Manhattan is Sinking: What Do We Do? by Rachel Veroff
In late October, 2012, Hurricane Sandy rose as a tropical storm from the Caribbean Sea and curled slowly up the Eastern Seaboard, growing in intensity as it moved. By the time it reached the New York Bay, its forceful winds were howling at 89 mph. The counterclockwise rotation of the storm then drove the hurricane up into New York City’s vulnerable harbor. It shoved the ocean up into the Hudson and East Rivers and poured down onto Lower Manhattan in a record 13-foot storm surge, causing full-scale crisis, power outages, massive flooding of subway tunnels, and an estimated $20 billion in economic damage, all in one of the most densely populated neighborhoods of the country.
Now, three years later, the people of Lower Manhattan are still grappling with some very overwhelming issues. Aside from disaster recovery, a complex and expensive endeavor by itself—one that has involved excavating basements, repairing extensive damages to old buildings, and replacing lost property—Manhattanites find themselves faced with an increasingly alarming fact: This is going to happen again.…show more content… By 2050, the water in the New York Harbor is predicted to be as much as 36 inches higher than it is today, also making the area more vulnerable to storm surges. Not only that, the Eastern Seaboard is actually sinking. This factoid goes back to the last ice age, which peaked around 20,000 years ago. A massive ice sheet used to stretch over Canada, weighing down the earth’s crust and causing areas away from the ice to bulge upwards. Now that the ice sheet has melted, the ground that was directly beneath it is rising, and the bulged areas are