Gil --
Thanks for your good thoughts.
In our part of Brooklyn (Park Slope), we didn't lose power and we weren't flooded. A few stray tree branches came down, and some trees a few blocks away. Our TV antenna mast broke (we don't have cable), but it did not interfere with TV, while our neighbors with cable lost service -- and Radio Shack had a new mast, which I got installed yesterday. Though we are only a few blocks from the harbor and the Gowanus canal, at 53' elevation we are well above sea level -- Park Slope really is a slope -- the back side of the morraine that is Long Island, created by the last glaciers. But much of the very edges of Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island are largely low-lying areas that once were salt marshes -- the glacier run-off plains -- since mostly filled in, but still very low-lying.
My office is in lower Manhattan, where there is no power, and the subway tunnels out of Brooklyn have been flooded. We are right on Broadway, which runs along the height of the land of Manhattan, a block from the Stock Exchange; the Exchange is operating with emergency generators they brought in, and while I am told there is essentially no damage right around us, the power can't be turned back on until they pump out lower-lying buildings closer to the East River. The edges of Manhattan are almost all fill placed over the years in the Hudson or East Rivers, restrained by bulk heading --on the east side of lower Manhattan, Water St., Front St., and South St. at various times marked the water's edge, but became inland streets the island "grew" in the 19th century, and modern Battery Park City and the World Financial Center expanded lower Manhattan by a couple of blocks westerly at the end of the 20th century. All these areas are low-lying, and while the buildings may be tall, their basements (usually two, three, and four levels underground), are often below sea level.
So I've had a bit of unexpected time off -- no real treat, since the backed-up work will be waiting when I get back, probably on Monday.
I understand that Dover-Foxcroft, Maine (where our canoes are) -- and I guess most of Maine -- was largely unaffected.
So we were lucky -- a huge amount of damage was done to homes along the New Jersey Shore and in the New Jersey meadow lands, on Long Island, and along the extensive low-lying parts of Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. The damage that affects me is not directly to my home or family -- it is infrastructure damage that basically causes me only inconvenience, not the real loss that so many are suffering.
In my work as an environmental lawyer for NY, I deal a lot with wetlands regulation and protection, and shore front erosion issues. The regulations that are intended to protect wetlands, beaches, and shore fronts are largely seen by those most directly affected by them as burdensome, annoying, and interfering. And they are, but even so, more is needed -- the kind of devastation resulting from this storm (and there will be more like it and worse) shows that more attention needs to be paid to the forces of nature rather than to the conveniences of those who wish to live within walking distance of a beach or the greed of those who wish to build a football stadium or factory in a wet meadow.
Some politicians are already crying "We will rebuild!" But we shouldn't -- not in those same areas, or at least not in the same way. If we do, we will suffer the same, and greater, loses again, and again as often as we just rebuild. I would hope that we might learn from such an experience -- learn to do things differently so we won't repeat the same experience. But I am not optimistic -- doing things differently can be expensive and inconvenient, and the potential rewards are distant and not immediately obvious, and people all to often just don't like to change.
Sorry for the rant -- but it is difficult to hear newscasters and public officials complaining about serious loss, without any acknowledgement that the policies and practices of our culture have contributed to, and even caused, those losses. Storms have always happened, and always will. The beaches have always eroded, and low-lying areas have always flooded. Historically, we have not usually built on the beaches or in swamps and meadow lands. We seem, as a culture, to have become more stupid. If we suffer losses from storms, it is in good part because we have put ourselves in their way, often needlessly and thoughtlessly.
