Employers letting their recently brought back to office remote employees go home early to try to beat transit issues caused by extreme weather events that are becoming more common due to global warming caused by everyone commuting to office every day burning energy and creating pollution.
It took a global pandemic to spur us to switch to a more modern and as it happens environmentally friendly way of working, which could even help us alleviate housing issues by allowing more people to disperse around the country, help local economies in more rural places, but no, let’s go back to doing things exactly how we did before.
Sure... But how much extra energy is consumer by people heating/cooling their 1-2 person homes now they're in it all day? Likely less than transit, and not zero. Regardless, the primary impact on climate change has always been and likely always will be those who manufacture your clothes, plastics, electronics etc - which people bought more over over said pandemic.
Rural areas invaded by "COVID refugees" are broadly losing out on their culture and filling with yuppies with too much money and no interest in community.
I admire your passion, but the problems are more complex.
I'd like to hear from people who are there right now. How scary is this? Because it looks like the end of the world. But are we all watching the same whirlpool video and it was cherry picked doom, or is it really that bad everywhere?
The videos show the worst spots--in most cases you can get around them, assuming you have time and aren't worried about getting wet.
It's definitely scary and dangerous if you or your car happens to be stuck in the water. If you're in an apartment that doesn't have drainage issues, you can probably stay inside without noticing much. If you own a house with a basement in some neighborhoods, there's a good chance you have (potentially sewage-contaminated) water flowing into it.
Right now it’s not scary at all. If anything I’m impressed by the city’s drainage systems because this morning was an absolute horror show in my area of Brooklyn.
IMO the bigger story from this particular storm is the lack of preparation by the Mayor’s office. We heard very little about the oncoming storm from government sources. Declaring a state of emergency is all very well but it’s (literally!) pretty late in the day.
I live in Brooklyn. It's.... as bad as Ida was 2 years ago, maybe slightly less.
My cellar flooded, but I was able to pump it out as the storm drains caught up. I've changed some plumbing in prep -- Ida I took 2' in the Cellar, today I had about 2" when I was able to pump out.
The most dangerous thing is cellar apartments (of which there are many illegal) that can flood quickly.
> doors that open inwards that become death traps with flooding
Do you mean doors that open outwards? The weight/pressure of floodwater outside the door would seal it shut from the outside, whereas it would eventually break open a door that opens inwards, right? Is it the violence of the breakin itself that's so dangerous with inward-opening doors?
I have family all over NYC. Seems like Brooklyn got hit the hardest. The video they took and sent me, some streets are about knee height. Other borough are flooded enough to effect homes and basements but nothing catastrophically bad. The worse part is the backed up drains and sewers.
I took the subway to broad street, took the boat to the statue of liberty and walked back to Soho. That whole region of Manhattan, at least, is fine. There were some delays on the subway because someone slipped on the stairs from the rain and needed medical attention, that's about it.
I spent all day with friends going around Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. We had to Uber around since the subway was mostly disabled. That was expensive and traffic wasn't great but we got around just fine. All the places we went to were open and happy to serve us.
Its not all areas of Brooklyn that are flooded of course. Some of those areas flooded usually experience some kind of flooding when it rains heavily.
There was a heavy monsoon like downpour on 4 th of July for about an hour and there was flooding in the Prospect Park area and Windsor terrace area(flooded now again); Enough that given I was in my previously lowered car I wouldn't have been able to drive through it.
Another flooded area Borough Park is flat and I believe gets a lot of run off from the more elevation Sunset park neighborhood nextdoor.
In the suburbs, people were evacuated from the low areas. I went out for an hour and getting home was a challenge because most roads were closed down due to flooding
Not a local but drove into Long Island city for a date night in midtown. Wouldn’t have guessed there was a noteworthy problem although there was a lot of rain.
Is anyone aware of major civil engineering effort being undertaken in NYC to deal with this? They've had several major flooding events in the last handful of years. Seems almost as if they need levees.
Today’s flooding was caused by excessive rain, and I think the problems are mostly around inadequate drainage? Whereas Sandy was a storm surge and could have been mitigated with something like levees.
NYC might be able to do something like that if it wasn't being strangled budget-wise by an insanely expensive, overstaffed, and ineffective police department.
They are, but they are a bit backlogged on what exactly they need to do.
Part of the issue is that New York is so old it runs a combined sewer/storm drain system. Modern practice is to separate the two since the former needs to be treated and the latter generally doesn't, but when they're combined the outflows overwhelm the sewage system and then that's how you get backed up sewage, sewage emergency discharge into the harbor, etc.
