New York City | La Capital del Mundo | The Capital of the World

[ygoJavier]

Muy buenas fotos ElVoltageDR estan espectaculares

[crasho]

Estas fotos las tome hace dos años:

The Chrysler Building desde el mirador del Empire State Building



Manhattan desde mi habitación de hotel



Ground Zero



La Estatua de la Libertad



Times Square de Noche: aunque esta salio borrosa, pero la quiero compartir



Pondre mas despues!!!!

[K-Bien]

He aquí otras fotos. Estas las tomé en mayo del 2005 desde el barco que circunnavega a Manhattan. El tour es muy bueno, pero lo malo fue que tomó como tres horas y hacía un frío insoportable.

[Dreamliner]

Home Sweet Home ...Thanks for the pics!

[Bori427]

No estas en Barcelona?

[Dreamliner]

No chico, llegue en mayo. Ahora "the better half" viaja aca. Regreso a España para enero.

[crasho]

Voy a revivir este tema trayendo esta noticia:

Llega a los 100 años el Puente de Manhattan
Los celebrarán hoy con un festejo en Nueva York

Por EFE / -

Nueva York (EFE) - La ciudad de Nueva York celebra este fin de semana el centenario del Puente de Manhattan, una de sus principales vías de comunicación, pero que a lo largo de su historia ha quedado eclipsado por la belleza del cercano Puente de Brooklyn.

Fuegos artificiales, desfiles, paseos a pie y en bicicleta, y varias exposiciones servirán hoy para conmemorar los cien años de la que podría ser una de las construcciones más emblemáticas de Nueva York, aunque siempre ha sido visto como el “hermano pobre” de los otros puentes que cruzan el East River.

El más joven de los tres imponentes puentes que sirven como nexo de unión entre Manhattan y el barrio de Brooklyn se abrió al tráfico en 1909, 26 años después de que se inaugurara el Puente de Brooklyn, situado más al sur y a la sombra del que su construcción de acero ha envejecido sin mucho esplendor.

Los neoyorquinos lo han mirado siempre, más que como una estructura emblemática, como una mera arteria de comunicación, ya que por sus más de dos kilómetros de distancia pasan miles de automóviles, además de otros tantos usuarios de los trenes de cuatro líneas del sistema público de metro de la ciudad.

El puente, además, no ha llamado tanto la atención a los artistas como sus construcciones vecinas, con lo que sus apariciones cinematográficas, por ejemplo, se ven reducidas a mero acompañante en el horizonte del Puente de Brooklyn, que sí ha sido retratado en numerosas ocasiones en la pequeña y la gran pantalla.

Al menos el Puente de Manhattan sí que ha aparecido, aunque sea con poco protagonismo, en cintas como “Cazafantasmas” (1984), “Independence Day” (1996) e incluso en la adaptación del clásico “King Kong” que dirigió Peter Jackson en 2005.

En el cine figura, además, retratado como el lugar preferido para suicidarse por algunas personas que se sienten solas, gracias a la comedia romántica “The Lonely Guy”, que protagonizó el cómico Steve Martin en 1984.

Construido por el ingeniero polaco Ralph Modjeski, los cables que los sustentan fueron diseñados por el letón Leon Moisseiff, quien fue responsable también del puente colgante de Tacoma (Washington), inaugurado en julio de 1940 y que se derrumbó inesperadamente cuatro meses después.

Pese a que no se teme que la estructura del Puente de Manhattan se vaya a derrumbar, la construcción se ha tenido que reforzar en varias ocasiones y no es extraño detectar cómo oscila más que otros puentes similares cuando pasan varios trenes a la vez por las vías que contiene.

Con motivo de su centenario, la ciudad limpió y restauró el majestuoso arco con el que nace el puente en el extremo este de Canal Street en Manhattan.

La construcción llega a la Avenida Flatbush de Brooklyn, en cuyo inicio ha dado nombre al barrio de DUMBO, acrónimo que se debe a “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass”, por formarse precisamente bajo la centenaria construcción.

http://www.elnuevodia.com/llegaalos1...an-622566.html

[skysanjuan]

[QUOTE=K-Bien;23426084]He aquí otras fotos. Estas las tomé en mayo del 2005 desde el barco que circunnavega a Manhattan. El tour es muy bueno, pero lo malo fue que tomó como tres horas y hacía un frío insoportable.





