How Boston is rethinking its relationship with the sea | Hacker News Reader

How Boston is rethinking its relationship with the sea

bbc.co.uk

65 pointswarbastard27 comments

Yea... so as a Bostonian this will never happen. There are cheaper options like dropping a flood-wall out in the middle of the harbor.

If anyone thought the Big Dig was a clusterfuck then they have seen nothing if this vision became a reality... the idea of turning the Back Bay into a series of canals... an area built on landfill and poorly documented about where infrastructure is located along with tons of historic residential architecture is going to cost many times more money. Not to mention the Back Bay neighborhood association, which is probably the most powerful neighborhood associations in the United States due to a combination of power and wealth would throw a nutty (and rightfully so).

The big dig was not nearly as poorly executed as you might assume, digging in the middle of a major city is simply rediculusly expencive.

IMO, the best option is to simply raise buildings following the Chicago model. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago. A major advantage being you don't need to worry about flood control measures failing. It's not like the buildings are actually worth all that much it's 90% pure land value with a token for the structure. (Aka move the same building to the middle of an Iowa cornfield and suddenly there not so valuable.)

Either it was poorly executed or disingenuously planned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig

'The Big Dig was the most expensive highway project in the U.S. and was plagued by escalating costs, scheduling overruns, leaks, design flaws, charges of poor execution and use of substandard materials, criminal arrests,[2][3] and one death.[4] The project was originally scheduled to be completed in 1998[5] at an estimated cost of $2.8 billion (in 1982 dollars, US$6.0 billion adjusted for inflation as of 2006).[6] However, the project was completed only in December 2007, at a cost of over $14.6 billion ($8.08 billion in 1982 dollars, meaning a cost overrun of about 190%)[6] as of 2006.[7] The Boston Globe estimated that the project will ultimately cost $22 billion, including interest, and that it will not be paid off until 2038.[8] As a result of the death, leaks, and other design flaws, the consortium that oversaw the project agreed to pay $407 million in restitution, and several smaller companies agreed to pay a combined sum of approximately $51 million.[9]'

I don't think they did a good job, but your cost estimates are rather divorced from reality. Inflation is a poor way to measure projects like this. Construction costs in the short term are only loosely coupled with overall inflation. Consider the just price of copper: http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/copper.aspx?timeframe=10y Though most construction raw materials had similar price swings.

Anyway, the project finished in 2007 amid a huge housing boom in the US which significantly increased costs. A well managed project could have probably been ~30% cheaper, but the much of the "190%" over run was well outside the projects scope.

For comparison the hover dam is generally thought of as a well executed project despite ~98 directly related fatalities during construction. IMO, we have become vary critical of large construction projects in large part because rebuilding infrastructure is simply far more complex than clean slate construction in the middle of the wilderness, and even worse it negatively impacts peoples lives during construction. Especially in places like HN considering how few software projects are on time and under budget.

I can't find the answer with Google, but maybe someone here knows.

During the raising of Chicago, how did they get the jackscrews under the buildings in the first place? Especially those (presumably) positioned in the interiors (as opposed to edges) of the buildings?

I think they go into the basement, as they do when raising buildings today. I don't know what they'd do for buildings without basements.

But, presumably, you want to put the jacks where the structural walls of the basement already are? Is this not the case, or is the basement dug away piecemeal as jacks are inserted?

America has gotten pretty bad at tunneling, and it's much more expensive here than in Spain or France.

Madrid buried its M30 high for far less money: http://www.roadtraffic-technology.com/projects/m30_madrid/ Note that the project included two contracts that included >4km highway tunnels, neither of which cost more than $1B USD.

There were differences, of course. But read up on American tunneling costs versus those in Asia or non-English-speaking Europe, if you want to better understand why we can't have nice things.

  But read up on American tunneling costs

Where? I'm kind of interested as to why it's so much more expensive here (other than the obvious labor cost and probably-more-stringent safety regulation)?

Corruption.

http://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/06/06/study-corrupt-states-s...

"According to research published in the journal Public Administration Review, states with higher levels of public corruption spend more money on highways and construction. The study found highway and construction projects and police programs provide the most opportunities for lawmakers to enrich themselves, according to Governing Magazine, and are positively correlated with state levels of corruption. Meanwhile, highly corrupt states also spend relatively less on health, education, and welfare — categories that were less susceptible to graft and bribery, the report found."

Interesting how Texas and North Carolina managed to avoid the corruption endemic in their neighbors. In the case of Texas, though, there is plenty of localized corruption. Dallas proper and its southern suburbs are dirty as shit. The northern suburbs, not so much. I get the impression Massachusetts has something similar, with Boston metro being far more corrupt than the rest of the state.

And Spain isn't corrupt?

I didn't say it wasn't. The data from the link I posted only had US data.

