New York City Is on the Verge of Disaster | Hacker News Reader

New York City Is on the Verge of Disaster

mattstoller.substack.com

57 points1PlayerOne20 comments

This is a beautiful example of why there is a natural frequency to preventable disasters.

In the aftermath of a preventable disaster, there is will to implement policies and changes to prevent the next one. However the longer it has been since the last, or the safer things seem, the harder it is to maintain those policies. This slide will continue until disaster strikes. Which creates political will to avoid it.

A first disaster may be side by those with influence. But a series of them will undermine their excuses and eventually result in action. Action prevents disaster. Disaster prevention creates complacency and the cycle starts again.

There is no question that we have staved off infrastructure disaster for a long time. And it is just a question of time until the piper comes due...again.

I agree and an important question is what is a good strategy to mobilize action in advance of disaster. The news is full of warnings about impending disasters. (Most) people can't evaluate the relative risk of each of these events, so the natural response is to be overwhelmed and assume we will deal with it when/if it occurs. I don't know if it would have much of an effect on how inclined readers would be to act, but articles like this one would be a lot more compelling if they included real data that demonstrates NYC is at a greater risk than it has been in the past or than other similar cities around the world.

The outage in Midtown was somewhat of a freak thing. And if you look at the math around it, in a city of 8 million ~70k customers without power for ~5 hours. That's incredible.

Is ConEd's network the best? No, there are always improvements that can be made. There is a lot of aging infrastructure that has been replaced and upgraded as a result of Sandy. And to be clear, I think the response to Sandy was unacceptable to ConEd management, not just the union(s).

The engineering of the Manhattan network (and the Brooklyn network) is pretty amazing. It's the reason that when there are power outages, they are usually shorter and affect fewer customers.

I am reminded of the response to Hurricane Ike in Houston. There were people there in relatively lightly hit areas that went without power for 3+ weeks.

I think food is the scariest of these. A collapsed tunnel/bridge is a tragedy that will scar lots of people, but society as a whole keeps moving. And people can adapt to loss of electricity on its own. Yes there will be deaths from the elements, failed emergency systems, as well as an increase in crime. But food supplies totally disappearing is when the full chaos begins, especially someplace like NYC where people don't typically have space for a few weeks of canned food.

“Every society is three meals away from chaos” - Vladimir Lenin

I don't know if this is a true quote, but food isn't that important in the short run, compared to water and sewage.

(insert comment about overweight Americans here)

Maybe NYC can learn from other countries. Train costs:

https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/spain-high-speed-train-toro...

Which links to https://pedestrianobservations.com/2011/05/16/us-rail-constr...

Edit: 2019: https://pedestrianobservations.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/c...

Honestly my first thought is this is nothing compared to the PGE and SCE blackouts in California which last for days at a time.

America's infrastructure as a whole seems to be on the verge of collapse.

Our electrical grids are decades old and cannot support the number of people we now have, nor their increasing power demands. Our roads are cracking, and our bridges are crumbling. In the few locations we do have trains, they're old, diesel-powered, and poorly maintained.

As a nation, we steadfastly refuse to invest in boring-but-necessary things that would dramatically improve the lives of average people.

It's because those thing require taxes, and taxes are evil/theft/waste.

Maybe that we get 10x less infrastructure for every dollar spent has something to do with it.

We can't afford to fix infrastructure, we blew it all on tax breaks for the super-rich, who are spending it all on buying private islands for when the society they ruined inevitably collapses.

Water, no one is (well, some are) talking about water. I have worked in that part of the industry on the industrial controls side. I can tell you that the problems we are seeing with power are right in line with the issues we are seeing in water and sewer.

We really need to reinvest in public infrastructure.

House passes ‘progressive’ defense bill, $738 billion for the Pentagon.

The concern about the train tunnel seems a bit overblown to me. The busiest route in the country? Maybe, but I bet most of it is passenger trains. If the tunnel fails, NYC won't starve. People just won't be able to commute to and from New Jersey by rail, or to take a train to Philadelphia or DC. That's inconvenient, maybe even somewhat disruptive, but not catastrophic.

Wouldn't the failure also kill a lot of people?

It might. It would depend on when it failed, and how it failed, and whether there was any advance warning. That in turn could depend on the competence and diligence of the inspectors, and whether management listens to them (or can be forced to listen). But yes, it's certainly possible that it could kill several hundred people. Probably not much more than that (I think).

Still not in the same category as the city running out of food - not by a long shot. And the tunnel could kill zero.

That's a good point.

What I was trying to say is that, in my opinion, even several hundred people being killed would constitute a catastrophe.

I also think that the scenario of New York running out of food has a number of factors that make the worst case scenario less likely:

- A scenario where emergency food supplies cannot be brought in suggests that there is some sort of systemic failure country wide. In that case I'm not sure that there's any strategy that can account for the collapse of society.

- It likely wouldn't be possible to evacuate everyone and a panicked evacuation would cause some deaths. However, it is still likely that many people could be evacuated.

- At the point where supply lines break down, there would still be a few days of food already in the city, most people would probably go a few days without food before they started major rioting, and it would likely be a couple weeks before people started starving.

Overall, I agree with you that a major interruption to New York's food supply would likely cause deaths. However, unless society itself has collapsed, I think it's unlikely that it descends into a Mad Max scenario.

Try coming to California...

"Eat your heart out NY"!

Anyone got any good recipes?

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