New York’s “Self-Inflicted Calamity”

I recently found a fantastic article on Discover Magazine, discussing New York’s “Self-Inflicted Calamity.”  This calamity being the development & reclaiming of urbanized areas on wetlands and flood-prone areas.  The piece focuses on the effects that Hurricane Sandy had and continues to have on locations along the Northeast coast.

The article dives deep into the areas hardest hit along the northeast coast, along with a breakdown of the development side of things.  You may not know it, but developers in the past had to literally “raise” Manhattan 10+feet in order to make the advancement of these thriving locations possible.  Ever since, the leaders that preside over this piece of land has ignored the possibility of extreme weather events.

The following image shows how much of present-day Manhattan would be under water in the 17th century.  As you can see, many man-made advancements has allowed the city to expand exponentially:

The following is an excerpt taken from the article:

And yet to interpret the calamity as an act of nature is to make it seem as if the disaster came out of nowhere. Invoking Mother Nature risked leaving the impression that the long history of land-making and building in the floodplain had little to do with the catastrophe. Simply put, this was a self-inflicted calamity.

New York has been thumbing its nose at the ocean for over 300 years. The Dutch took some tentative steps into the floodplain of the East River back in the 17th century, but it was the English who invented a whole new form of property — land underwater — that allowed building to go forward in harm’s way. Still, it was only in the 19th century that the idea of New York as a limitless proposition led to the extensive development of coastal areas. That move came at the expense of the wetlands and mudflats that once safeguarded the shoreline and helped to mitigate the effects of storm surge.

I highly encourage you to take 10-15 minutes of your time to read this great piece by Ted Steinberg.  He speaks of truths that are often ignored, including the fact that most people “in charge” tend to ignore the high-impact threats present by extreme weather events.