♪♪
-If we understand how nature is trying to shape New York City,
then maybe we can make New York City
fit into the nature of the place
and then, that way, make it possible to live in the city
into the next 400 years
and maybe the 400 years after that.
-From the sky, it's clear that New York City was boldly built
right to the water's edge.
It's a coastal city surrounded by water on all sides.
♪♪
Just a century ago, there was more cargo tonnage and people
passing through this port than all other major harbors
in the country combined.
With 578 miles of coastline,
all that water is now New York's greatest threat.
-The real challenge for us in the 21st century is,
can we be as wise as we are smart?
We're so smart about so many things.
We're so clever and yet, somehow,
when it actually comes to making hard decisions,
the wise decisions based on what we know,
we have trouble doing that.
I don't know how many more examples nature needs to give us
to do the right thing.
-The world's great cities
face threats they have never before encountered.
New York...
Tokyo...
London...
Miami...
The threats come from the sea,
from above and from below.
These are the problems and their solutions...
♪♪
...for when the water comes.
[ Waves crashing ]
-A Mayor of the City of New York
has ordered a mandatory evacuation.
All residents are urged to comply
with this evacuation request.
-In 2012, superstorm Sandy catches New York by surprise.
The city is flooded with 1.6 billion gallons of water
containing raw and partially treated sewage.
The storm surge, measuring over 13 feet,
engulfs New York with over 700,000 tons of debris.
It is the worst natural disaster in the city's history.
Trever Holland is a resident and an attorney
in a neighborhood called Two Bridges.
-It's on the Lower East Side,
and it's called Two Bridges because our neighborhood
is located between the two bridges,
the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge.
-The median household income
in this inner-city neighborhood of 38,000 people
is just over $21,000.
That's well under half of the average median income
of New York City. -It's an affordable
neighborhood, working-class individuals.
We're in a very diverse neighborhood,
one of the most diverse in Manhattan.
Different economic levels. Different races.
Different creeds. Different religions.
I mean, it's one of the reasons why I love living here.
-Two Bridges is situated on New York's floodplain.
At five to 10 feet above sea level,
parts of it will be completely underwater
if sea levels rise by six feet
in the next century, as predicted.
-Someone had talked about storm amnesia,
and I think that does happen
because you forget how bad it was.
One of the more vivid scenes I remember
is that we take a look in the backyard area
where our playground is...
There were three or four homeless people,
who didn't get the notice that a storm was coming.
They don't have cell phones. They're not watching the news.
They just realize that the water is rising.
And they were basically trapped in an area
and they were standing in water
trying to figure out how to get out of this.
I remember that vividly thinking,
"How many people didn't get the news flash
that a storm is coming?"
And they were just sleeping along the river
and then all of a sudden the water came up.
♪♪
These are porters.
They stayed overnight. They had no choice.
This one is actually South Street.
This was early in the storm.
The water had just come over the edges.
When you think of Manhattan,
you kind of think, "Oh, apartment buildings."
You don't really think that, you know, a building flooding,
especially in our particular neighborhood.
This was the point where
we could no longer enter the street.
I mean, this is the side of the building
and that's actually the sidewalk you can see on the right side.
It had already gone up to the four-foot wall
that is outside of our building.
And, looking down from the street,
a sea of water, or a river of water.
-Two Bridges got slammed by the storm surge in 2012,
and it will be slammed again.
-We know that there's gonna be another big hurricane.
That hurricane could come next year,
and they're gonna blame the politicians
for not acting fast enough.
We have to recognize that climate change is here.
We know that there's gonna be sea-level rise
and we know the storms are getting more intense.
We should find ways, have a plan,
for people to live in a safe way.
We're so creative about our science
but, somehow, we haven't really brought
our full suite of creativity to this question.
♪♪
This place is on the edge, it's on the edge of the continent,
and that's what makes New York City so special,
and that also is what's threatening New York City
going into the future.
-New York City faces two challenges.
The first is the inevitable fact
that the city lies in a hurricane zone,
and storms will continue to come no matter what.
-My kids are 10 and 15.
I know that they're gonna have to live with this
the rest of their lives.
I think this is something that is embedded in us
as people who have had to live through it.
-The second is rising sea levels.
-I think that people in New York understand
that sea level is rising and that it's a critical problem.
How much it's rising? And how we'll adapt?
Those are still open questions.
-The challenges are clear, but what are the solutions?
How can New York adapt and survive?
-We're gonna go out and we're gonna just swap one instrument,
put in a new, fresh instrument
so we get good-quality measurement.
-Philip Orton works on the front line
of the effort to measure the rising seas.
He monitors the Hudson River, gathering present-day data
to predict and maybe prevent future catastrophe.
-We've got a buoy offshore.
It's got a SONN, an instrument that has many sensors on it,
that's measuring pH, the oxygen, salinity of the water,
temperature of the water, water elevation...
There's instruments all up and down the Hudson.
It'll send the data to the Internet
which we take into our database.
We collect the data for the forecast model.