Actually separating the two is quite difficult. On the one hand that means requiring building owners to separate and plug into a new system. Then you run into the fact that in New York 170+ years of haphazardly planned utilities by multiple public and private actors means there is no accurate map of where exactly things are underground, which makes building a new system going under every street expensive and full of legal issues. (The city has been trying to get a handle on this problem for years but doesn't get a lot of cooperation since a lot of these entities treat the location of their stuff underground as trade secrets, if they even have accurate information themselves.)
Right now, the projects taking up most of their time are
* the construction of Water Tunnel no. 3, since the other two tunnels that deliver all the water to NYC have never been shut down for inspection at any point in their 100+ year lives and can't be unless a backup tunnel exists
* lead pipe remediation, because there's still a lot of it.
So...too much legacy technical debt. And no political will to do anything. In an environment of rising interest rates (more expensive gov bonds) and lower tax receipts.
Makes sense, given quality of life and city services have been getting worse. And things should (predictably) get worse.
For the past 10-12 years or so, yes, this has been happening more and more. This kind of thing was not happening 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, at this level any how. You can say now "these floods happen every year", but this used to not be the case.
This year New York was covered by smoke due to Canadian forest fires. I can't remember that ever happening in the past half century. I'm sure in a few years someone will these "this happens every year".
You’re not wrong and the trend is toward more of these torrential-to-flood events. The story is simple: the infrastructure we have doesn’t handle multiple inches of rain in a very short period of time.
Would that rain have previously had somewhere to run off to, i.e. is over-development plus a lack of infrastructure projects to blame here? Or was the city already heavily developed like this and the storm just that much worse?
I’m used to Charleston, SC flooding over the years and the worst spots always neatly lined up with the historical maps, specially the areas of the peninsula that were filled in with trash and covered with dirt. Areas that would have otherwise been low-lying wetlands were the streets you could kayak through.
As others pointed out, generalizing across NYC is quite hard. Some areas - particularly in Brooklyn and Queens - are probably more developed than they used to be.
From that article:
> Heavy precipitation does not necessarily mean the total amount of precipitation at a location has increased—just that precipitation is occurring in more intense events. However, changes in the intensity of precipitation, when combined with changes in the interval between precipitation events, can also lead to changes in overall precipitation totals.
In other words, 6 inches of rain fell at JFK over 4 days, that might be manageable for the infrastructure. Not so much if it happens in one day, which is what this articles speaks to.
'Chibougamau Mayor Manon Cyr says she was relieved when she learned of Paré’s arrest. In an interview Friday, the mayor said the fires that Paré is accused of starting were unrelated to the two massive wildfires that forced the evacuation of the town in June.
“We’ll see what’s said in court on this,” Cyr said. “But the big fires that caused the evacuation were caused by lightning.”'
NYC resident here. It is not "crazy bad". Other than the trains not running (which, let's be clear, is unfortunately not super rare), I barely noticed a difference.
Zero-content exaggeration like this is infuriating. Obviously, if you're in an area that got flooded, it may well be the worst thing you've experienced in years. One person cannot speak for a city of 8 million people.
I mean...I don't disagree about context-free doom, but unless you work from home and had nothing to do today, you were likely affected by this in some way.
Basically the entire subway and commuter rail serving millions of people was barely functional all day long, there was massive gridlock traffic because the highways flooded, many hours later three major road links out of the city (the Saw Mill, Hutchinson, and Bronx River parkways) remain closed to traffic, and there's widespread water damage to people's property–down the block from me cars floated out of the street and onto the sidewalk! Not great!
For what it's worth, I live in Manhattan and don't work from home, and this didn't affect my day at all beyond my evening commute taking an extra half hour or so.
> NYC resident here. It is not "crazy bad". Other than the trains not running (which, let's be clear, is unfortunately not super rare), I barely noticed a difference.
You must not have been in BK. 1/2/3, 4/5/6, N/Q/W/R all stopped running or partial service in BK. Local and express busses down in that area. Major streets shut down, including the ones around BK bridge. I spent 4 hours in traffic picking up my wife today. Also saw 4 accidents, bc drivers here seem to prefer driving more reckless in rain. If that's not "crazy bad", I don't know what it.
> Zero-content exaggeration like this is infuriating. Obviously, if you're in an area that got flooded, it may well be the worst thing you've experienced in years. One person cannot speak for a city of 8 million people.
Too many new yorkers have adopted this attitude of "its not that bad!" when it gets ugly here. I get it, I like the city (when its working) too, but I want the city to be better. I have been living or consistently visiting the city (and by "city", I mean all of NYC, not just Manhattan) since 2011. Thing have been getting worse, especially since covid. I have seen a video of people open cooking a roast pig on the sidewalk. NYC is 3rd world. The only thing keeping me here is my job that requires me to come into the office 3x/week.
there was sandy and then there was the hurricane that happened two years ago... this shit just keeps happening. the entire drainage/sewer system needs renovation and the city/state hasn't invested in those projects.
