Powerful Article ... non-political
Watching New York City drown
In 2005, Aaron Naparstek, a writer with the New York Press, published a remarkably prescient piece about the vulnerability of New York City to hurricanes, the flooding that would result along the hundreds of miles of shoreline in the five boroughs—with the water filling the sea-level interior flatlands and washing over the reclaimed swamps of Brooklyn—and the ill-prepared psychology of “a complacent coastal city” where the ocean is not thought of as a threat. Naparstek observed that in fact
New York “is behind only Miami and New Orleans on the list of U.S. cities most likely to suffer a major hurricane disaster.” He cited meteorologists and disaster planners with the city’s Office of Emergency of Management who were in consensus “that the metropolitan region is due for a big one. Overdue, in fact.” Mike Lee, then Director of Watch Command at the OEM, told Naparstek that the worst-case hurricane scenario for New York City—in which 30 feet or more of storm surge sweeps over the city in a category 3 storm event—“gives emergency managers serious gastrointestinal distress.” Nicholas Coch, a professor of coastal geology at Queens College, said “The New York City area is the worst possible place for a hurricane to make a landfall.”
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/30/watc...rk_city_drown/