Much like with the weather forecast,
you can merge the best information you have
to form the initial conditions
in order to launch your next forecast.
-These gauges help Orton understand
which parts of the city are most at risk
when the next big storm or hurricane hits.
♪♪
After Sandy, Orton's data was used in modeling
to see what New York would look like
with six feet of sea level rise by 2100.
-So this is a satellite map showing New York City
without any flooding.
Shown here is Broad Channel, The Rockaways, Lower Manhattan,
and over here is Staten Island.
If you get six feet of sea-level rise,
the everyday average high tide
is gonna start flooding a lot of neighborhoods.
It's high tide in 2100.
This is now showing tidal flooding of places like
South Street Seaport, Lower Manhattan,
a lot of flooding around Jamaica Bay,
also on Staten Island.
Hundreds of thousands of people being flooded at that point.
It's uninhabitable when you start getting flooded
so many times per year.
That's tidal flooding, but then there's also storm surges.
We can also look at what 2100 would hold
if we had a very severe storm like Hurricane Sandy,
plus six feet of sea level rise.
A much larger percentage of the coastal zone is flooded,
the West Side of Manhattan, the Tribeca district,
Wall Street, Battery Park, Lower East Side.
-Sandy flooded 51 square miles --
17% of the city.
With six feet of sea rise,
those numbers would be closer to 100 square miles
or about 1/3 of the city underwater.
-This kind of flooding would be catastrophic.
There's massive infrastructural elements
for a city of 8 million people that are in the flood zones.
Transportation system, the tunnels, the subways,
the electrical system,
and of course a lot of these things were flooded
just by Hurricane Sandy,
so if you envision six feet of sea-level rise,
then a great deal more is at risk at that point.
The whole city could be disabled in this kind of flood scenario.
It's almost certain if we don't
reduce our carbon-dioxide emissions
that we'll have sea level rise of that scale
in the 22nd century.
New York City's 300 years old.
At this rate, we won't make it to another 300 years.
♪♪
-When we designed and built New York,
we did not think of floods and storms.
-New York's century-old subway system
is a disturbing example of the challenges the city faces
from rising seas and powerful storms.
The subway moves almost 6 million people every day,
the largest transit service in the country,
with 840 miles of track --
enough to stretch all the way to Chicago.
But it's now in critical need of maintenance
as New York adapts to the perils of climate change.
-This is the South Ferry station.
Water entered actually through this entrance
and went all the way down the stairs...
...and flooded the entire station.
There was actually three, four feet of water on the mezzanine.
Everybody was surprised that the whole station got flooded.
Nobody anticipated that much water coming in
and actually flooding the whole station.
First of all, there was urgency to get service back,
so there was urgency to get all of the water out,
pump everything.
There was like...
7 or 8 million gallons of water
that had to be pumped out,
and it took weeks to pump it out.
So, once they pumped out all of the water,
then the station was assessed to see what was damaged
and what had to be done.
♪♪
-Joe Lhota is the chairman of
the Metropolitan Transit Authority.
He says that the city's 14 submerged subway tunnels
are in jeopardy due to storm surge and rising seas.
-The subway system was built
over about 115 years ago now.
And when they opened it,
I don't think they ever envisioned the rising tides
that we're experiencing now in the 21st century.
Pretty much all of our tunnels were damaged.
Not just to the actual rail equipment
but to the side of the walls.
We had South Ferry station here in Lower Manhattan
that was pretty much brand-new, completely renovated
that was completely destroyed.
The water went all the way up to the steps,
its two stories below ground, it was completely flooded.
We need to rebuild the system.
-Dr. Klaus Jacob is a disaster-risk and climate expert
In 2011, he released a study
that warned it would only take a single superstorm,
combined with sea-level rise,
to flood and destroy the city's most vulnerable subway tunnels.
-We did the studies in close cooperation
with the engineering staff
of the Metropolitan Transit Authority,
whose subdivision runs the subway system.
Looking not only at the present,
but for the 2030s, 2050s, 2080s
and the end of the century.
Our focus really was climate change
and how would New York City adapt to that rising sea level
with storms superimposed on top.
Our results showed that the Achilles' heel of New York City
would be the subway system.
We had computed that it would take only about 40 minutes
to fill whatever can be filled.
But if you have six feet of water already in addition,
a city like New York City has no choice but to take action.
-The subway is just one of
several critical infrastructure assets
New York City has to protect
from rising sea levels and powerful storms.
-It's $7- to $8-billion problem.
It's not just the subways --
we also have numerous bridges and tunnels.
We also have the commuter rail lines,
Metro-North and the Lower Allen railroad
that we need to make resilient.
Because that's how people get to and from work,
to and from school.
They're the arteries that allow
the lifeblood of the metropolitan area
to stick together.
-New York's population is at its highest in history
and shows no sign of declining.
8.6 million people now call the five boroughs home
and that population has risen 5.5% since 2010 --
leading the state in population growth.
-I have looked at the evolution of New York City
over its 400 years of existence.