My understanding was that Manhattan didn't get hit bad but Brooklyn did. it's not just a few people who got flooded, it was entire schools, fire depts, parks, reservoirs, shops, etc.
I don't think that saying "it's crazy" is even specific enough to be called an exaggeration, nor is it untrue. It doesn't take that many force multipliers to make your experience during these floods absolutely wild and crazy painful. Try being homeless, incarcerated, mentally ill? I mean, I'm glad you're comfortable, but the city as a whole has really had a crazier than usual day.
Both of these things can be true at the same time:
Climate change can increase the likelihood of events like this (warmer sea water roughly translates to more energy available for tropical storms, if I understand it right), but for any individual storm, it's impossible to say whether it would have happened anyway without climate change, and it can make sense to be prepared.
Climate change is real, but climate change awareness alone is not a reasonable protection strategy for a city by the sea.
It's a fair point you raise - my issue is the immediate blame of damn near everything on climate change. If everything is climate change, then nothing is climate change... it's tired and overused.
There's no way the government of NYC conducted a study and learned this particular storm was caused by climate change in real time while it's still happening. Yet... here's the blame parade already.
Climate change activists need to understand this pseudo-religious fever harms their position.
Whether it’s climate change or not misses the point.
People only pay attention when they can draw a bright line to a cause. Climate change is that cause. But the climate and impacts of all kinds related to it (all very complicated) have been studied and socialized for quite some time.
So - I’m not sure the approach is wrong. Frankly, I don’t know what’s right. If you think their position hurts them, what do you suggest they or we do instead? Honest question.
> This climate change thing has not only become an excuse for government incompetence (fires, infrastructure failure, etc)
They can both be true at the same time, and it pains me to be reading this type of stuff on hacker news. This climate change 'thing' was predicted and talked about for decades while deniers said it was bullshit. When the effects are visible, it's actually just 'government incompetence'. When the government tries to shape up and propose a plan to deal with it, the plan is struck down as being 'neo-marxist' or 'radical left' because again, climate change is 'bullshit'. I swear, it seems like we live in a more ridiculous reality than 'Don't look up'.
The "do something, anything" crowd got to run the show for a bit and the results were nothing like promised.
Things like plastic straw bans that accomplish nothing, or ideas like banning airplanes entirely. These are radical extremist ideological views driven by fear and emotion - just like religion.
Climate change activists shoot their own foot off with every opportunity. Propose sane, gradual changes without all the "world ending in 5 years" rhetoric and you will accomplish a lot more.
It's a religion today. And just like other religions, it has it's own purity and ideology tests.
> Propose sane, gradual changes without all the "world ending in 5 years" rhetoric and you will accomplish a lot more.
Bollocks - that was done.
In the US the American Engineers Society(?) proposed necessary and required changes to infrastructure alongside required maintainance of existing infrastructure for almost two decades (possibly longer).
Nothing was done about any of that until recently .. and the amount committed was still under the total recommended for upkeep alone.
Were they thought out or just political signals? In the US, unfortunately the overwhelming majority of climate change propositions are ill-thought political rhetoric, which sets back actual progress.
Look at recent changes. CA banned single-use plastic bags because someone said incorrectly they contributed to that huge floating plastic island in the pacific. Turns out, that floating plastic island is made up of fishing equipment - and our replacement for the plastic bags use vastly more resources to create so the net effect has been negative.
Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Report Card for America’s Infrastructure depicts the condition and performance of American infrastructure in the familiar form of a school report card.
Engineers make real proposals, with costings.
They have summaries of what's broken and what's needed going back to 1988 (at least) and have been largely ignored by the US decision makers throughout that time.
The US DoD has frequently reported on the need for climate mitigating changes to defence infrastructure, harbours, fuel stores, etc - that can get thrown into the mix also.
As you're throwing shade on the problems you'd do well to look to the most egregious villians here - the Koch brothers and their immediate circle in the fossil fuel industries who went into overdrive in the 1970s (when climate change caused by human activity was internationally accepted and recognised as a real and pressing issue) and funded a network of think tanks (Heartland et al).
The production and placement of distraction pieces in the media ("We're headed for an Ice Age says prominant climate scientist!!" etc) to really confuse and FUD up the issue was one thing, they had deep pockets and did it well, but ...
They started that very early and literally killed sane gradual change.
The US public broadly overwhelmingly supported good public transport (reduced car travel, better fuel economy at scale per mile, etc) and at every turn anytime a sensible public transit system was proposed they undercut and killed it with deep pockets, simply to keep sellling more and more oil and turn a profit.
> And by the time you wake up, the only thing you're going to have to say is "Well, it's too late to do anything now".
