This morning we had some rain in New York City. Yeah, it rained hard.
But the entire transit system basically failed.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/08/08/nyc.weather/index.html

3 Inches of rain. Moderate winds.

The great hurricane of 1938
http://www.geocities.com/hurricanene/hurr1938.htm
was a massive disaster, and at the time, the population of Long Island was much smaller.

http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/38hurricane/hurricane_climatology.html

That's worth worrying about.

I don't remember ever hearing thunder that loud before. It was crazy, I was glad to be in bed & not outdoors during this storm.

Indeed, my normally 35 minute commute took over two hours this morning.

The real trouble to me was not the breakdown in the transit system. I am willing to be understanding of the fact that a 100 or so year old system will have failures under stress. The problem was the total lack of information available to help make informed decisions.

There was no way to know what was going on or how big a problem it was while actually on the trains. Transit workers gave no information, and police officers gave information that was wrong more often than not.

I saw at least one person collapse in the subway from the heat. Bystanders offered water and fanned her with whatever was available, while waiting for EMS.

All-in-all not our finest day in NYC. Makes me give more thought to how I'd get home in an emergency, and confirms that bugging out from NYC would be nearly impossible.

I am not surprised. Here in San Franciso, the light rail system slows to a crawl whenever it rains. It's never perfect, but it is even more frustrating to be waiting for (delayed) trains out in the rain . . .

Yeah - it was a joke, and the Pt Washington Branch of the LIRR went down again

NYC has NOT been maintaining it's infrastructure. The MTA says "we can only pump that the sewers can handle". One HUGE issue is that we keep letting people build up areas - but we DON'T upgrade the infrastructure

Last summer there was a 2 week long blackout in Northwestern Queens. They blame it on various things, but one of hte big issues is - if you rip down 1 family houses, and replace them with apartments for 6 families, you NEED more infrastructure (Look at Flushing Queens thank you)

The problem is the city, the utilities and the developers ALL don't want to upgrade the utlities - heck that costs MONEY - but the developers keep talking the city into taking lots zoned for a 1 family house, and rezoning for multi family

I know some of the city's hurricane plans (got to sit in on OEM meetings a couple of years back) - They are relying on things like public transit to clear the low lying areas in South Brooklyn and South Queens. Yeah right, as today, and the storm of 2 weeks ago prove

The NIGHTMARE scenario is called "The Hudson Bight" scenario - picture a storm as big as the storm of 1938, moving as FAST as the storm of 38 (which went from south of Florida to Long Island in less than 24 hours) but instead of the storm hitting basically in Suffolk, the EAST wall of the eye comes right up the Hudson River. You get maximum storm surge, the way the west wall hits land, the storm starts to break up right over NYC - so you get the most wind AND the most rain, NJ and Westchester get totally flooded, so there is NO way to get rescue supplies to NYC from the west until the flooding goes down (remember folks, except for The Bronx, all of NYC is on islands)

Folks - you think NO was bad? The whole city there was 600K people. Picture 1 MILLION homeless in NYC alone, plus major problems in NJ, the counties right above NYC, and a LOT more in Nassau and Suffolk

The ONE good thing - the NYC water supply does NOT require electric to work (unless you live above the 6th floor) - so we will almost definately have water, and MOST of the city will self drain when the storm surge ends

A BAD thing is it is estimated that NYC has no more than 72 hours of food anywhere in the city, at any time - aka not only the stores, but the werehouses

A good point is that rescue supplies can be brought in by ship/barge - the bad news is that it might be the only way to bring stuff in, and the Atlantic right after a major storm is probably NOT someplace you want to be

Minor quibble. 3 inches of rain in less than an hour, and while no hurricane, at least one tornado. But you're right, there are much larger storms in NYC's future this century, and this doesn't bode well.

Thanks for the enlightening links. My nephew is going to school there, and I keep telling him to occasionally pull his head out of the books and watch the news, especially the weather report.

I have often wondered about the NYC water supply in an emergency. I have always been under the impression that our water in gravity fed from the Catskills up to the sixth floor as well, but I don't know where I heard that. I know that the water has kept flowing through every power failure I can think of.

How secure do you think the NYC water supply is during a major natual disaster? I have not given much though to storing significant drinking water in my preps, as I do believe that our water supply is robust. Is this unwise?

Of course, it is unlikely that a hurricane would take me completely by surprise, so I guess I could fill containers as the storm approached, but that would require having containers handy. . .

"...I do believe that our water supply is robust..."

I don't live in NYC, thank God, but imagine an earthquake, or underground steam explosion like you had a short time back, taking out YOUR water line...

95% of the water that is delivered to NYC from the Catskill/Delaware Watershed and the Croton Watershed is gravity-fed, so that's a good thing. The Croton water system was built back in the 1800's! Mechanical breakdowns, power outages within NYC, and high fuel costs don't impact that part of the system as much as in other cities that require a lot of pumping.

I'm not sure if water mains pressure alone is enough to refill rooftop water tanks, though, without the assistance of pumps. So, during a longer power outage, if you lived on a higher floor that generally relies on rooftop water tanks to maintain adequate pressure within the building, you may eventually "run out of" water on the higher floors because the rooftop tank finally ran dry and the water main pressure alone is not enough to push water to your floor.

Then again, during Queen's extended power outage last summer, I don't recall reading any news stories about people in taller apartment buildings have their taps run dry on higher floors, so I could be wrong. Hmm, or maybe those buildings all had non-electric backup pumps?

The NYC Water Supply is a marvel of engineering. The history of thw water supply dates back to 1677. The Chase Manhattan Bank is, in a roundabout way, connected to the first public water supply system.

Today, the Catskills remain as the source of water for NYC.

http://nyc.gov/html/dep/html/drinking_water/maplevels_wide.shtml

Fed by gravity, the system is capable of supplying billions of gallons of water every day.

That's the key, though. It's a gravity fed system.

So, that's why you see lots of these in NYC:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lintbrush/145275022/

Those tanks are used to deal with water supplies in buildings taller than about 6 stories, but in some places, they are needed for any water at all, because of the elevation of the terrain relative to the water supply.

In short, you should have water on hand. In an apartment, this is REALLY REALLY hard to do. One thing that I used to do when I lived in Manhattan in a tiny place on 25th street was to use plastic 2 liter seltzer bottles in the back of the closet. You can actually get some decent amounts of water in multple bottles.