Que aguas mas asquerosas xD por eso me quedo con las de San Juan.

[gugi182]

ese barco es el INTEPRID

[gugi182]

MI EXPERENCIA COMO LA PASE DESPIDIENDO EL AÑO EN TIMES SQUARE.

Les voy a contar yo tuve el privilegio de despedir el año en Times Square del año 2010-2011. Temperatura 39 F. Tienes que llegar bien temprano alli para asegurarte la linea que se pone caotico. Les recomiendo que dejen los liquidos y que vayan para el baño antes de que los pongan en los cuadros de seguridad. A la vez que la policia te inspeciona y te pone en los cuadros no puedes salir de alli para nada a la vez que sales bye bye pa tu casa porque no te dejan entrar mas.

Te empiezan acomodar a las 11am en los cuadros y alli tu te quedas parado como salchicha en una lata desde las 12pm dependiendo de la linea hasta las 12:10am. Cuando uno prende la television uno lo mira como una experencia de grandes ligas pero les digo que no es gran cosa que digamos. En la television te lo pintan de bonito tu solo vez como una hora pero tu no sabes que esas personas llevan aguantando, frio, hambre, estrujones, malos ratos con miles miles de personas de diferentes partes del mundo. Ponen una hermosa sonrisa a ver si salen en la television y los animadores te lo pintan de glorioso. Es algo que deberian de hacer una sola vez y gozarsela.

Les recomiendo si lo van hacer que esten alli desde las 9am hagan la fila a las 11am entren a las 12pm y aguantar y aguantar. Pena si tienes que usar el baño porque te perderas una experencia unica. Si te sientes mal del estomago quedate en tu casa, si te da mucha hambre o tienes problemas intestinales y tienes que frecuentar el baño mejor verlo en la television. Oh otra cosa todo el mundo sale disparao minutos despues de que caiga la bola. 12 minutos despues de que cayo eso practicamente esta vacio y el corre corre por las calles de Nueva York es otro dilema. Yo tuve que caminar 10 bloques para cojer el tren y estaba lleno que ni podias entrar. En la television lo prendes a las 11pm cantas en tu casa 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1- happy new year pero en persona eso es un chaos!!! de madre.......

[Ultramatic]

New York Is Lagging as Seas and Risks Rise, Critics Warn


Michael Kamber for The New York Times
Sea walls, marshes and trees in Brooklyn Bridge Park, part of efforts by New York City agencies to cope with rising seas.

By MIREYA NAVARRO

Published: September 10, 2012 205 Comments

With a 520-mile-long coast lined largely by teeming roads and fragile infrastructure, New York City is gingerly facing up to the intertwined threats posed by rising seas and ever-more-severe storm flooding.