It has undergone so many mutations.
I mean, it did not look anything like it looks now.
Why should it look in 100 years anything like it looks now?
-Clues to the future challenges New York City faces
may be found in its past --
in urban development that started over 300 years ago.
-I remember getting a call from Bill
not that long after Hurricane Sandy,
and he asked if we have maps which show,
in a really dramatic fashion,
how the landfill in New York City
had an impact on the severity of the storm.
-My name is Bill Johnson.
In 2012, I was director of the state-wide mapping program,
part of the Division of Homeland Security & Emergency Services.
They were hoping that the maps would help them understand
the underlying issues related to the storm.
And so, we started thinking about
how we could help her with this work.
-My reaction to this kind of request was excitement
in that we had means to contribute
to helping the city become a more resilient place.
-We started thinking about overlays of aerial imagery
with historic maps.
-We had all of these maps here in digital format already
and we had them stretched over the same geographic grid
so that they lined up when we compared them.
-Those were the raw ingredients we needed.
We had an accurate representation
of everything that had changed
between 1609 and 2012 as evidenced in an aerial photo.
So, when we overlay this 1860 map on the 1767,
what's immediately apparent is
that there's a tremendous expansion.
Here's the 1767 shoreline I'm tracing with my finger.
So, all of this from here out to here is new.
We overlay that on the modern map of Manhattan,
and you can see how much of Lower Manhattan
is actually constructed on the man-made, reclaimed land.
-An area which was formerly undeveloped
is the scene of a project in which is employment is provided
for both skilled and unskilled workers.
A long bulkhead was built
to reclaim land from the waters of the bay.
-Almost four square miles of modern-day Manhattan
is built on landfill added all along the city's coasts.
-We took the Sandy storm-surge data and overlaid it on top
to see if there was alignment between the man-made lands
and where the flooding occurred from Sandy.
And what we can see
is that it very dramatically aligns with the man-made area.
What this really reveals
is that the flooding from superstorm Sandy
is largely man-made.
The flooding occurred largely as a result
of 400 years of human activity
that basically created a new floodplain.
And that floodplain is densely filled with
modern, urban infrastructure --
subway tunnels, power-plants --
and that's where we saw the damage
from flooding from Sandy.
-The reclaimed land Johnson identifies
is a critical part of the U.S. economy.
Banking, finance, technology, communication, insurance --
more Fortune 500 companies have offices here
than anywhere else on the planet.
-We are the financial capital of the country,
if not the world,
we are the center of arts and media.
Many of the media companies for this country,
if not the world, are headquartered here.
We have to get it right because of what we mean
to the economy of the country and the economy of the world.
And we need to do better.
-Despite dire warnings,
63% of New Yorkers who were under mandatory evacuation
stay put through Sandy.
Many stay because they have no choice.
-That's typical in a lot of the affordable neighborhoods
in New York City, and it's a stark contrast
to a lot of the other neighborhoods.
People just don't have the resources to leave.
They shelter in place
and they're used to sheltering in place
during the typical disasters that we've had in New York.
Where are they gonna go?
-The city has created new evacuation zones
that can accommodate 3 million New Yorkers.
-You don't want to put people's lives at risk.
You have hundreds of thousands of people,
if not millions of people affected
by the decision to evacuate.
It is costly as well.
You're opening shelters, there's an economic impact
but you have to say life safety is the most important thing.
There's certainly always going to be a challenge
with people making that decision --
do they want to leave their homes?
And the best thing you can do
is tell people you have to take this seriously.
-But evacuation is a band-aid solution
for a life-threatening problem --
rising sea levels that will make parts of the city
permanently uninhabitable,
unless innovative engineering can make a difference.
That takes political will.
-My name is Dan Zarrilli.
I'm the chief resilience officer
and the senior director for climate policy and programs
here in the mayor's office.
There's been a lot of activity to make sure that we are
more aware of what it means to live by the coast
and that sometimes you may get wet
but we're continuing to invest and make sure that
we are able to bounce back quicker from those events
and that we are building a stronger New York City
at the end of this.
The vulnerabilities aren't just something
that's going to show up in 100 years.
They're here, they're now,
and we need to invest to mitigate those risks
and that means that we're looking at a full range
of coastal-defense investments.
We're implementing them, new building code regulations,
new zoning code regulations, upgrading our infrastructure.
-In the search for solutions to save the city,
Dan Zarrilli has turned to the private sector.
-We are not an infrastructure-forward country
right now. -Vishaan Chakrabarti
is one of the architects and urban thinkers
who is tackling the problem head on.
-The last time we were was under President Eisenhower.
-The highway construction program initiated by Ike
is the biggest peace-time enterprise ever undertaken.
It will cost tens of billions. -That was the last time
this nation moved a quantum leap forward
in terms of its infrastructure and we haven't done it since.
-The elimination of waste spending
made a balanced budget possible. -As much as I love New York,
our biggest problem in my mind
is that we have substandard infrastructure
that's over 100 years old.
