WestView

Come High Water

February 2010

FEMA Tells Coastal Villagers New Cost of Living
City Sets Hurricane Evacuation Zones, Shelters

By John Tebbel

WestView first received the news of the coming flood from our readers.

“The condo I’m involved with [on the corner of West St.] has just raised maintenance by 20 per cent. The reason: FEMA has just done a new 100-year flood risk and now decided it is in a flood plain or whatever. According to them, it could possibly be under 9 feet of water in the next 100 years (maybe a storm-surge hurricane). So there has to be building flood insurance (since all the mechanical systems would be wiped out). The board has bargained it down to under $50K a year. Right now, though, the rider hasn’t yet gone into effect and nobody there can get a mortgage.”

New York City exists because of the water. The ocean brought Europeans to this wonderful collection of waterways that would offer both shelter from the sea and access to the interior. Before the city, the ebb and flow of the tides created a temperate wonderland of marsh and stream and floodplain that brought forth plant and animal life to sustain a human population.

In our part of the city the water lives behind walls. As long as most of us have been alive the walls have been higher than the water. But as the recent disaster in Haiti reminds us, living memory is no protection or provender against catastrophe.

To this end the Federal Emergency Management Agency has recently redrawn the maps that tell us where a hundred year storm would flood coastal areas all around the country.

What we call the Hudson River is known to mariners as the North River, referring to where on the compass it is when your boat is sitting in the middle of the Upper Bay and you’re wondering where to go. And mariners also know it is as much a part of the sea as it is a way to drain the land.

We’ve recently witnessed the linkage between government and insurance. This is also seen in the area of coastal property. Village coop owners within a half block of West St. may not think they have much in common with those who have beachfront homes on Hilton Head, but to the Government and the insurance industry, oh and don’t forget the banks, one island near a part of the ocean is much like another.

Until the Federal Government got into the flood insurance business coastal landowners assumed all the risk of their risky location. The government flood insurance has allowed the taxpayers to subsidize coastal development. So far. There is a price we will not pay; we just don’t know yet what that is.

Usually, of course, the water stays down, the hurricane passes, the nor’easter relents. There are neighbors of ours in the more easily recognizable oceanfront communities such as Gerritsen or College Point who must pay strict attention to the coastal flood watches and for whom the rising water is a constant concern.

We have been able to ignore the flood danger so far, but no longer. FEMA has decided what areas they believe the hundred year storm will inundate and has issued maps to tell us all about it. The insurance companies will design flood insurance policies and the banks that hold the mortgages will demand that owners obtain it.

Of course the hundred year storm might not arrive for several hundred years. And a five-hundred year storm might show up next week. When it comes to natural disasters, records are meant to be broken.

Also of interest are the city’s own Office of Emergency Management’s maps of the three stages of hurricane evacuation that are contemplated in the event of hundred year storms and worse.

The first stage evacuation includes, roughly, the FEMA hundred year storm areas, and the second stage is much more extensive, requiring most everyone west of Sixth Ave. to refugee to higher ground.

The city wants us to stay with friends or relatives on higher ground, and, once you realize that only three shelters are expected to accommodate all of Manhattan south of Central Park, you’ll want to stay with friends and family too. Look at the map and start making a list.

The best, most detailed information is on the web.

Find the FEMA flood maps at msc.fema.gov

An excellent page of links is at fema.gov/plan/prevent/floodins/infocon.shtm

The city’s two cents, backed by police powers, are at nyc.gov/html/oem/html/hazards/storms_evaczones.shtml

The city’s Hurricane Evacuation Map is at nyc.gov/html/oem/downloads/pdf/hurricane_map_english.pdf

We close with the words of Ambrose Bierce from The Devil’s Dictionary:

Insurance, n. An ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.

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