• Graphic: An Expanding Flood Zone

So far, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has commissioned exhaustive research on the challenge of climate change. His administration is expanding wetlands to accommodate surging tides, installing green roofs to absorb rainwater and prodding property owners to move boilers out of flood-prone basements.
But even as city officials earn high marks for environmental awareness, critics say New York is moving too slowly to address the potential for flooding that could paralyze transportation, cripple the low-lying financial district and temporarily drive hundreds of thousands of people from their homes.
Only a year ago, they point out, the city shut down the subway system and ordered the evacuation of 370,000 people as Hurricane Irene barreled up the Atlantic coast. Ultimately, the hurricane weakened to a tropical storm and spared the city, but it exposed how New York is years away from — and billions of dollars short of — armoring itself.
“They lack a sense of urgency about this,” said Douglas Hill, an engineer with the Storm Surge Research Group at Stony Brook University, on Long Island.
Instead of “planning to be flooded,” as he put it, city, state and federal agencies should be investing in protection like sea gates that could close during a storm and block a surge from Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean into the East River and New York Harbor.
Others express concern for areas like the South Bronx and Sunset Park in Brooklyn, which have large industrial waterfronts with chemical-manufacturing plants, oil-storage sites and garbage-transfer stations. Unless hazardous materials are safeguarded with storm surges in mind, some local groups warn, residents could one day be wading through toxic water.
“A lot of attention is devoted to Lower Manhattan, but you forget that you have real industries on the waterfront” elsewhere in the city, said Eddie Bautista, executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, which represents low-income residents of industrial areas. “We’re behind in consciousness-building and disaster planning.”
Other cities are also tackling these issues, at their own pace.
New shoreline development around San Francisco Bay must now be designed to cope with the anticipated higher sea levels under new regional regulations imposed last fall. In Chicago, new bike lanes and parking spaces are made of permeable pavement that allows rainwater to filter through it. Charlotte, N.C., and Cedar Falls, Iowa, are restricting development in flood plains. Maryland is pressing shoreline property owners to plant marshland instead of building retaining walls.
Officials in New York caution that adapting a city of eight million people to climate change is infinitely more complicated and that the costs must be weighed against the relative risks of flooding. The last time a hurricane made landfall directly in New York City was more than a century ago.
Many decisions also require federal assistance, like updated flood maps from the Federal Emergency Management Agency that incorporate sea level rise, and agreement from dozens of public agencies and private partners that own transportation, energy, telecommunications and other infrastructure.
“It’s a million small changes that need to happen,” said Adam Freed, until August the deputy director of the city’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability. “Everything you do has to be a calculation of the risks and benefits and costs you face.”
And in any case, Mr. Freed said, “you can’t make a climate-proof city.”
So city officials are pursuing a so-called resilience strategy that calls for strengthening the city’s ability to weather the effects of serious flooding and recover from it.

Flooding Threat Grows

Unlike New Orleans, New York City is above sea level. Yet the city is second only to New Orleans in the number of people living less than four feet above high tide — nearly 200,000 New Yorkers, according to the research group Climate Central.
The waters on the city’s doorstep have been rising roughly an inch a decade over the last century as oceans have warmed and expanded. But according to scientists advising the city, that rate is accelerating, because of environmental factors, and levels could rise two feet higher than today’s by midcentury. More frequent flooding is expected to become an uncomfortable reality.
With higher seas, a common storm could prove as damaging as the rare big storm or hurricane is today, scientists say. Were sea levels to rise four feet by the 2080s, for example, 34 percent of the city’s streets could lie in the flood-risk zone, compared with just 11 percent now, a 2011 study commissioned by the state said.

New York has added bike lanes, required large buildings to track and reduce their energy use, banned the dirtiest home heating oils, and taken other steps to reduce the emissions that contribute to global warming. But with shoreline development that ranges from public beaches to towering high rises — and a complex mix of rivers, estuaries, bays and ocean — the city needs to size up the various risks posed by rising seas before plunging ahead with vast capital projects or strict regulations, city officials argue.

Enlarge This Image


Michael Kamber for The New York Times

Raised ventilation grates, like these in Lower Manhattan, are intended to deal with flooding in the subway system during severe storms.

Yet the city’s plan for waterfront development dismisses any notion of retreat from the shoreline. Curbing development or buying up property in flood plains, as some smaller cities have done, is too impractical here, city officials say, especially because the city anticipates another million residents over the next two decades.
Rather, the city and its partners are incorporating flood-protection measures into projects as they go along.
Consolidated Edison, the utility that supplies electricity to most of the city, estimates that adaptations like installing submersible switches and moving high-voltage transformers above ground level would cost at least $250 million. Lacking the means, it is making gradual adjustments, with about $24 million spent in flood zones since 2007.
Some steps taken by city agencies have already subtly altered the city’s looks. At Brooklyn Bridge Park, a buffer between the East River and neighborhoods like Dumbo, porous riprap rock and a soft edge of salt-resistant grass have been laid in to help absorb the punch of a storm surge. Sidewalk bioswales, or vegetative tree pits that can fill up with rainwater to reduce storm water and sewage overflows and also minimize flooding, are popping up around the city.
Over all, the city is hoping to funnel more than $2 billion of public and private money to such environmental projects over the next 18 years, officials say.
“It’s a series of small interventions that cumulatively, over time, will take us to a more natural system” to deal with climate change, said Carter H. Strickland, the city’s environmental commissioner.
Planning experts say it is hard to muster public support for projects with uncertain or distant benefits.
“There’s a lot of concern about angering developers,” said Ben Chou, a water-policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
New York planners have proposed requiring developers to assess the climate-change risks faced by new buildings so they can consider protection like retractable watertight gates for windows. But no such requirements have been imposed so far.
While some new buildings are being elevated or going above current required flood protections — like a new recycling plant on a Brooklyn pier and the Port Authority’s transit hub at the World Trade Center site — most new construction is not being adapted to future flood risks yet, industry representatives said.
Some experts argue that the encounter with Hurricane Irene last year and a flash flood in 2007 underscored the dangers of deferring aggressive solutions.
Klaus H. Jacob, a research scientist at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, said the storm surge from Irene came, on average, just one foot short of paralyzing transportation into and out of Manhattan.
If the surge had been just that much higher, subway tunnels would have flooded, segments of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and roads along the Hudson River would have turned into rivers, and sections of the commuter rail system would have been impassable or bereft of power, he said.
The most vulnerable systems, like the subway tunnels under the Harlem and East Rivers, would have been unusable for nearly a month, or longer, at an economic loss of about $55 billion, said Dr. Jacob, an adviser to the city on climate change and an author of the 2011 state study that laid out the flooding prospects.
“We’ve been extremely lucky,” he said. “I’m disappointed that the political process hasn’t recognized that we’re playing Russian roulette.”
With more rain and higher seas, some envision more turmoil — like mile after mile of apartment buildings without working elevators, lights or potable water.

