The price tag for overdue projects in New York state, mainly flood control, comes to over half a trillion dollars by 2050, according to a recent report by Rebuild by Design titled, Paying for Resilience in New York State. This report is based in large part on public records of damage caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 which revealed many storm related vulnerabilities of the entire state, but especially the New York City area. The report has hundreds of needed water control and related projects that are still on the drawing board, under construction, or simple upgrades, expansions, and modernization to existing infrastructure. Since 2011 every county in the state has had a federally declared weather-related disaster event. Just this summer, heavy rains have flooded subway stations, left submerged cars from New Jersey to the Bronx, and caused sewage to overflow.
The governing assumption, regrettably, is accommodation: surrender the flood plains, soften the blow with “green” solutions, persuade the public to adapt. That is a policy of managed retreat.
The alternative is not exotic. The Dutch, whose country would largely be under water without infrastructure, spent the postwar decades building the Delta Works and now hold back the North Sea as a matter of routine engineering. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is the largest and among the most experienced such agencies on earth. Half a trillion dollars over a generation is not an insurmountable cost for a nation that spends more than twice that on its military every year—it is a question of what the nation is for.
So the real choice in New York is the one facing the country: adapt to a shrinking world, or build a growing one.
