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Date
A news item that popped up on several news outlets caught my attention this week – it was about the combined effect of the weight of the built environment in Manhattan (and New York City in general) and the rise of the sea level along NYC’s coastline.
Bottom line 1: the City of New York is sinking, and the concurrently, the water is rising.
Bottom line 2: This means programs, projects, and meaningful opportunities for project leaders
Let’s start with the background:
Coming Down!
According to an article from The Guardian:
New York City is sinking in part due to the extraordinary weight of its vertiginous buildings, worsening the flooding threat posed to the metropolis from the rising seas, new research has found.
The Big Apple may be the city that never sleeps but it is a city that certainly sinks, subsiding by approximately 1-2mm each year on average, with some areas of New York City plunging at double this rate, according to researchers.
Going up!
The Guardian article goes on to say:
The water that flanks New York City has risen by about 9in, or 22cm, since 1950 and major flooding events from storms could be up to four times more frequent than now by the end of the century due to the combination of sea level rise and hurricanes strengthened by climate change.
Referenced in the Guardian article is a paper from a Wiley publication called Earth’s Future.
The study is titled: The Weight of New York City: Possible Contributions to Subsidence From Anthropogenic Sources
Its plain-language summary is below:
New York City faces accelerating inundation risk from sea level rise, subsidence, and increasing storm intensity from natural and anthropogenic causes. Here we calculate a previously unquantified contribution to subsidence from the cumulative mass and downward pressure exerted by the built environment of the city.
A 2022 sea level rise report from the US NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) says that without remediation (and this does NOT account for ‘that sinking feeling’) the sea level in NYC will rise by one foot by 2050.
This is about triple the rate of the past 100 years.
If you would like to see what that means for New York City - or your area of the world, you can actually generate interactive maps for your region in a cool site provided here by Climate Central. Here’s an example of Boston with 5.5 feet of sea-level rise. Doesn’t look too promising for MIT, Fenway Park, or Boston University:
To mitigate the situation in New York City, the US Army Corps of Engineers is proposing a very large program (mistakenly called a project by some) which I will cover in detail in a follow-up post.
From an article recently published in The City,
The Army Corps estimates construction on the $52 billion project would begin in 2030 and be complete by 2044. The project must be first approved by federal, state and local officials and funded before any of the work can start.
The public can comment on the project proposal through Jan. 6 — via email or snail mail — in order to inform the design, which is expected to be finalized in 2025.
Some specific proposals for neighborhoods include:
- Sheet-pile reinforced dunes along Rockaway Beach and boardwalk
- Floodwalls, seawalls and levees along Coney Island peninsula and along the Greenpoint/Long Island City shore
- Elevated promenades near East River Esplanade and Coney Island Beach
- Bulkheads, berms and elevated roads in Broad Channel
- Seawalls at Carl Schurz Park on the Upper East Side and Hunters Point in Queens
In the next post, I would like to cover the Army Corps of Engineers’ proposal, but also the way in which they considered stakeholders and presented this major, important program to taxpayers and other stakeholders.
REFERENCES:
Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/19/new-york-city-sinking-skyscrapers-climate-crisis
Parsons, T., Wu, P.-C., (Matt) Wei, M., & D'Hondt, S. (2023). The weight of New York City: Possible contributions to subsidence from anthropogenic sources. Earth's Future, 11, e2022EF003465. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022EF003465
Posted
by
Richard Maltzman
on: May 21, 2023 08:56 PM |
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