“That’s a key vulnerability,” said Rafael Pelli, a Manhattan architect who serves on a climate-change committee that advises the Department of City Planning. “If you have to relocate 10,000 people, how do you do that?”

Barriers to Block Tides

Some New Yorkers argue that the answer lies not in evacuation, but in prevention, like armoring city waterways with the latest high-tech barriers. Others are not so sure.
At a recent meeting of Manhattan community board leaders in Harlem, Robert Trentlyon, a resident of Chelsea, argued for sea gates.
A 2004 study by Mr. Hill and the Storm Surge Research Group at Stony Brook recommended installing movable barriers at the upper end of the East River, near the Throgs Neck Bridge; under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge; and at the mouth of the Arthur Kill, between Staten Island and New Jersey. During hurricanes and northeasters, closing the barriers would block a huge tide from flooding Manhattan and parts of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and New Jersey, they said.
City officials say that sea barriers are among the options being studied, but others say such gates could interfere with aquatic ecosystems and with the flushing out of pollutants, and may eventually fail as sea levels keep rising.
And then there is the cost. Installing barriers for New York could reach nearly $10 billion.
There is more agreement on how to protect the subway system. Several studies have advised the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to move quickly to increase pumping capacity at stations, raise entrances and design floodgates to block water from entering.
In 2009, a commission warned that global warming posed “a new and potentially dire challenge for which the M.T.A. system is largely unprepared.”
Five years ago, a summer-morning deluge brought about 3 1/2 inches of rain in two hours and paralyzed the system for hours, stranding 2.5 million riders.
That prompted the transit agency to spend $34 million on improvements like raising some ventilation grates nine inches above sidewalks and building steps that head upward, before descending, at flood-prone stations. All the money came from the agency’s capital budget, which also pays for subway cars and buses.
“This is a vicious circle of the worst kind,” Projjal Dutta, the transportation agency’s director of sustainability, said of the financial effect. “You’re cutting public transportation, which cuts down greenhouse gases, to harden against climate change.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/ny...1&ref=nyregion

[islandtransit]

Se que hay algunos de nosotros que somos del area de NYC. Quiero preguntar si todos estan bien? Yo vivo en Long Island y por la mayoria de la isla la situacion esta mal, pero gracias a dios mi familia y yo tenemos de todo (hoy volvio la luz). Los demas, como estan?

[Ultramatic]

Protecting the City, Before Next Time


Architecture Research Office and dlandstudio
URBAN WETLANDS A rendering of Lower Manhattan that shows tidal marshes to absorb waves.

By ALAN FEUER

Published: November 3, 2012

Multimedia

Photographs
Hurricane Sandy Aftermath

Related

• Fractured Recovery Divides the Region (November 4, 2012)
• After Getting Back to Normal, Big Job Is Facing New Reality (November 4, 2012)
• Big City: The Real Luxury: A Way Out (November 4, 2012)
• Federal Relief Costs Likely to Be Big, and Contested (November 3, 2012)

Related in Opinion

• Opinion: Deciding Where Future Disasters Will Strike (November 4, 2012)

Should New York Build Sea Gates?

