Ibrahim wrote:I read that the NY subway has pumps running constantly, even on sunny days, and that during storms there is near chaos. The story also said that some of the approximately 700 pumps were purchased from the completed Panama Canal project in 1914.
IMO the MTA should send some people to Hong Kong and Guangzhou and see what they have set up. Both have extensive subways (not NY's size, but large) and deal with several typhoons every years, plus Guangzhou is basically build on red sand next to a massive estuary.
Well that is like the agonised debate here whenever we have even moderately heavy snow, and it causes chaos - whereas in Canada, Russia or even Scotland it does not. That is because in southern England it is sufficiently rare as not to make it worth it to invest heavily in protective measures. HK gets hit regularly, in the NE USA Sandy is a once in a century event. Also the HK MTA has one underwater tunnel, how many does NYC have?
I think getting transit back to normal is going to be the biggest challenge here and that is going to affect the economy of the city for weeks.
Incidentally to non-Americans this is by far the biggest story here, with live Sandy update streams on the BBC and the main newspaper sites. But then, it's New York, disaster movies are always set there. If a Chinese city had been wiped out by a typhoon with far higher loss of life, it would rate a paragraph on an inside page.