Blown Away

It’s been just about a year since Hurricane (Superstorm?) Sandy reacquainted too many on the Eastern seaboard with the wrath of nature unleashed. Storm surges crushed buildings and infrastructure like matchboxes, raging waters flooded subway tunnels, basements, emergency shelters and decimated the power grid, shutting off electricity for days in many areas. Like lower Manhattan, which lacked heat and power for days… or Atlantic City and Staten Island that faced horrific damage. Hospitals’ back-up systems often proved inadequate and much of the East was paralyzed. Death and destruction were everywhere.

So aside from rebuilding and some grand plans discussed by New York City Mayor Bloomberg and NY State Governor Cuomo about building massive flood gates at the entrance to the harbor, what has been or can be done to mitigate the next destructive wave that everyone now expects… sooner or later? And remember, all this preparedness costs money, just as governments and the private sector are driven to cost reductions like never before. It’s not sexy to spend lots of money, incur tons of disruption to install new systems, used so infrequently, that often take up valuable space and need their own constant maintenance. For example, most modern building don’t have windows that open, but when electrical ventilating systems go down for days, what you do to breathe reasonable air?

Even little stuff, like moving emergency equipment out of flood-prone basements to a higher floor takes away valuable real estate – think New York City – and is highly disruptive and expensive to implement. And here’s an expensive thought: Do you move your data centers to higher ground? Hospitals are rethinking their own connection to the power grid, and instead of expensive and seldom-used diesel back-up power generators, some are converting their entire power system to rely instead on their own internal natural gas-powered generators for everything.

The idea of a solid, large and unitary grid system, even one that might have significant substations and segmentation, might slowly give way to the notion of microgrids. “A storm like Sandy will always knock the lights out for some people. But in the future, smart communities will have microgrids, which are self-contained clean energy production sites that store power in onsite fuel cells or batteries. Microgrids can be small or large--it just depends how many buildings they are intended to power. By 2020, six gigawatts of electricity, or enough to power nearly 5 million homes, will move through microgrids, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.” FastCompany.com, October 24^th. The Eastern seaboard isn’t remotely moving fast enough to make this meaningful in the foreseeable future.

“Microgrids can remain connected to the main energy grid, but if Con Ed loses one of its power stations, the microgrid can provide all necessary power (by going into ‘island mode’). That's exactly what happened to some savvy organizations during the storm: A few microgrid-connected buildings on New York University's campus, for example, had power through the entire ordeal, providing a beacon of light in an otherwise dark swath of the city.

As Co.Exist pointed out in the days after Sandy, the U.S. military has enthusiastically embraced microgrids. Last year, the military set aside 16 million acres of its own land for renewable energy installations… But are microgrids a feasible solution for entire cities? From a technical standpoint, you can create a microgrid in any campus environment, explains Paul Orzeske, president of Honeywell Building Solutions. You could even create a Manhattan-sized microgrid. The problem is regulation. ‘If three or four businesses wanted to coordinate their buildings and wanted to connect, to cross a road--in many jurisdictions by crossing a road you become a power utility, and that makes it not feasible to run a microgrid,’ he says. ‘We still don't see enough around relaxing laws around the definition of a utility.’” FastCompany.com.

And let’s revisit the discussion, immediately following Sandy’s crush, about those storm surge barriers, massive moveable gates that mirror the kinds of systems that currently protect so much of low-lying Holland. Maybe such barriers will help NYC, but where does all that deflected water go? “The flooding in New York and New Jersey caused by Superstorm Sandy prompted calls from Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other officials to consider building storm surge barriers to protect Lower Manhattan from future catastrophes. But, such a strategy could make things even worse for outlying areas that were hit hard by the hurricane, such as Staten Island, the New Jersey Shore and Long Island's South Shore, a City College of New York landscape architecture professor warns.

“‘If you mitigate to protect Lower Manhattan, you increase the impact in other areas,’ says Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, associate professor of landscape architecture in CCNY's Spitzer School of Architecture. ‘Everyone outside of the surge protection zone would be in jeopardy because the water doesn't get reduced, it just goes somewhere else. It's an environmental justice issue. You can't just save Wall Street.’… Professor Seavitt calls, instead, for deploying a storm defense strategy that combines elements of soft infrastructure with the hardening of existing infrastructure such as the subway system, highways and power plants.” ScienceDaily.com, November 19, 2012. Trust me, they are a long way from figuring this one out.

What about water and sewage removal, when disasters run for days? “The Building Resiliency Task Force is also making progress on strengthening New York City's non-hospital buildings. The city council passed five of the task force's proposals [New York City's Strategic Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency] so far, including one to ensure that building toilets and sinks work without power, and one to prevent sewage backflow.

“[Robin] Guenther [a member of the above task force] believes that another proposal--a requirement to provide access to water in residential buildings over six stories high when the power goes out--will pass soon. This was suggested because high-rise residential buildings lost access to water during the storm (buildings in New York City that are higher than six stories generally need an electricity-reliant pumping system to provide adequate water pressure to residents on higher levels). If the new proposal passes, residential buildings will have to retrofit a location lower than six stories where residents can get potable water capable of running off pressure in the water mains--no electricity required.” Fast Company.com.

And then there’s this obvious thang about not letting people live or rebuild in venues that are really likely to get slammed again. Flood and storm insurance is often heavily federally subsidized, and taxpayers really shouldn’t to keep paying for sequential rebuilding. “For some communities, land buyouts have been the easiest and ultimately perhaps the cheapest option for recovery: Instead of building sand dunes and watching NIMBYers complain, the state buys land back from residents and returns it to nature. New Jersey's Blue Acres program buys flood-prone homes, tears them down, and turns the land into wetlands, which protect from the effects of flooding. The program existed before Superstorm Sandy, but has now taken on a new relevance, with federal storm aid funds helping to pay for future buyouts. And in New York, the state is buying back properties in flood-prone areas of Staten Island and Long Island.” FastCompany.com.

Even with some of these measures moving forward, perhaps even if most of them are implemented, the climate-change-induced intensity and movement of mega-storms are still going to wreak havoc when they descend on our lands. The bigger issue, grappling with the acceleration of greenhouse gasses that has caused this mess, is not even remotely on the horizon.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while we need to prepare for the next big storm, we also need to start prioritizing pursuing the big global solution as well.