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Think NYC’s L train fiasco is bad? Just wait until storms swamp JFK Airport

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When Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in 2012, water rushed into the underground tunnels that are the backbone of the city’s transit system, swamping sensitive electronics and decades-old infrastructure in corrosive saltwater. Nothing like that had ever happened in the 100+ years the subways had been operating. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority had no timetable for when the system would reopen.

Fixing the L train tunnel, which connects Brooklyn to 14th Street in Manhattan, has caused a major headache for the city. More than 300,000 New Yorkers rely on the L every day. On Thursday, after years of planning a complete overhaul that would shut down the line for more than a year, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo did an about-face, throwing fresh uncertainty on the problem.

The 15-month total shutdown, which went through an extensive public vetting process and wound up depressing home values in Brooklyn, is no longer. The new plan is a 20-month nights-and-weekends shutdown, which will disadvantage New Yorkers who work at odd hours for even longer. Instead of a wholesale overhaul of the tunnel, the new plan is to encase sensitive wires in plastic. It’s a method that’s never been used before in the United States, and never anywhere in the world during a tunnel repair.

The vast majority of NYC’s subway tunnels were built between 1900 and 1936, and since the system runs 24-hours a day, they’ve been patched together for decades. The city pumps millions of gallons of water out of the system each day that pours in from percolating rainwater and countless leaks.

In the past 70 years, there have been a dozen coastal storms where rising waters came within less than two feet of flooding the subways. It actually happened during Sandy, but it almost happened the year before, too, during Hurricane Irene.

Rising sea levels and stronger storms are making coastal flooding much more common. By 2050, at our current near-worst case scenario of rising carbon emissions, floods like Sandy’s could hit an average of once every five years. It’s a question of when, not if the subways will flood again.

If you think the L train fiasco is bad, what will happen when JFK Airport floods? Or when the next catastrophic Midwest flood permanently forces the Mississippi River away from New Orleans? What should we do about the Hoover Dam, once the drought in the Southwest finishes draining its reservoir and renders it obsolete?

Climate change means uncertainty, and uncertainty means more drawn-out decisions to rebuild or replace infrastructure not just in New York City, but in every part of the world. And in that kind of context, we will inevitably get more decisions like Cuomo’s which pit difficult long-term consensus planning against quick-fix changes.

Welcome to infrastructure planning in the era of rapid climate change.

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Think NYC’s L train fiasco is bad? Just wait until storms swamp JFK Airport

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The first ‘negative emissions’ carbon-capture plant is up and running.

In a memo leaked last week, Department of Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert recommended White House staff pivot to a “theme of stabilizing” with regard to messaging around the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico.

President Trump, however, appears to have missed that particular update. On Thursday morning, he threatened to pull federal relief workers from the devastated island just three weeks after Maria made landfall.

Meanwhile, most of Puerto Rico is still without power, hospitals are running out of medical supplies, and clean water remains scarce.

Trump isn’t the only prominent Republican refusing to recognize the severity of the crisis. In an interview with CNN on Thursday morning, Representative Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican, accused host Chris Cuomo of fabricating reports of the severity of the disaster.

“Mr. Cuomo, you’re simply just making this stuff up,” Perry said. “If half the country didn’t have food or water, those people would be dying, and they’re not.”

45 Puerto Rican deaths have been officially confirmed so far, and reports from the ground indicate the unofficial number of deaths due to the storm is higher.

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The first ‘negative emissions’ carbon-capture plant is up and running.

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New York Fast-Food Workers Just Scored a Big Win In Their Fight For a Living Wage

Mother Jones

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In a widely expected move, a panel appointed by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recommended today that the state’s minimum wage for employees of fast-food chain restaurants be raised to $15 an hour.

The recommendation comes three years after strikes by New York City fast-food workers set off a national labor movement that has led to the passage of a $15 minimum wage in Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. But unlike those cities, New York doesn’t have the power to set its own minimum wage—it’s up to legislators in Albany.

