New York City’s Future Is Very, Very Wet
How the city deals with climate change will affect not only the tens of millions of people in the region, but cities worldwide that follow its example.
Hurricane Ida made the Major Deegan a river again.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images North AmericaNew York City saw it coming. In May, in the kind of clarifying document that invariably gets noticed when it’s too late, the city mapped out the sort of devastation that Hurricane Ida would bring just a few months later.
The message of the New York City Stormwater Resiliency Plan is that, weatherwise, the scale of everything has changed. The city’s current infrastructure — its roads, subway tunnels, sewer systems, storm drains — is not built to withstand the climate-related ravages to come. As a result, the report states, capital investments “provide diminishing returns, as it becomes more and more challenging to treat the large volumes of stormwater released in extreme events.”