I think we really need to step back and holistically look at
all the infrastructure in the city.
Do we have train stations that function properly?
Do we have subways that can run in these situations?
In the world's richest country,
and the richest city of the world's richest country,
are we gonna say that we're not gonna do something about this?
-The question remains, does New York City really need
to spend huge sums on expensive mega-projects
to protect itself from rising sea levels?
The answer may lie in a vault in Massachusetts.
Historical records reveal evidence
of previous mega-storms in New York,
and researchers look for patterns to determine
if they are getting more frequent and worse.
-This is the sea-floor-samples lab.
It's a national archive of all the sediment cores
that have been taken over the last several decades.
-Jeff Donnelly is a senior scientist
at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
-There are samples from all over the world.
Tens of thousands of them.
We maintain this archive so that scientists can come
and resample cores that may have been taken
long before they were even born.
-These core-sediment samples
were taken by scientists in New York, dating back to 1721.
-One of the things that makes New York especially vulnerable
to hurricane strikes is the sort of shape of the coastline there.
You've got the bight
where New York and New Jersey come together.
As a storm comes up the eastern seaboard,
it's focusing water into that bight
and causing greater levels of storm surge.
-Just like tree rings can tell the story of climate change,
core-sediment samples offer clear signs
of powerful hurricanes across the past 300 years.
-You can see these really distinctive sand layers here
that are deposited within the salt marsh peat
and it's these layers that tell us about
the high-energy event that occurred,
so it's hurricane waves and storm surge
overtopping the beach
transporting the beach sand into the salt marsh.
We already had well-documented the 1821 hurricane
but didn't really have a very good modern analogue
for which we had modern measurements.
Hurricane Sandy provided an opportunity
to do a comparison with these earlier events.
We know from the documentary record that
the storm surge for 1821 was actually even higher than Sandy.
It was probably about 14, 15 feet worth of storm surge.
The 1821 hurricane hit
when sea levels were about two-feet lower.
-Every century, the city gets slammed.
-You don't even need the bigger and badder storm than 1821,
you have 1821 come back,
you've already gotta add two feet to that
just because of the sea-level rise that's occurred since then.
-Donnelly's findings confirm
superstorm Sandy was not the exception, but the rule --
common to every century.
In fact, the storm surge in 1821
was 1 1/2 times the height and strength of Sandy.
-They're more of an order of once every 70, 80, 100 years.
-New York's population then was just over 120,000 people --
most of whom did not live on the water's edge.
-In the next century, sea level is forecast to rise
at least three more feet, so you can imagine
how much more infrastructure and people are at risk
as every foot sea level rises.
-Donnelly's findings confirm
that New York has always been hit by hurricanes.
The next storm is coming, and more people than ever
will be living along New York's coasts when the city floods.
♪♪
This is how New York City's coast looked in 1821,
when the last mega-storm before Sandy hit --
stark, wild, flat and vulnerable.
It's a salt marsh in New Jersey, 20 miles from Manhattan.
♪♪
-It's interesting to know that sea level goes up and goes down
but if you want to correlate it with climate,
you need to know when.
-Horton and his team also use core-sediment samples
to research the prehistoric climate of New York.
But instead of focusing on the patterns of sand layers,
they look at microscopic organisms to determine
if sea levels have risen dramatically
in the prehistoric past.
-The four meters of sediment represents approximately
the last 2,000 years of Earth's history.
It's a nice sample.
We take these cores back
and we try and record precisely how sea level has changed.
Has it accelerated? Has it decelerated?
And then correlate those with changes in climate.
♪♪
The microfossils that we're looking at under the microscope
are single-cell organisms known as foraminifera.
Okay, let me have a look.
-Horton's looking for microscopic fossils
that come from the marsh when water is at its highest
and lowest.
The presence of these fossils
gives a clear picture of changing sea levels
across hundreds of years.
-So, based upon the changes in the abundance
of any individual species
tells you how sea level has changed through time.
-The research shows that for well over 1,500 years,
sea levels were stable.
200 years ago, that changed --
not coincidentally, with the Industrial Revolution.
-Beginning in the latter part of the 19th century
is where sea level accelerated.
When we correlate climate and sea level,
we see a near-perfect relationship --
whenever climate warmed, sea levels accelerated.
One of the fundamental questions
that, as climate scientists, we are asked is,
is the modern rate of change unprecedented?
We were able to show that
the rates of sea-level rise in the 20th and the 21st century
had not been seen for the previous 2,000 years.
The latest projections predict
that New York City would receive
an upper estimate of sea level of around two meters by 2100,
or around six feet.
We're living in a very, very unusual time.
We have a clear choice, and therefore we still have hope.
But if we don't make urgent action, then all bets are off.
-With a six-foot sea rise, according to Horton's research,
a full 280 square miles of New York will be lost forever,
a sunken city.
600,000 New Yorkers will lose their homes.
300,000 jobs will be displaced or lost.
The poorest will take the hardest hit,
with 12,000 public-housing units cut off by the sea.