One difference (though I won't venture a guess for what % of the cost difference it account for) is that the U.S. has a much more drawn out and less final decision-making process. The national legislature passes very general laws, like the Clean Water Act, and charges an administrative agency with implementing them, and the courts with interpreting them and resolving disputes over what they mean. States do something similar. A city that wants to do something like build a metro line must therefore pass a series of these general requirements. They do things like prepare environmental impact statements, noise-abatement statements, seek EPA and other agencies' approval of plans, seek state approval of plans, etc. Various stakeholders or members of the general public can challenge these plans at each stage (sometimes up to a dozen or so agencies may be involved). If the plans make it through that stage, such people can then sue in state or federal court, using any of these dozens of laws, looking for an injunction to halt construction, modifications to the plans, etc. The end result of all this is a lot of delay and expense, even apart from any actual construction issues.

In many other countries the process is somewhat more legislative. A city proposes a metro line, and seeks the direct approval of higher levels of government: there are discussions, hearings, and then the plans are passed into law. Once the plan is law, then it's law: the legislature is presumed to have weighed the pros and cons and made the decision, so you can usually no longer challenge it on environmental grounds, noise-pollution grounds, or anything else, because that power is not delegated to agencies or courts.

In short: the U.S. both has a lot more layers of government (city, transit district, county, state, national), and delegates much more case-by-case decision-making power to administrative agencies and courts.

My impression was the big dig succeeded spectacularly at its goal: it was a machine to pump massive amounts of federal funds into Boston. As a nice side effect they also built some roads/tunnels/etc.

now they just have to fix the damn green line

olympics bid when?

It'd be nice to know in exactly what capacity this was discussed.

The article just says that "architects, developers, real estate experts and business owners were brought together in May to discuss ways of preserving the city's buildings in this watery cityscape of the future".

Who set this up? Were canals a serious suggestion with a reasonable amount of support, or just thrown out as a possibility during a brainstorming-type exercise?

I was under the impression that in places like Amsterdam, canals were useful historically because people didn't have motor vehicles so they were a highly effective way to move goods around town (and to/from remote farms, towns and cities via rivers like the Amstel and IJ, other canals, and the sea).

Today, while extant networks may remain quite decorative and interesting, urban canals seem unlikely to be used for any purpose other than high-end recreation / tourism, and the article does not address any way they'd be directly useful for flood control. It's not even made clear they'd really assist in keeping seawater out of peoples' homes and businesses.

I was under the impression that the canal networks in the Netherlands were similar to the South Florida Water Management District's canal system. The primary purpose of the network is to prevent southern Florida from reverting to swampland, which is the natural tendency due to the geology, geography, and weather patterns. Since much of the coastal Netherlands is in a similar situation, I always assumed the canals were primarily for moving water to the North Sea without flooding out the low-lying areas.

That may be the case for de kanalen, but I don't think it explains de grachten -- that is, the Netherlands has canals criss-crossing the countryside which might accomplish flood control purposes, but when there are canals in between every other city street, that's another matter.

Either way, the article failed to explain :)

(Fun fact: the word "gracht", Dutch / Nederlands for street-canal, uses the voiced velar fricative, a sound which English eschews. Good luck pronouncing it right. :b)

Somewhat worrying that the people in charge of protecting Boston from flooding would waste their time on such an obviously impractical and pointless idea.

Even if Boston already had canals they would still need to build surrounding flood protection systems just like Venice and Amsterdam. So why build the canals?

Interior canals can actually make flooding more likely as New Orleans learned when breaks along canals were responsible for flooring the city after Katrina. The solution - as a everywhere else - was beefed up perimeter defenses not more canals. Canals just make the problem harder and the risks greater. Why build a system to deliver vast quantities of water to the center of a city?

The real problem with building reliable flood protection is that it is impossible to fully test and may not be tested by nature for a very long time. This requires sustained effort by level headed engineers and planners not politically motivated dreamers.

I share your skepticism, but there's one thing you might be overlooking.

Canals can act as a buffer in case of heavy rainfall. This requires the canals not to be connected to open water. In anticipation of heavy rainfall you would pump water out of the canals, into open water (sea). The canals can then act as a temporary buffer for excess rainwater. True, this wouldn't help against dike-breaks.

Related to this: in Holland there are many farmlands in the proximity of rivers that are designated as buffers like these. When necessary, they let these farmlands run full of water in a controlled way to prevent downriver cities from flooding.

> This requires the canals not to be connected to open water. In anticipation of heavy rainfall you would pump water out of the canals, into open water (sea).

Not necessarily. The South Florida Water Management District canals ultimately drain directly into either the ocean or the Everglades. The canal network has a series of flood locks and pumps, though, which can be used to manipulate water levels and force water to flow faster or slower than it would naturally.

Municipal drainage along the coast in southern Florida is also connected directly to the ocean. In that case as well the drainage system is augmented by high-capacity pumps to force the water out of the system and into the ocean. The municipal green spaces act as the buffers if the pumps cannot keep up with the rainfall.

I don't understand how this will keep the houses from flooding. Creating some canals won't lower the sea levels and keep buildings from flooding.

The feat of engineering to create the Back Bay is impressive by itself. Just a matter of time before more changes are needed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Bay,_Boston#History

This article cherry-picks one idea among many. A better article:

http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/09/29/venice-charle...

Here's my pie in the sky plan. We'll send all the excess water from melted icecaps to mars for terraforming purposes.

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