Shore Dwellers Expendable
Dear Editor,
Our mayor certainly wants to be proven right. He now wants to correct the mistakes that were made with Hurricane Sandy. He also tried to correct the mistakes that were made with Hurricane Irene. The end result was that tens of thousands of people were traumatized, frozen, and starved. The cost of two storm surge barriers would be $10 billion. If they had been in place, Sandy would not have destroyed the housing in Staten Island facing the ocean, it would have not left people in the dark and cold when the Con Ed transmitter exploded, it would have stopped flooding on the East River and on the Hudson. How many times will we be able to go to Washington and get $50 billion? It is a fact that there will be sea level rises and that storms will be more frequent and more severe. Climate Central, a group of Princeton scientists, claims that we will have another storm, probably larger than Sandy, by the year 2100 when it is expected that the sea level will be five feet higher. In the meantime, we will have our annual flooding which can be prevented by the storm surge barriers. It makes much more sense and is much cheaper to build two storm surge barriers of less than a total of ten miles than levees and berms that would have to protect over 500 miles of waterfront, inlets and streams.
Robert Trentlyon
Bob Trentlyon has had a career as publisher of various community newspapers, including
The Villager. He has been on many NYC task forces, including the West Side Task Force,
which recommended the creation of the Hudson River Park.