The people working the problem on the ground
now seek solutions,
to rebuild and protect New York for the 22nd century.
This is what's called, the BIG U.
It's an ambitious megaproject
that would protect the $500-billion business sector
in lower Manhattan,
the epicenter of the American economy.
-My name is Kai Uwe-Bergmann.
-Uwe-Bergmann is an architect who leads the BIG U project.
-We have proposed 10 miles of contiguous flood protection
stretching from West 57th, 58th Streets
along the entire coastline
to the tip where Battery Park is right now,
and then back up the East River to the 30s.
That would protect all of the geography
that is currently below the flood line.
-The BIG U is a massive sea wall, in places 20-feet high,
that would protect the most vital business district
in the U.S. from sea-level rise of up to 15 feet.
Its surface would be primarily parkland,
with sports facilities, playgrounds,
and bike and walking paths
all along the 10 miles of coastline
it is designed to protect.
-In the case of New York,
there was a realization that climate change
is something that we need to address.
You can think of the BIG U as actually a giant gutter,
because it also is dealing with all of the rain
that's hitting the streets while a hurricane event
or a storm event is happening.
The BIG U has also a contiguous bike trail,
so if it were all built out, all 10 miles,
you could ride a bicycle for 10 miles
and never cross a street.
You could say that the coastline of Manhattan
is actually going from a working waterfront
to one that is about leisure,
it's about health and well-being
and making the waterfront accessible.
-The BIG U will be realized in stages,
the first being a 2.5-mile stretch on the Lower East Side.
The city has approved the plan, with a budget of $305 million.
Trever Holland lives in a neighborhood
the BIG U would protect.
As a lawyer and a resident,
he took part in meetings with the developers,
who say the project would protect Two Bridges
from the rising sea.
-This neighborhood has planning fatigue.
We've been to dozens of meetings.
Dozens of meetings about what we're gonna do.
We're gonna change this, we're gonna add this,
and a lot of those plans wind up on the shelves.
You go through this process of trying to figure out
a way to protect the neighborhood
and you wind up with a nice, big, glossy booklet
that sits on a shelf and nothing happens.
-That's not Holland's only problem with the BIG U.
-We fought so long to get access to the waterfront.
And now, one of the solutions that they're proposing
is to basically close it off.
We're gonna build 10-foot walls all made of concrete
and you'll be protected -- Good to go.
We've been asking "Is this the only solution?
Is there anything else, or are we just looking at walls?
I mean, what have other cities done?"
-Holland's not alone.
There are others who think the BIG U
is a step in the wrong direction.
-In Rotterdam, they are designing
underground parking garages,
so if they know a storm is coming,
they evacuate the cars and they build that parking garage
so that it can be a water-holding tank
that holds millions of gallons of water.
So that water doesn't go out into the community
and then when the water recedes,
they have a mechanism to pump the water out
of the parking garage.
The parking garage does double duty.
So, there are ways to design around these problems.
I don't think the answer is you're gonna retreat from
all of Lower Manhattan.
We have to figure out how to build things more resiliently.
-Geophysicist Klaus Jacob has other concerns.
-How high do you make those seawalls
before you are in a prison?
And that's not a sustainable solution.
-That's a dystopian picture.
It's just a wall.
And most of it, in fact, is just a concrete and rebar wall.
And I think that going in that direction
makes our cities more brittle.
It's so easy for that wall to break.
I mean, I worked in New Orleans for eight years. Walls break.
Unexpected things happen, a barge whacks up against it.
There's always something unexpected.
-Hill's greatest concern is that all walls
eventually have to come down.
She believes in building in layers,
with every generation contributing to
the work done by the last.
-A wall, that's rigid, that's fixed in place.
The design is only for that specific location.
We should spend that same amount of money
to put things in place that can be added to.
We need to build the foundation for future generations.
-Urban architect Pippa Brashear
agrees that living behind a wall is a future she cannot imagine.
-It's fundamentally gonna change the culture.
Is that the New York City we want to live in?
It's not the New York City I chose to live in.
One of my greatest fears for the future of New York City
is that we won't get past that protect question.
-I'm a little bit of a sceptic in anything that says,
"Oh, we're gonna keep the water out over here,"
because it's gonna go somewhere.
It was conceived of as a big giant wall.
And they might've said, "We're gonna put grass on it
so it'll look nice" but it's still a big giant wall.
This notion that we're just gonna build a giant fence
around New York City and keep this from happening,
is not either practical or, in some ways, ethical.
-It's anything but a dumb wall.
-Kai Uwe-Bergmann welcomes others
to come up with a better idea.
-It is going to be a place that a person can actually go,
inhabit, use 100% of the time
and then be reassured that it's actually protecting them
against the sea surges.
-He says a short-term radical solution
is better than none at all.
-I think the biggest risk is not doing anything.
Many of these communities have heard repeatedly
that something would be done,
and I think that the biggest fear is that another storm event
would come and flood them out of their homes again
and they have to deal with the loss.
