[Marxism] The looming disaster beneath my feet

[Louis Proyect]

(This article argues that Columbia University's Manhattanville expansion 
risks New Orleans/Katrina type flooding. My building is the advance 
guard of this expansion.)


http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-10-01/news/everyone-listens-to-columbia-s-disaster-expert-mdash-except-columbia-itself/

Columbia's Disaster Expert
When Klaus Jacob talks, important people take action. Except the 
important people paying him.
By Elizabeth Dwoskin

Columbia geophysicist Klaus Jacob is such a highly regarded expert on 
urban environmental disasters related to climate change that governments 
and scientists all over the world take him seriously, revising building 
codes and altering the construction of dams as a result of his warnings.

When Jacob talks, important people take action.

Except, it turns out, at his own place of employment, where he's spent 
almost 40 years as a research scientist.

Jacob tells the Voice that he's repeatedly been given the brush-off by 
Columbia officials regarding his specific and detailed warnings that 
their ambitious development plans in Harlem could lead to a wide-scale 
disaster.

Much has been written about the university's plans to spread northward 
across 17 acres of developed land—but Jacob is concerned less about the 
school's move outward than he is about something that's garnered less 
attention: Columbia's intention to dig deep into the ground.

Expansion plans call for the largest underground complex in the city, a 
massive, 80-foot-deep basement that will extend only a block from the 
banks of the Hudson River. That's an underground space large enough to 
hold an eight-story building, lying only a few hundred feet from water 
that's susceptible to storm surge.

Imagine this scenario, based on Jacob's research: It's the year 2065, 
and Columbia University's 17-acre West Harlem expansion is abuzz with 
activity. Students hurry through rainfall along a tree-lined promenade 
overlooking the Hudson. In a biotechnology lab nearby, scientists are 
engineering lethal pathogens to respond to the next generation of 
infectious diseases and bioterrorist threats. Deep down below, 
engineering majors use the future version of Facebook to instant-message 
their friends.

Warnings, meanwhile, are steadily being broadcast about an oncoming 
storm. A Category 2 hurricane with 110-mile-an-hour winds is barreling 
down on the city—a more frequent occurrence than in decades past. New 
Yorkers have become familiar with the drill: They evacuate to local 
shelters set up by the city's Office of Emergency Management. Over 
several hours, the Hudson rises 10 feet, flooding the waterfront 
promenade and the rest of the campus. Many, but perhaps not all, have 
heeded warnings to leave the deep basement. Damage will be extensive and 
exorbitantly expensive. And some of the sprawling labs that contain 
biohazardous material may become another kind of floating threat to the 
city.

Sounds like the plot of some sci-fi disaster movie. But without the 
kinds of precautions that Jacob has been urging Columbia to take, he 
says, the prospect of inundation is all but inevitable.

This is how seriously officials—at least those outside of Columbia—take 
Klaus Jacob's research: When he was conducting the first national study 
on the environmental impact of climate change in major East Coast cities 
for the Clinton administration, he consulted with the Port Authority and 
the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to help the agencies 
understand how to prevent floods. In the early '90s, his research on 
earthquakes led the city to ask him to help rewrite its building code. 
That code was later adopted nationwide. Now he's working with the 
Transportation Research Board—a branch of the National Research 
Council—to issue federal guidelines on how cities can protect themselves 
from environmental disasters related to global warming.

"We're working with the Transportation Research Board in Washington," 
says Jacob. "And yet, here I'm trying to convince my own alma mater to 
do the right thing, and I can't. And that's bad news."

After trying for four years to get university officials to respond to 
his concerns, Jacob says he's now given up and is willing to talk 
publicly about that struggle for the first time. In a few months, New 
York's Empire State Development Corporation will decide whether to give 
Columbia the right to use eminent domain to force a few remaining 
business owners that stand in the way to give up their properties. That 
decision is the last major hurdle before the university can break 
ground—when West Harlem officially becomes "Manhattanville."

In 2004, when Jacob first heard that his employer was planning to expand 
from 125th Street to 133rd Street across two avenues, he asked to see 
the plans. At the time, he and his wife Isabella lived in faculty 
housing on 125th Street at Riverside Drive, so he went to an open house 
not only for professional reasons, but also as an interested 
neighborhood resident. (He has since moved upstate.)

He says the first thing he noticed about the building plans, as they 
were presented at the time, was that the effects of global warming 
weren't being taken seriously. In fact, they weren't being taken into 
account at all.

The plans didn't include floodgates, dikes, or levee systems, but Jacob 
knew that sea levels in New York are expected to rise between two and 
three feet—perhaps more—by the end of this century. That sea-level rise 
will shift the area expected to be flooded during a hurricane storm 
surge. As a result, Columbia's expansion site, Jacob believes, is 
located squarely in a future flood zone.

To make matters worse, the likelihood of hurricanes hitting New York 
will also rise with the sea level. There's a current probability of 1 in 
100 that a storm will hit the city in any given year. That number could 
grow to 1 in 10 by the year 2100, according to a widely publicized 
report issued last year by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The expansion plans so worried Jacob that he decided it was his 
professional responsibility to tell someone about it. As he attended 
public presentations of the plans, he took down the names of the people 
in charge of each aspect of the project. Armed with those names, he 
composed a letter on May 4, 2004, and mailed copies to Columbia vice 
president Mark Burstein, four additional university officials, and some 
of the project architects at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

Attaching a topographical map to the letter, Jacob wrote that the 
portion of Upper Manhattan at issue in the expansion plans is located in 
a valley with low elevations. (This is vividly demonstrated if you 
travel north on Broadway past Columbia's campus: As you go steeply 
downhill, you'll see the No. 1 train emerge from the ground and continue 
on a trestle for several blocks before re-entering the tunnel.) In his 
letter, Jacob outlined the most current climate-change research on New 
York's flooding potential. He also wrote that the expansion site might 
be vulnerable to an earthquake, but he has since dropped those concerns, 
saying that subsequent engineering plans have resolved that issue.

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