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October 1, 2023

New York officials blame climate change for its deluge damage instead of their own filthy sewers

By Monica Showalter

Got a filthy sewer problem?

Global warming to the rescue.

That's the situation in New York City, where torrential rain has caused flooding not seen since Superstorm Sandy in 2012 (they blamed global warming for that one, too), and Hurricane Ida in 2021.

According to NBC News:

A severe storm dumped more than 7 inches of rain in less than 24 hours over parts of New York City on Friday, turning streets into fast-moving rivers and grinding subway travel to a halt as water cascaded into underground transit stations.

The storm, which hit just two years after flooding from the remnants of Hurricane Ida battered the five boroughs and killed at least 13 people in the city, laid bare how vulnerable the Big Apple’s aging infrastructure is to extreme weather events that are intensified by climate change. And more than a decade after Hurricane Sandy forced officials to rethink the meaning of climate resilience in New York City, it appears there’s still much to be done.

Heavy rainfall of up to 2.5 inches per hour were reported in some of the hardest-hit places. A number of roads were closed, cars were submerged and several city buses were trapped as a result of flash flooding. Subways, regional rail lines and air travel was suspended or severely delayed, and at least one school in Brooklyn was evacuated during the storm.

“The reality staring city leaders in the face, including in places like New York, is that the climate is getting more extreme, more unpredictable and requiring more investment,” said Joseph Kane, a fellow who focuses on infrastructure at the Brookings Institute, a nonprofit think tank. “Usually, it’s too little too late.”

It led to scenes like these:

 

 

 

 

And lots of blame-global-warming gaming in the mainstream press and among New York's all-blue politicians.

Here's Reuters:

Torrential downpours that caused flash flooding in New York City on Friday reflect a "new normal" due to the effects of climate change, New York Governor Kathy Hochul warned on Saturday, as the city began drying out after one of its wettest days ever.

Here's the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, one of its many bloated bureaucracies:

The most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (leaves DEC website) states that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from human activities are responsible for accelerating global warming and climate change. Higher temperatures, more frequent precipitation and storms, faster rates of ocean warming, and sea level rise are some of the key physical effects of climate change that are impacting communities and ecosystems around the world. Climate change impacts will continue to worsen as global temperatures and greenhouse gas emissions increase (see Climate Change 101).

New York's Responding to Climate Change in New York State (ClimAID) report (2011, 2014) (leaves DEC website), the National Climate Assessment (2018) (leaves DEC website), DEC Observed and Projected Climate Change in NYS (PDF), and other climate impact assessment reports show that a variety of climate change impacts have already been observed across the northeastern United States and in New York State. These climate change reports clearly show, based on scientific data, that significant climate change impacts are already occurring. People, plants and wildlife, and ecosystems are facing an uncertain future unless adequate actions are taken to adapt to climate change impacts already unfolding and expected to intensify over time. GHG emissions must also rapidly and significantly be reduced in the near future and eventually eliminated to prevent the increasingly harmful impacts of climate change over the next several decades.

The Atlantic called it a "tropical" rainfall pattern:

New York City’s sewer system is built for the rain of the past—when a notable storm might have meant 1.75 inches of water an hour. It wasn’t built to handle the rainfall from Hurricane Irene, Hurricane Sandy, or, more recently, Hurricane Ida—which dumped 3.15 inches an hour on Central Park. And it wasn’t built to handle the kind of extreme rainfall that is becoming routine: The city flooded last December, last April, and last July—an unusual seasonal span. “We now have in New York something much more like a tropical-rainfall pattern,” Rohit Aggarwala, New York City’s environmental-protection commissioner, said yesterday at The Atlantic Festival. “And it happens over and over again.”

Actually, it has always rained like this in New York. Wait 'til the writer hears about the city's snow. 

The piece compares the rainfall to what Singapore gets and what Miami gets. I've lived in Singapore -- and I know what its torrential rain is like, rain so heavy you can't see across the street and I know what its sparkling clean subway system is like. They don't get breakdowns like New York's subway does. They've figured out that if you want a nice subway system, you need to keep it clean, including its drains. Hurricane-savvy Miami also doesn't break down during big rainstorms.

All New York had to do was keep its subway drains clean, keeping the trash out of it. Somehow that didn't get done.

And actually, there are plenty of places that get this kind of rainfall: 

 

 Only New York, though, has started to break down, and break down in ways that it didn't used to break down.

Instead of blaming blue-city government, focused as it is on taking down statues of George Washington, hiring bureaucrats, expanding their vast welfare system including care and feeding of NGOs, (who service illegal immigrants), they blame global warming as if they had nothing to do with the incompetent government that failed to prepare for the storms New York always gets.

Now they're paying the piper, but fear not -- global warming did it. It's quite a convenient 'sin eater' for all the incompetence and failure to prepare of New York's solid blue government. Nobody is bringing up that maybe they should have focused their priorities differently, upgrading and maintaining their subway lines, as well as keeping them crime-free so that people will want to ride them and financing would naturally flow for this maintenance. They just let it get run down like old Soviet buildings, the shambling ruins of extended socialism. (Yes, Moscow always has had an elegant subway system but that was a showpiece, not everyday reality like the socialist worker-ant buildings).

Funny how you see the same results in socialism every time you try it. Just blame global warming.

Image: Twitter screen shot

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