Sandy vs. America’s Greatest City — Round 2: Dealing With the Aftermath
Sandy vs. America’s Greatest City — Round 2: Dealing With the Aftermath - World - Macleans.ca
Manhattan is in many ways the nerve centre of the world—its unsurpassed capital of trade, finance and politics. Hurricane Sandy has provided an awkward, tragic reminder that the island’s “natural” state, after much alteration by humans—and occupation by 1.6 million of them—is half-submerged. Alan Weisman, author of the bestselling eco-fantasy The World Without Us, notes that the New York City subway system has to pump 50 million litres of water just to keep the tunnels dry on a nice day.
“Manhattan used to have systems of streams and rivers on the island, but when the city was built on a grid they got buried,” says Weisman. “It also used to be very hilly—that is the literal meaning of the word ‘Manhattan’—but those hills were flattened.”
For better and worse, the effects of Sandy on the New York-New Jersey region largely met the expectations of planners, forcing a surge of four extra metres of water almost directly into the mouth of the Hudson River. As anticipated, seawater filled the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, covered the runways at John F. Kennedy Airport, poured into building foundations at Ground Zero, and gushed in through elevator doors at the Exchange Place PATH rail station in Hoboken, N.J.
As the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dispatched a special “unwatering team” to the metropolis, the U.S. northeast and a few unlucky property owners in southern Ontario began to survey the damage from Sandy. (Meanwhile, citizens of Appalachian states such as Tennessee and West Virginia both suffered a bizarre, unprecedented 60-cm blast of wet snow.) By midweek, the storm had caused as many as 50 deaths in the U.S., mostly from falling trees, after having already killed 69 in the Caribbean. A Toronto woman was killed by a falling sign in the city’s west end.