Superstorm calls for NYC sea barrier

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Superstorm calls for NYC sea barrier

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The destruction wreaked by superstorm in New York City can be prevented with a sea barrier.

01 November,2012 07:24 pm

The multibillion-dollar price tag of such a project has been a hindrance, but it may appear more of an option now.The time has come. The city is finally going to have to face this, said oceanography professor Malcolm J. Bowman at Long Islands Stony Brook University.He has warned for years of the potential for a catastrophic storm surge in New York and has advocated for a barrier.Government responses have been mixed after the superstorm.We cannot build a big barrier reef off the shore to stop the waves from coming in, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday.But New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo opened the door to new ideas Tuesday, saying that the government has a responsibility to think about new designs and techniques to protect the city in the face of what look like increasingly frequent megastorms.Part of learning from this is the recognition that climate change is a reality. Extreme weather is a reality. It is a reality that we are vulnerable, Cuomo told a news conference Wednesday.Invented by Bowman and his colleague Douglas Hill, two European engineering firms have drawn up proposals for walling most of New York City off from the sea, at a price just above $6 billion.Before the storm, Bloombergs administration had said it was working to analyze natural risks and the effectiveness of various coast-protection techniques, including storm-surge barriers.But officials had noted that barriers were only one of many ideas, and they have often emphasized more modest, immediate steps the city has taken.Its a series of small interventions that cumulatively, over time, will take us to a more natural system to deal with climate change and rising sea levels, Carter H. Strickland, the citys environmental commissioner, told The New York Times this summer.Engineers know this approach as resilience essentially, toughening the city piece by piece to make it soak up a surge without major damage.But the European engineering firms whose barriers protect the Netherlands and the Russian metropolis of St. Petersburg see this as unrealistic, given the vast amount of expensive infrastructure that underpins New York.