New York City Subways and Hurricane Sandy
Great long article on what N.Y.C. Subways did to mitigate the effects of Hurricane Sandy.
From the
New York Times:
Could New York City Subways Survive Another Hurricane?
A good place to see how and why the Metropolitan Transportation Authority just barely survived Sandy last fall is the entrance to a tunnel at 148th Street and Lenox Avenue, in East Harlem, where, just before the storm hit, a crew of carpenters built a plywood dam 8� feet tall by about 55 feet wide. That ad hoc, low-tech, last-minute construction held the New York Harbor at bay and not only saved the city hundreds of millions of dollars, but also made it possible for the subway to come back to life as quickly as it did.
The first work on the dam began a week before Sandy arrived, when building materials were taken to the site. As weather forecasters were hemming and hawing about European versus American climate models and Mayor Bloomberg was debating whether to evacuate flood areas, New York City Transit was working on its own hurricane plans. �You scramble your jets right away � you can�t wait,� says Thomas F. Prendergast, president of New York City Transit at the time and now the authority�s chairman and chief executive. The reports on the dam that he was getting at the Rail Control Center in Midtown showed the level getting higher and higher. �The water was lapping at the top,� he says.
Not long after Sandy was categorized a tropical depression off the coast of Venezuela on Friday, Oct. 19, the M.T.A. had begun gathering cots and bedding, food and water, for track workers and hydraulics teams and even the train crews that would shut the system down and start it back up. Carpenters and bus drivers alike would be staying at depots and temporary shelters, because there would be no way for them to go home and then return to work while the subways and regional trains like Metro-North Railroad and New Jersey Transit were out. By Wednesday, when Sandy crossed the island of Jamaica as a Category 1 hurricane, carpenters were covering sidewalk subway grates with plastic sheeting and plywood and building barriers at the entrances of low-lying subway stations, mostly in Lower Manhattan.
Sounds like the Transit Authority is really well managed -- got to be a meritocracy instead of a bureaucracy. You actually have to be able to do the work in order to get promoted. Do not listen to the chattering political class in times like this; they have no idea as to what is actually happening, they surround themselves with yes-men.
Posted by DaveH at October 23, 2013 10:51 PM