The Netherlands: A Dutch Solution for New York's Storm Surge Woes? - by John McQuaid

The Netherlands Delta Works

Hurricane Sandy’s storm surge did a number on New York City, flooding lower Manhattan, inundating the subway system, triggering fires and power outages, and causing other widespread damage that will take a long time to repair. As this New York Times story from September notes, the city has been only moderately proactive in prepping itself for the long-term risk posed by ocean floods, stressing how to respond when water breaches existing barriers rather than stopping floods altogether.

That’s not surprising, really, because there is little political incentive to prep for something that hasn’t happened, even if you know it’s coming at some point. Now it has. Moreover, the risks are rising inexorably: sea level rise is happening at an accelerated rate along the East Coast. Every extra inch of sea level increases the annual risk of flooding. So what was once a vanishingly rare event becomes a rare one, then a common one. Existing systems just won’t cut it.

Matthew Yglesias suggests that New York (and by extension, other East Coast cities) think big and start looking at the Dutch flood protection model, which employs large-scale flood gates to repel storm surges off from the North Sea:

The idea of essentially damning up New York Harbor sounds extreme, but that’s equivalent to what the Dutch did with the Zuiderzee Works and especially the Delta Works projects undertaken after the 1953 flood. Some of the Dutch works are permanent dijks, but others are open sluices that merely shut when storms are coming to block surges. You could imagine something similar at the Arthur Kill and across the Verazano Narrows or even between Sandy Hook and Rockaway. Projects like that wouldn’t immunize Staten Island or the beachfront parts of Brooklyn and Queens from storm surges but they would defend Lower Manhattan, the badly flooded Red Hook part of Brooklyn, Long Island City, LaGuardia Airport, and a big swathe of New Jersey.

Ultimately, I think something like this is exactly what we’ll see in New York and other coastal cities. It sounds fanciful, but New York is simply too big and important not to protect, and a system of surge barriers and other structures is probably the only way to protect it long-term. Which is exactly the thinking behind the Dutch system.

As it happens, I visited the Netherlands after Hurricane Katrina to look at how Dutch flood control worked, and how its success might apply to New Orleans. (It was part of a mega-series – worth rereading now – that looked for lessons in how other places, from Kobe, Japan to Galveston, had  recovered from disasters.) After crawling over New Orleans’ crappy levees and floodwalls, it was like stepping from “Deadwood” into “Star Trek.”

Note EU-Digest:  The most powerful nation on the globe which has invested billions on the most modern weaponry and has more shopping malls and different flavors of ice-cream and cola than any other country in the world has unfortunately for many years completely neglected to upgrade its antiquated infra-structure. The proof of the pudding is the terrible damage and loss of lives that results every time a natural disaster strikes the US. New Orleans and more recent the US East Coast, New York, New Jersey, are two prime examples where a modern water surge levee protection system like the Delta works in the Netherlands would have made a major difference.  Kudos to the Netherlands !



Read more: A Dutch Solution for New York's Storm Surge Woes? - Forbes