Portrait of a Drowning City
Adapted from The Tarball Chronicles, to be published this fall by Milkweed Editions
Over the last few years I have explored our country's coasts with Orrin Pilkey, a retired geology professor emeritus from Duke University who has long been a galvanizing figure in the battles over coastal erosion and development in North Carolina and beyond. Pilkey and I have mostly explored the beaches of our home state, North Carolina, where so many storms, including today's, make landfall. But one day, a couple of years ago we flew up to a different sort of low-lying island: Manhattan, which is also in Hurricane Irene’s path. As we explored New York City, Orrin outlined the many ways it was vulnerable to storms.
After a day of hiking around the city, Orrin climbed in a cab and headed back to the airport, while I walked south for a couple of miles to do something I hadn’t done since I was a kid. When I got to the Empire State Building I waited in line for well over an hour -- first the line for tickets, then the line for the first elevator, then the line for the final ride to the top. But the wait was worth it. The weather was clear and the view was both startling and scary. How could human beings build anything so high? I snuck out within ten feet of the edge and looked toward downtown, toward the Basin, the Bathtub.
The city was laid out below me like a map. Back on the Outer Banks, Orrin pointed out the folly of having streets that ran from the ocean to the marsh side of the barrier islands, since during storms those streets could easily turn into inlets. New York’s streets would perform the same function, leading water from the Hudson to the East River, ushering the storm surge straight into and through the city, crisscrossing the place with water and helping flood the island.
It was hard for me to get my head around this picture of a drowning city. How can we not be a little skeptical? This is the way the world is, we think, the world we know, and this is the way the world will stay. To say that most of us are climate change skeptics is not to say that most of us doubt the work of science. What we are perhaps truly doubtful of is the ability to predict or believe in radical change. It’s simply not in our DNA.
From the Empire State Building I looked down and, tired of picturing what might be, I imagined what once was. Were I able to travel back in time, say a thousand years, the island below would have been crisscrossed with streams and spotted with marshes, not cross-sectioned by streets and studded with buildings. The site where the World Trade Center towers once stood would have been well offshore to the east, submerged then as it might be again. The only human beings that inhabited the place would have most likely done so seasonally, the way most humans have always used the coast, taking advantage of summer’s abundance but wary of winter’s cold winds. The island itself, like all islands, once migrated, forming and reforming through storms and currents, though that was before buildings were shot down into it, like framing nails, to try to keep it still. But of course it won’t keep still. The human desire to pin things down won’t keep the place from changing: the island was once something else and soon enough will be again.
Up there, on top of the world, I found myself growing weary of apocalypse. Despite Orrin Pilkey’s energy and charm, I was still not yet entirely sold on the fact I so often hear repeated: that global warming and sea level rise will lead to our doom.
But then again, it didn’t hurt to play a little game of “what if.”
What if? It was easier to picture it from above: water filling the lowest areas first, pouring into the Trade Center site, cascading down the subway steps, using the cross streets to cut inland toward the island’s middle. Even with a mere .71-meter sea level rise by midcentury, the conservative number the city planners have settled on, New York faces obvious threats to its water supply, sewer, and wastewater systems, coastal erosion, and saltwater infiltration of aquifers and surface waters. Meanwhile, according to the United States Global Change Research Program’s assessment, “subway, road or rail tunnels or ventilation shafts will be at or below flood levels.”
And this was without a hurricane. There’s the rub. The fact that gets lost in the squabbling over numbers is that sea level doesn’t have to rise a single millimeter for a Katrina-like disaster to strike New York.
While I had spent the better part of the day trying to imagine this, the truth was that the word unimaginable worked pretty well in this instance. Eight million people on an island that is close to sea level with questionable means for evacuation. Experts can talk in a positive fashion about “solutions,” but the truth is that while sewage barriers are nice, the current strategy really comes down to being lucky. After all, isn’t it simply due to good fortune -- a kind roll of the dice -- that storms have veered in other directions and that a major storm hasn’t hit in at least a decade? We can create barriers for sewage plants -- and by all means we should -- but we can’t control what is uncontrollable. No one wants to hear it, but the real conclusion of an honest climate change impact report would be pretty simple: keep your fingers crossed.
I pictured a storm barreling up the East Coast and then veering northeast, drawn into the funnel of the Verrazano Narrows through the Upper Bay and toward the Hudson and East rivers. Once there, it would send twenty-five-foot storm surges over Battery Park and wash over Ground Zero, filling the bathtub of lower Manhattan to the brim.
I am no prophet, and I certainly wasn’t saying this would happen. But there is no doubt that it could. Or it could do any number of other things, could veer slightly east and take out the Rockaways, for instance, or slam into Coney Island, once a healthy barrier island before its leeward marsh was artificially filled, where high-rise buildings now stand right next to the Atlantic. Or the storm could decide -- or whatever the storm equivalent of “decide” is -- to skip New York entirely and head for Boston or Washington.
Like most of us, I could barely imagine this happening.
But that, I understood, had no impact on whether it would or wouldn’t.