-Broad Channel is a little island in Queens,
in the middle of Jamaica Bay.
It is a tiny place.
I don't think anybody ever heard of it...
unless you live in, you know, in the area.
I have talked to a lot of people that live, you know,
in Manhattan and they have no idea what Broad Channel is.
I've been here, you know, since I'm four years old.
The same neighbors I had as growing up
are the same neighbors I have today.
My wife was born in Broad Channel also.
Her whole family's from the town.
♪♪
-For years, Bassetti lived in a world
that somehow escaped change.
Then, about a decade ago,
high tides flooded the streets, even on sunny days.
-You just get used to it.
The high tide comes up, I gotta get my daughter to school.
"All right. Get on my back,"
and you piggy-back her up to the corner
to get her to school on time.
This was a full-moon high tide.
This picture is one of my favorites.
Day I was taking my son home from the hospital.
He was just born. He was three days old.
When you live in Broad Channel,
you take off your shoes and you carry him down the block.
That is total Broad Channel-living right there.
-Superstorm Sandy
turned the inconvenience into a catastrophe.
-You couldn't stop it.
There's nothing that could stop that water from coming in.
-Bassetti and his family evacuated to Brooklyn...
...and returned two days later.
-So, when I finally get to my house I go,
"Well, this ain't that bad."
Well, it didn't get bad
until we started doing the work, you know.
First, all right,
let's start throwing out everything that's wet,
you know, let's empty out underneath the sinks,
underneath the closets, let's get rid of these couches.
♪♪
-By the time they are done, there is nothing left to save.
Bassetti joined the city's Build It Back program.
With a whopping $2.2-billion budget,
Build It Back encourages homeowners and businesses
to rebuild higher and stronger,
more resilient against the rising seas.
The city has replaced over 1,400 homes,
repaired and reimbursed 6,500 more
with about 1,000 remaining under construction.
-Build It Back is raising the home for me.
They're raising the house 11 feet from where it started from,
which would put me a few feet above that national flood line.
I'm hoping I'm prepared enough.
I'm hoping my house is raised high enough
where the water comes in and I'm not affected.
But I...
Who knows? It's Mother Nature.
You can't predict what she's gonna do.
-Frank is one of thousands who are determined to defend.
He'll never leave.
-Never even crossed my mind.
This was a great place to grow up,
and I want my kids to have the same environment.
The house behind me is the house that I own.
-But there was a second option -- "managed retreat."
New York City and State also encouraged people
to stop investing in flood-prone areas
and leave the land to revert to its natural state.
600 homeowners took this buy-out including Frank Moszczynski.
-Ocean Breeze was pretty much fantastic.
It really was. It was paradise.
I miss everything about it, most is the people that we lost.
-Two of Moszczynski's neighbors
died here during superstorm Sandy.
-It was the ideal spot to put something just to say,
"Hey, we'll never forget ya."
Both in their 80s, pillars in their community,
great people, and just not supposed to die this way.
We had a typical white picket fence,
front porch right here,
and my house would be from right here, on back.
Paradise 364 days a year, until the day the storms came.
My house still had about three feet of water in it.
It was still on the foundation,
but it had been completely submerged.
So, it was...
devastation.
I did go inside, everything was turned upside down.
And I knew there was gonna be nothing,
nothing at all savable.
And that's when it really hit me.
Three hours and we don't own anything.
One of the neighboring areas on the east shore
started talk of a buy-out.
One day I received a call from the governor's representative,
"Congratulations, you were very successful...
your area has the option of the New York State buy-out."
-Homeowners received full market value
for their houses in exchange for leaving.
-They took the house down and as you can see,
we're standing here and there's just grass growing right now.
It's doing what it was supposed to --
going back to nature, and nature is slowly reclaiming it.
And the animals are coming back, too.
Some people decided to stay.
You know what?
It's America, so they have choice.
If they wanna put themselves in that predicament,
and their family, that's their choice.
-One bold engineering project
is giving the coastal communities of Staten Island
hope.
-What if we just look at this a whole new way,
look at the problem a new way and look for new solutions?
-Pippa Brashear is an urban planner and landscape architect.
She works with a team that believes the answer
is to stop trying to fight the sea,
but to learn to live with it and even harness it to do good,
not harm.
-The design project that ultimately came out of it
was our Living Breakwaters project.
The project is located on the southern tip of Staten Island.
It was really pummeled by waves during Sandy.
Our Living Breakwaters project,
it's a system of offshore breakwaters.
Each of the individual breakwaters range
from about 300-feet long to 450-feet long
and they are spaced along the shoreline
to really protect it from the most damaging waves.
The largest breakwaters that are positioned to really knock down
those large storm waves, they have to be tall enough
that they're still peaking above the top of the water when
you have those really elevated surge levels like Sandy.
And so those crest elevations are at about 14 feet
above main sea level.
-Rather than a continuous sea wall,
the breakwaters are a series of raised surfaces
that slow storm surge.
It's an old concept,
but the ecological element is a new twist.
