Progressive Answers for the Problems of Subway Flooding
The intensifying global climate is having a serious impact on urban centers. New York City is not exempt from this. It is as beloved as any place can be in the modern world, and yet it is vulnerable in many ways — as the concentration of a vast number of people and as a low-lying area alongside some very slippery geology. Also, the nation’s most swampy city on a per acre basis (all that U.S. tax dollar-funded swamp creation, which is still going on despite the Law of Unintended Consequences!), New York stretches like a wheezing lung into the middle of the humid air from the Atlantic. When the wind’s right, the city’s drowned dead from a few centuries ago and the masses still above ground promise a fragrant olfactory topping for urban temperatures that are already stewing.
The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) makes a laudable target of opportunity. This is the agency that, over the course of more than a century, has built the world’s greatest subway system, an incomprehensibly vast underground network that operates with a kind of reliable, if occasionally rickety, efficiency. It is also the agency, in the era of climate change, that has to solve the interrelated problems of storm surge and rainfall flooding—two forms of flooding that threaten to inundate the subway system in a future that, on the evidence of recent history, seems ever more certain.
How Groundwater and Rainfall Complicate Matters
The effect of flooding in New York’s subway system goes well beyond causing a mere inconvenience for the 4 million daily riders. Even an occasional disruption can ripple throughout the economy and the entire social fabric of the city. That’s how vital the subway is and how much it facilitates the city’s livelihoods and lives. According to the MTA, the subway system alone generates about $50 billion each year because it keeps people moving. Indeed, if you can flood-proof the subway, as MTA engineer Eric Wilson says, you can do it for any underground facility in the world. That’s why the subway matters, why its being disrupted matters, and why the MTA’s efforts to stop the water from coming in are so important, as much for New York as for cities everywhere that have, or are building, an underground network.
The subway system of the MTA, which has been running since 1904, was built when climate considerations were not even in the picture. Nowadays, the subway tunnels are right at the water table and are susceptible to groundwater seepage. The MTA sees to it that 254 pumps along the subway system work day and night to push back the groundwater. These pumps, and the system they work in, are known as the “Continuous Flooding Mitigation System.” The flood that nearly enveloped the subways in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2012 led to a reallocation of a not insubstantial sum of money—$7.6 billion, part of the $51 billion federal disaster relief package from 2013—to pay for a series of upgrades intended to make the subway less prone to flooding. However, several of these upgrades, including the installation of sea gates at several subway entrances, have been called into question because the record rainfall events of the last couple of years have caused over $200 million in damage to the subway system.
What Hurricane Sandy Taught Us
The MTA has a two-part strategy for dealing with flooding. One part consists of deployable systems: flood logs and mechanical closure devices that can be deployed to protect entrances to the subway. These require human activation, which is not quite the real-time reaction you want when a sudden weather event is upon you. These kinds of systems are really the MTA’s best shot at trying to protect a subway entrance in a human-friendly way.
The MTA’s bets on the deployable system and on a passive flood protection system in the entrance to the BQE at the Brooklyn-Power Street intersection highlight how much of this is still using old-fashioned methods. And even with them in place, the subway was still flooded during Tropical Storm Ida.
Moreover, the MTA’s limited funds worsen the situation. Of the initial $7.6 billion earmarked for post-Sandy resilience projects, only $4.8 billion has been put to use. Meanwhile, the MTA’s total budget shortfall stands at $16 billion—an amount that would cover the salary of every bus and subway train operator for two years. Once it completes the already plundered measure of charging motorists to enter Manhattan, the agency plans to use that revenue to mitigate the shortfall.
Ways to Make the New York Subway System More Resilient
The MTA’s flood protection investments may seem adequate, even to some critics, who argue that our beloved subway has come through storms past. But this overlooks just how unprecedented recent weather events have been—and how likely they’re going to be, in an always stormy climate, to recur. The subway’s historical resilience doesn’t guarantee its future survival. Furthermore, the appearance of advanced drainage systems and/or real-time monitoring on some high-tech future version of the subway is irrelevant, to some critics, for the more fundamental reason that plain old aging infrastructure can no longer (if it ever could) be counted on to do what it’s supposed to do, which is basic, rule-like stuff like stay up, keep water out, and let electricity flow. And this is after already six years of post-Sandy fixes that the MTA has promised.
Flooding in the subway seems to hold lots of serious penalties for the average New Yorker. Delays and service kinks can produce lost pay, missed meetings, and escalated pressure. The MTA, though, is in no position to mitigate those impacts, because it cannot secure funding to implement flood mitigation measures. Even so, the MTA’s problems raise larger questions about the city’s commitment to investing in a resilient urban infrastructure. After all, as climate change continues to push against urban assets, even well-intentioned urban assets, those are mostly going to be paid for by New Yorkers.
To sum up, the MTA is doing worthwhile work to counteract flooding in the subway system, but what it’s doing may not be enough. The system uses deployable flood protection that can only do so much; its budget is constrained; and its infrastructure is old, which makes it hard to upgrade and ensure a component is not going to flood. And that’s before we consider that the area around the subway is going to get wetter and windier, thanks to climate change. Again: There’s no way this is going to be a half-assed project. More money, please.
New York City is on the brink of a climate disaster, and the subway system provides a crystal-clear view of the dangers that lie ahead for all urban areas. It’s not just about whether the MTA can keep water out of the subway. Can we as a society figure out a way to pay for the kinds of upgrades that will keep the most important parts of our urban infrastructure up and running?
That sounds a lot like a “yes” or “no” question with the future at stake, and a “dry” subway probably figures into that future somehow.