Demspotis
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Joined: 3/11/2005
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Lordandmaster
We're STILL talking about why people were foolish enough to live in Hurricane Sandy's path? About 80 million people were living in Hurricane Sandy's path. Were they were all supposed to be living in Nebraska instead? Then you'd be blaming them for living in tornado country!
Living in the path of a hurricane is not a problem, living in the most vulnerable pieces of land in hurricane-prone areas is the problem. I live in NYC, with a disaster zone on the other side of the nearest major street. My neighborhood only suffered a loss of power for a day, and a few downed trees. What's the difference? The other side of that street is low-lying beach front; but there is a slope from the shore, and my neighborhood is uphill, outside of the flood zone. The areas of the city that were severely damaged were all shoreline areas, and most of them were wetlands (swamp, marsh, bog) that were filled in.
Choosing to live in a place like that is like stealing Damocles' seat at the feast: that sword dangling overhead could fall on you at any time.
Now, there ARE relatively safe ways to live in areas like that, in fact, and a quick read of the above posts showed some of them, such as putting buildings on stilts; or otherwise making a lower level that is designed to withstand major flooding, and in which you do not keep anything essential to survival, or valuable. I've seen some historic buildings arranged like that; not in coastal flood zones, but in stream-valley flood zones. I'm thinking especially of one building in central New Jersey, which is built on the shore of a stream; it may have originally been a mill. This stream runs along the bottom of what appears to be a small valley, with the floor of it somewhere around 6 or 10 feet below the general level of land around it. So, the lower level of the structure is stone; this part is high enough to go above the surrounding ground level; the upper level is wood and could be habitable, or possibly storage space for mill products. The wooden part has at least one door that appears to open out onto nothing... no stairs, no deck. When I saw this, it was very mysterious. But then in a flash I realized that if there was a flood, as from heavy rain, or melting snow, further upstream, the wooden level and its door would be above the waterlevel of the flood even if it filled the "valley" up to the top. (If the water got any higher than that, it would have to spread out along the regular lay of the land, and would not be able to rise much higher.) So... anyone in that building during a flood would be reasonably safe, and with the door could be rescued by boat or raft without even the trouble of trying to climb through a window. There was another nearby structure in the valley that also was stonework on the lower level; in that case it looked like no more than a very high, flood-resistant, foundation, though they could have sheltered animals or stored tools there during dry times. The actual house was built away from the stream and slightly uphill, noticeably out of the way of any imaginable flooding.
As for wetland, swampy, areas, one could do like that perhaps, but much wiser is to simply recognize that it is a water environment, and build accordingly. There are many cultures that live in swamps. The trick is to do what they do. What our "developers" have done here is to try to treat wetlands like drylands, or transform the wetlands into drylands. That was naive at best. Those areas are wetlands because that is the natural state of lowlying shoreline lands, especially in river deltas. If you look at a map of this area, where New York (Long Island, with New England on the mainland behind it, on the north) and New Jersey come together in a right angle, you will see that not only does the Hudson River (which is actually an "estuary", rather than a true river) come to the sea. In addition there are other rivers, especially the Raritan, that come into the sea in the area. As such the whole area forms something of a vast delta. It is complicated by the fact that the right angle is the result of the debris left behind by the edge of an Ice Age glacier: there are many ridges, more or less parallel.
Lower Manhattan's flooding is a different story. There, we have to remember that the southern end of that island was original smaller; the Dutch colonists followed the usual habit of their home country and expanded the shoreline (the Netherlands is much larger than it was a thousand years ago). However, this is not the Netherlands; the Netherlands is not regularly bashed by storms from the Caribbean. What's interesting is that to a considerable extent the flood levels there were fairly close to the original coast line of Manhattan island.
Now, for the Atlantic coast of North America, tropical storms are normal, on a fairly regular basis. Those areas of land close to sea-level are naturally waterlogged and swampy. Areas like that, to some extent, serve as a kind of catchbasin barrier for flooding brought by storms like Sandy. If these areas are inhabited, it ought to be in ways adapted for the natural realities of those places. Dry-land architecture is simply not practical there; to the contrary, it is quite dangerous.
In my part of the city especially, there have been generations of environmentalists trying to preserve the wetlands, protect them from the naive developers and their even-more naive politician supporters. These environmentalists are and have been far from the stereotypical neo-hippy, anarchist young environmentalists; throughout my lifetime the leaders have been older people, generally the parents of the original hippies. Now, unfortunately, only a few are left of that generation. A fair number of them are even *gasp* Republicans. Yes, Republican, conservative environmentalists!
Anyway, the basic point is that to live in some places, we must adapt to their natural situation. Don't build in swamps as you would on dry land; turning the swamp into dry land will not work well in the long run, at least not in hurricane-prone areas, such as the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. People who do live in those areas should take heed of how people have been living in similar places throughout history, and take any lessons from them that fit.
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RE: Individual Responsibilities for Storm Preparedness - 
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