-Much of the breakwaters will be made from stone,
but we're also using these
bio-enhanced concrete armor units
to help jumpstart the ecology.
The chemical content of the concrete
has been adjusted to attract organisms.
This is a scale model of one.
It's about half the size of what the actual armor units will be,
four feet by four feet.
One of the premises that we had
was we have to actually restore the environment.
Historic habitats, wetlands,
oyster reefs have been decimated.
Can we recreate that complex aquatic habitat,
to really build back this environment?
-I think the Living Breakwaters project is great.
It's something flexible.
If the rocks don't work right there, you move the rocks
or you make a new pile of rocks.
Those strategies we can actually do
and we can export them to other cities.
There are opportunities and, you know,
there always gonna be surprises,
like oysters on those breakwaters.
Well, when the ocean is more acid,
I don't know about oysters, but something will live on there.
-People are looking for ways to buy time.
-I'm not sure we can reverse it, but can we slow it down?
Yes, I think we can slow it down.
At least as far as the subway system and our commuter rails,
I'm committed to make them as resilient as possible
for what we can expect over the next 100 to next 200 years.
-Right now we have about 104 subway entrances
that we find that are critical facilities
that are in the floodplain.
We use flex gates, marine doors.
-I call them submarine doors.
They basically close each entranceway.
They get locked in place, they're very heavy doors,
each one weighs about 3,500 pounds.
-These can be deployed in relatively quick time
to prevent water from entering the subway system.
These are stop logs.
What happens is, these two beams get locked in place
with these pins.
They get locked in place
and then as these logs are stacked,
the pins slide into this beam
and as they get stacked to the top...
...this whole area then becomes watertight.
-Another innovation is an inflatable plug
made of Kevlar and waterproof fabric.
The plugs blow up like balloons
to block tunnels against flooding.
Made from the same materials as the airbags on the Mars rover,
strong enough to cushion the spacecraft
if it lands on rocks,
these tough balloons fill up with 35,000 gallons of air
in just three minutes.
But the airbags need to be perfectly packed and deployed
to provide a watertight seal.
-I don't think much of the plugs,
those round balls that get filled up with air
that will plug it and all of that.
You need something a little bit better than some kind of plastic
or polymer filled with air to be able to block the water.
As we all know, water is extremely strong and powerful.
-And at $400,000 each,
the city decides they are too expensive
to plug all 14 of their under-river subway tunnels.
-It's very, very important
that we recognize that climate change is real.
And if you don't want to recognize
that climate change is real,
we do have to recognize the sheer fact
that water seems to be rising.
So, what do we do to mitigate that
and what do we do to mitigate
the risks that are involved in that
so we can continue to operate?
Are we better off than others?
It's hard for me to know because I've not done a comparison,
but I do know that we're a lot better off today
than we were five years ago.
-The new Whitney Museum in the Meatpacking District
appears to be one of the most flood-resistant museums
in the country and perhaps the world.
It was built for the future,
designed to be resilient
against rising sea levels and storm surge.
Its loading dock is protected by a waterproof flood door,
designed and built by naval engineers.
The outer concrete wall was reinforced
to become 100% waterproof.
Like the subway, the museum also has a "stoplog system" --
a deployable barricade that can be installed
in just eight hours in advance of an approaching storm.
That doubles Sandy's storm surge height in Lower Manhattan --
but it's in line with future projections.
Urban architect Vishaan Chakrabarti
believes that the survival of New York
depends on designs like the Whitney.
It comes down to new buildings that can endure
the inevitable rising water that's coming its way.
-You make sure the building can flood,
which means that you get
all of the vulnerable mechanical equipment
out of the basement.
-We're in the west tower of the American Copper Buildings
here on the East Side of Manhattan.
This building is designed around the 100-year floodplain.
Our elevators and our mechanical systems,
our power service, our pumps...
Those are all above that elevation.
-You make sure that there's a generator in the building.
It can't power the entire building,
but it can power the elevators,
it can power at least one outlet in every apartment
so you can charge a cell phone, get information and so forth.
Have at least enough light to live,
maybe keep a refrigerator running.
-We're up here on the 48th floor of the west tower.
This should be our penthouse apartment.
Sweeping views all over the city.
King of the world type of apartment.
Instead, we have two megawatts of emergency power.
We decided we're gonna put the generators up here
because by sacrificing the square feet up here,
even though we'd be renting them
for upwards of $130 or $150 a foot,
we figured by not using those square feet as an apartment,
we make all the rest of the square feet in the building
that much more valuable.
Even when there's no commercial power in this building,
you would be able to live here.
-Those basic things can actually dramatically change
what happens during a storm,
because if big buildings are equipped to do that,
you then don't have this massive exodus of people
who are trying to get out of their homes
with flooded streets, first responders,
all the other things that are happening simultaneously
with that crisis.
It's not a very high-tech set of solutions.
It's actually a fairly low-tech set of solutions.
-The lobby is built above the estimated high water mark
for flooding.
