Desk Report
Publish: 05 Sep 2021, 09:18 pm
Climate Change Blamed for havoc in northeast US floods || Photo: Collected
Climate
change and creaky infrastructure were blamed Friday for the scale of the impact
from floods tearing through New York City when remnants of Hurricane Ida swept
across the US northeast, killing at least 47 people.
"We
are in a whole different world," New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said after
the flash floods. "This is a different challenge."
Record
rain turned streets into rivers and shut down subway services as water cascaded
onto tracks. Nearly a dozen people drowned in basement apartments.
The
extreme weather, combined with a lack of preparation, stretched the United
States' biggest city to breaking point.
"It's
no big surprise that the city seems to break down every time there's a big
storm," said Jonathan Bowles, executive director of the think-tank Center
for an Urban Future.
"The
city's infrastructure hasn't kept pace with the population growth that New
York's had in the last couple of decades, let alone the increasing ferocity of
storms, and rising sea levels that have come with climate change," Bowles
said.
While
there has been a lot of investment in big projects -- train stations, airports,
new bridges -- less funding has gone to "unsexy" projects such as
sewer lines and water mains, he said.
Nicole
Gelinas, an urban economics expert at the Manhattan Institute, another
think-tank, said New York's infrastructure "was not built for seven inches
of rainfall in a few hours."
Drains
for the city's sewer system get clogged, Gelinas said, and "there's not
enough green space to catch some of the water before it runs into the drains.
"So
some of these avenues, they become canals when there's a big storm."
New
York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania were the hardest hit by Ida, which ravaged
the southern state of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast earlier in the week before
sweeping northeast.
President
Joe Biden, who has made threats from climate change a priority, flew to
Louisiana, where more than 800,000 people remained without power after Ida made
landfall as a Category 4 storm.
He
said costly improvements to the levee system around New Orleans after the far
deadlier Hurricane Katrina in 2005 had proved their worth in preventing more
catastrophic damage this time.
Similarly
transformative infrastructure projects -- rather than simply rebuilding -- will
have to become the new norm, he said, pushing for passage of his giant $3.5
trillion infrastructure bill in Congress.
"Things
have changed so drastically in terms of the environment, you've already crossed
a certain threshold," he said.
"You
can't build back a road, a highway or a bridge to what it was before."
-
Like a 'jungle' -
New
Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said Storm Ida had left 25 people dead in his
state, most of them "individuals who got caught in their vehicles."
Thirteen
deaths were reported in New York City, including 11 victims who could not escape
their basements, police said.
Three
people were killed in the New York suburb of Westchester, while another five
died in Pennsylvania and one -- a state trooper -- in Connecticut, officials
said.
"I'm
50 years old and I've never seen that much rain ever," said Metodija
Mihajlov, whose Manhattan restaurant basement was flooded with three inches of
water.
"It
was like living in the jungle, like tropical rain. Unbelievable. Everything is
so strange this year," Mihajlov told AFP.
The
National Weather Service recorded 3.15 inches of rain in New York's Central
Park in just an hour -- beating a record set just last month during Storm Henri.
The
US Open tennis tournament was halted as howling wind and rain blew under the
corners of the Louis Armstrong Stadium roof.
It
is rare for such storms to strike America's northeastern seaboard and comes as
the surface layer of oceans warms due to climate change.
The
warming is causing cyclones to become more powerful and carry more water,
posing an increasing threat to the world's coastal communities, scientists say.
"Global
warming is upon us and it's going to get worse and worse and worse unless we do
something about it," said New York Senator Chuck Schumer.
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Topic : Climate change The US
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