When New York lawmakers balked at raising the minimum wage last year, Gov. Cuomo convened a board to examine wages in the fast food industry, which employs 180,000 people in the state. The state’s labor commissioner, a Cuomo appointee, has the power to issue an order putting the proposal into effect. If he approves the wage hike, fast-food workers currently earning the state’s minimum wage of $8.75 will get a 70 percent raise, effective by 2018 in New York City and 2021 in the rest of the state.

“It’s hard to explain to my children why they can’t do things other kids do,” Barbara Kelley, a Buffalo mother who works at Dunkin’ Donuts and takes home an average of $150 a week, said in a statement released by labor organizers. “With $15 an hour, I will be able to get by and maybe reward my kids in little ways, like ice cream after a long day, and in big ways like being able to save for the future.” Labor organizers are optimistic that the $15 wage will be adopted and will spur raises in other industries.

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New York Fast-Food Workers Just Scored a Big Win In Their Fight For a Living Wage

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Still Undecided on Fracking, Cuomo Won’t Press for Health Study’s Release

In May, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo anticipated that it would be done “in the next several weeks,” and last month, he said he expected it to be done before next year’s state election. Link to article –  Still Undecided on Fracking, Cuomo Won’t Press for Health Study’s Release ; ;Related ArticlesStudy Raises Questions About Antibleeding DrugA Struggle to Balance Wind Energy With WildlifeOutsider Challenges Papers on Growth of Dinosaurs ;

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Still Undecided on Fracking, Cuomo Won’t Press for Health Study’s Release

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During the coldest week in decades, some Sandy-damaged homes still don’t have heat

During the coldest week in decades, some Sandy-damaged homes still don’t have heat

It has been 87 days since Hurricane Sandy hit the Northeast. The past three of those days have fallen during the coldest week in New York City in 17 years.

From The New York Times:

As the region suffers through a brutal cold snap this week, with temperatures so punishing that uncovered slivers of flesh feel like paper cuts and the slightest wind can send a chill through the teeth like a Popsicle, the best solution seems not to leave home. But for many people whose boilers were flooded by seawater during Hurricane Sandy and still languish, awaiting repair, home is as frigid as the outdoors.

Residents who have made do with cold homes under extra blankets and triple socks since the storm hit in October face new challenges as the thermometer continues to dip. Temperatures this week have been about 10 to 15 degrees lower than midwinter averages, according to the National Weather Service, and are expected to slide into the teens over the next few nights, and could even fall into the single digits in parts of the region.

As of Tuesday, New York City’s Rapid Repairs construction teams had restored heat, hot water or power to 12,247 residences in 7,112 buildings, according to Peter Spencer, the spokesman for the Mayor’s Office of Housing Recovery. But work is continuing in an additional 1,893 buildings, a substantial portion of which, Mr. Spencer estimated, remain without heat.

Daniel Choi’s house doesn’t have heat, the Times reports. Neither does Devon Lawrence’s. Retired nurse Hazel Beckett is warming bricks on her stove to stay warm.

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Breezy Point, Long Island.

Most of the still-powerless homes are in the areas of New York along the coast, the neighborhoods deluged by storm surge: the Rockaways, Staten Island, Breezy Point. For years before the storm hit, these were the neighborhoods understood to be most at risk, but little was done to prepare them. Now New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) is reluctant to rebuild in them. Again, the Times:

“There are some parcels that Mother Nature owns,“ he said earlier this month in his official State of the State speech. “She may only visit once every few years, but she owns the parcel and when she comes to visit, she visits.”

To deal with such intrusions, the governor wants to give homeowners in these areas a choice. New York will help them rebuild a better house — on stilts, for example, higher than future floodwaters. Or they can sell what’s left of their homes to the state and move to higher ground.

Details of his proposal — called the Recreate NY-Smart Home program — are still being worked out, and it is hard to say how many New Yorkers will take him up on his offer to relocate. It is also hard to know how much money Mr. Cuomo will be able to spend per house, since this program will be part of a larger Sandy package that includes protecting subways and utilities and creating a fuel reserve to manage future gas lines.

Should Cuomo need ready-made stories in his push for smarter rebuilding, he could turn to elderly Hazel Beckett and her warmed-up bricks. This is a scene that should never have happened — much less three months after the fact.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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During the coldest week in decades, some Sandy-damaged homes still don’t have heat

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