Even so, the building is designed to flood.
And when the water recedes,
the damage is minimal
and residents can go right back to their lives.
-What's unique about this lobby is the material selection.
The floor is stone, the walls are concrete, steel, and stone.
The portals are all steel
and the wood feature that we wanted in the lobby,
is set off the wall so that it's actually a vented system.
So if it ever did get wet,
we wouldn't be doing any sort of demolition and replacement.
The expectation is that eventually
something will happen,
and the building will get wet.
-Vishaan Chakrabarti has
his own megaproject under construction in Brooklyn,
one of the most ambitious and resilient plans
in the history of the five boroughs.
-Domino Park is a 3-million-square-foot
new neighborhood that's being built on the waterfront
in Brooklyn.
-Domino is a mixed-used development
with 2,800 condo units, 1/4 of them affordable housing.
Its main feature is a huge, six-acre park,
a quarter mile along the waterfront.
-We just went out to the community and we were very open
and honest with people and said, you know, "Look,
this needs to be more resilient."
And so, one of the first moves we had made
during the master-planning process
was to pull the buildings back from the water
and actually make a bigger park.
That resulted in more climate resilience in the long term
because that park has a tremendous amount
of porous surface --
grass, plant material that will take on water.
So what happens is, when a storm hits,
it will both slow the energy of the storm
and absorb like a sponge a lot of the water
that's coming into the community.
It's also designed with a natural grade of the land
so when the storm recedes,
the water will recede back into the river more quickly.
-The buildings will also have office and retail space,
so many residents can stay put through a storm surge.
-Domino is it's an interesting model to really think about
how you build in the world that we're gonna be living in
in the next 100 years or so
in terms of flooding and sea level rise.
-Developers and the City now work together
to harden New York against the rising sea.
This might prevent incidents
such as the transformer explosion in Lower Manhattan,
during Sandy... -Oh [bleep]!
-...that left 200,000 people without power, heat or light.
-Our electric grid now has the benefit of
an additional billion dollars of hardening
that has been placed into the grid
to make sure the lights stay on the next time.
We're dealing with a very complex set of new projects.
They've never been done before.
First of its kind in such a dense urban environment
and we're moving them as quickly as we can.
I'm hopeful about New York's future
because of the ability that New Yorkers have shown
to adapt to any number of challenges
over its nearly 400-year history.
We're gonna be here, we're gonna work with the threats,
we're gonna adapt and this is gonna be a thriving city.
-Many will defend,
but some will be forced to retreat.
That is New York City's inevitable future.
-I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all answer
to whether we should build or not in the floodplain.
There's hundreds of thousands of people in New York City
that live in floodplains.
And I think there are probably some cases where
it just simply doesn't make sense,
where it's not just a floodplain,
it's a highly vulnerable floodplain.
Retreat, in that instance, might make sense.
-What this means for the future,
it means seawall or levy protections,
storm-surge barriers.
Or the city could encourage more building
in population on higher ground
and do things to try to discourage
or buy people out who are in these low-lying flooded areas.
-There are some clear statistics out there
that for every dollar we invest in risk reduction
that there's a $4 avoided future cost.
Sandy was a $19-billion event
in terms of damages and lost economic activity.
From the risks of climate change,
that same event in the 2050s could be a $90-billion event.
-I think we have to prepare for the unexpected
and what that means is, how do you create a city
that can recover from any number of tough things happening to it,
whether it's a flood or a tornado or a terrorist attack.
Cities are vulnerable, cities have always been vulnerable.
Cities also have this extraordinary way
of being resilient and building back.
And so to me, it's always about the basics --
mobility, power, water.
Fixing this is not rocket science. Right?
It's simply a question of will.
-Urban engineering will be the determining factor
in just how New York faces its next great challenge.
It's a transformation that has to happen if it is to survive,
and even thrive, when the water comes.
-We have the situation that about 1 million more people
are expected to move to New York City
by the year 2030.
In addition, waterfront is still considered
the most desirable real estate,
which is a notion from the past
that doesn't hold for the future.
-If we're really going to adapt to climate change,
it's about behavior change, it's about us all thinking about
living with water differently.
And being willing to change and adapt over time.
-This is our home, and we want to keep it our home
and we want it to be a home for our children
and our grandchildren as well.
So, now's the time to start dealing with the problem.
-And I think if we do that, this city,
which is one of the greatest cities in the world,
will continue to be for a long, long time.
-Next time on "Sinking Cities"...
-Tokyo is like the Rolls-Royce of city and engineering.
It has most of the high-tech system
that you can find in the world.
♪♪
-Even though we have been trying our best,
I don't think we can say
that we are fully prepared for disasters.
-If you start to have a major flood on Tokyo,
we all going to pay.
-[ Speaking Japanese ]
-Tokyo is defenseless against such rainfall.
[ Indistinct shouting ]
♪♪
-To order "Sinking Cities" on DVD,
visit ShopPBS
or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.
This program is also available
on Amazon Prime Video.
♪♪