You just did it again - that's the sensationalism that is not helpful.
The world is not ending tomorrow or anytime soon. People need to cool it with that rhetoric because you lose everyone that's not already signed up for Sunday school.
Scientific data shows a trend and this is not the stock market where you can expect anything random. What is dogmatic? Our ignorance in dogmatics? Truth is objective and doesn't give a damn if it's dogmatic or not, every action has a reaction.
In my sister's ex-subdivision in Houston, the streets were designed to flood, channeling any water away from property and into bayous, rivers, and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico. It worked as designed over several tropical storms. The streets were a mess but everybody's home, driveway, and property stayed dry.
NYC needs a similar effort - change the streets and subways to channel water away from property and into the harbor, while providing means to harden the underground parts that can't get wet. It will be crazy expensive, but it's an engineering & construction problem, not a geographic or climate one.
Though as you may be aware, the 3rd and 5th wards are not so well protected. Low-lying parts of highways are often flooded out, especially during hurricanes.
I don't know about NYC but in general a sea wall could hold back a high tide. A lot of coastal cities flood when there is high rainfall coinciding with a high tide. When the tide is low the rain just drains into the river and out to sea.
In this case though, as far as I can tell it really was mostly a lot of rain at once, i.e. too much for sewers to drain to the sea to prevent flooding. I don't think a sea wall could improve this; only better storm drains could.
I think this was different for Hurricane Sandy, where a storm tide was actually pushing in water from the sea/rivers, which is the scenario where a sea wall would help.
And I suppose often it's a bit of both – storm drains stop working once the sea level is too high.
The current project has been beset by problems with this as well.
Anywhere with a seawall will have lower flooding inside but more flooding outside. When it was originally proposed at the Narrows, Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens were not pleased.
the NYC sewer backed-up into the apt. All the rain water and the sewer go to the same place because NYC's sewer system is from the 1800's.
If you do get a house, get one with a sump pump. if it's the bottom floor of an apartment building, get one with a back flow valve going into the building. When buying used, make sure to look over the HOA's minutes to see if they've had issues with flooding in the past and what repairs they've done to address those issues.
I seem to be hearing about these torrential rain/flood in the news more often and this data visualization that I made a couple of years ago seems relevant.
It makes an absurd statement about being able to predict and correlate the effects or not of a phenomenon we have evidence of occurring in the past numerous times.
Because climate change is real and observable with historical evidence.
Just like the common cold.
That's why it's not putting words in your mouth!
EDIT:
By the way, I realize what you're trying to say. Unfortunately, it's not confirmation bias for CNN not to cite every single source discussing climate change and its alterations of recent climate patterns, though it is pretty lazy, which is about standard for CNN.
Still, nobody's saying "Lol rain must be climate change", and if you read the article, you'd be able to pick out the distinction.
My claim is basically that someone sneezing doesn't mean that they have the cold. And even if they did have a cold, the sneeze could be caused by something else.
Not once did I say or suggest climate change is not real, or could not cause this extreme weather event. I can't make it any simpler for you.
If you read the article, you'd see that the claim is that the storm is only a datapoint in the pattern of worsening weather events, which does, in fact, have supporting evidence-- weather events are growing more intense and more common. This is a fact. It bears mentioning when extreme weather events occur.
How good are our data sources?
Like how accurate is our count of storms, hurricanes and typhoons making landfall in Australia and New Zealand. Do we have any data sources that go prior to 1606 when the first Europeans arrived?
How accurate is our storm/hurricane/forest fire count for California, before the first American settlers arrived in the Bartleson–Bidwell Party of 1841?
You would fail the LSAT with that kind of logical reasoning ability; just because something (y) might have occurred in the absence of a potential cause (x), does not mean that the claim that x caused y is prima facie false or "a joke".
Trying to bury one's head in the sand about climate change, on the other hand, is of course arrogant and morally corrupt.
I waded through knee high water earlier and a bunch of friends have flooded basements. My building’s elevators shut off so I’m not sure what my basement storage unit looks like right now, probably not great.
It’s, uh, not a mystery where the flooding took place today. But glad it’s a source of amusement!
Wow, how are you posting on here if you don't have access to internet? Surely if you had internet you'd see one of the hundreds of videos in and around NYC of flooded streets.
Hahaha, that's brillo mate. No, I don't think it's a number of people thing. I think there's got to be some anomalous event. You can't constantly be in an emergency. That's just the new normal, eh?
It took a global pandemic to spur us to switch to a more modern and as it happens environmentally friendly way of working, which could even help us alleviate housing issues by allowing more people to disperse around the country, help local economies in more rural places, but no, let’s go back to doing things exactly how we did before.
Everything is fine.