[NYguy]

http://therealdeal.com/blog/2012/11/...tists-say-yes/

NYC floodgates would cost billions. Some scientists insist they’re worth it




Floodgates in the Netherlands

November 09, 2012

Malcolm Bowman, an oceanographer who has studied New York harbor for decades, and other hydrologists, says a multibillion-dollar barrier system — with floodgates at certain points such as along the East River and at the Verrazano Narrows — could reduce future storm damage by about 25 percent. However, such a system would cost about $17 billion to build, Bloomberg News reported.

That cost isn’t all that much more than the $15 billion the federal government had to spend to rebuild New Orleans in the wake of hurricane Katrina.“Think about it this way,” said Bowman. “Including Hurricane Irene last year, we’ve had two 100-year storms in two years.”

Governor Andrew Cuomo, on a radio program yesterday, said a barrier system should be considered, according to the report from Bloomberg News. “The construction of this city did not anticipate these kinds of situations,” said Cuomo. “We are only a few feet above sea level.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-1...rk-city-l.html

Billions on Flood Barriers Now Might Save New York City

By Ken Wells and Mark Drajem
Nov 9, 2012

Bowman, an oceanographer who has spent much of a 40-year career warily watching the tidal flows in and around New York Harbor, recalls a few years back being down in the construction site of Manhattan’s South Ferry subway station.

“It was just a concrete box underground then,” he said in an interview. Bowman, at the time an observer in the middle of filming a documentary, looked up a long stairway leading to blue sky and asked a construction official, “Would you mind telling us how far above sea level is the entrance there at street level?”

The reply was 11 feet -- an elevation designed, the official said, to withstand possible floods from a storm that occurs once in 100 years.

“I said, ‘That sounds awfully low to me and, by the way, that storm could come next week,’” said Bowman, a professor at the Marine Sciences Research Center of State University of New York at Stony Brook, Long Island.

It took a little longer than that. The South Ferry station, a $530 million jewel in New York City’s subway system at the tip of Manhattan, opened in March 2009. Superstorm Sandy, slamming into the New York metropolitan area on the evening of Oct. 29, brought a record storm surge of 13.88 feet (4.2 meters) into Battery Park, which abuts South Ferry. The station flooded floor to ceiling with briny seawater, destroying equipment and turning escalator wells and tunnels into caverns deep enough to scuba dive in.