After the enormous storm last week, which genuinely panicked New York with its staggering and often fatal violence, residents here could certainly identify with the first line of Benchley’s note. But what about the second?
If, as climate experts say, sea levels in the region have not only gradually increased, but are also likely to get higher as time goes by, then the question is: What is the way forward? Does the city continue to build ever-sturdier and ever-higher sea walls? Or does it accept the uncomfortable idea that parts of New York will occasionally flood and that the smarter method is to make the local infrastructure more elastic and better able to recover?
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Wednesday gave a sea wall the nod. Because of the recent history of powerful storms hitting the area, he said, elected officials have a responsibility to consider new and innovative plans to prevent similar damage in the future. “Climate change is a reality,” Mr. Cuomo said. “Given the frequency of these extreme weather situations we have had, for us to sit here today and say this is once in a generation and it’s not going to happen again, I think would be shortsighted.”


Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

The water rose in Dumbo, Brooklyn, on Monday.

But some experts in the field who have thought deeply about how to protect New York from huge storms like Hurricane Sandy — and especially from the coastal surges they produce — suggested that less intrusive forms of so-called soft infrastructure might prove more effective in sheltering the city than mammoth Venetian sea walls. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg seemed to agree with them on Thursday when he said: “I don’t think there’s any practical way to build barriers in the oceans. Even if you spent a fortune, it’s not clear to me that you would get much value for it.”
According to the experts — architects, environmentalists and civil engineers — large-scale projects like underwater gates are expensive, cumbersome and difficult to build. More important, they say, such undertakings are binary projects that work just fine until the moment they do not.
Whatever the way forward, Klaus H. Jacob, a Columbia University seismologist and an expert on urban environmental disasters, said the century-event of Hurricane Sandy could become, because of rising seas alone, an annual occurrence by 2100.
“We know what we have to do,” said Dr. Jacob, who predicted last week’s tragedy with eerily prescient detail in a 2011 report. “The question is when do we get beyond talking and get to action.”
Among those actions already proposed are relatively minor alterations to the building code, to ban housing boilers and electrical systems in basements, and slightly more apocalyptic strategies, like one known as managed retreat, in which people would cede low-lying areas to the sea. While no one is calling for a mass and permanent exodus from the Rockaways, for instance, some experts, like Radley Horton, a climatologist at Columbia University, said that as parts of New York became more difficult — and costly — to protect, managed retreat needed at least to become “part of the public discussion.”
Here, then, are three proposals — some traditional, some fantastic, but all at least theoretically workable — designed to reduce the effects of storms like Hurricane Sandy on three especially vulnerable New York neighborhoods: Lower Manhattan, the Red Hook and Gowanus sections of Brooklyn, and the northern shore of Staten Island.

Lower Manhattan

Marshy Edges, Absorptive Streets
Picture a fringe of mossy wetlands strapped like a beard to Lower Manhattan’s chin, and you are halfway toward imagining the plan to protect the financial district and its environs dreamed up by the architect Stephen Cassell and a team from his firm, Architecture Research Office, and a partner firm, dlandstudio.
“Our goal was to design a more resilient city,” Mr. Cassell said. “We may not always be able to keep the water out, so we wanted to improve the edges and the streets of the city to deal with flooding in a more robust way.”
Among the most disturbing images to emerge from the aftermath of the storm was that of a pile of cars floating upended in the waters of a parking lot near Wall Street. Lower Manhattan, where most of the borough’s power failures occurred, is vulnerable to floods like this not just because it sits low in relation to the sea; it also juts out on heaps of artificial landfill, into the fickle waters of New York Harbor. It is probably not coincidental that the flooded areas of Manhattan, largely correspond to the island’s prelandfill borders.
To prevent incursions by water, Mr. Cassell and his planners imagined ringing Lower Manhattan with a grassy network of land-based parks accompanied by watery patches of wetlands and tidal salt marshes. At Battery Park, for instance, the marshes would weave through a series of breakwater islands made of geo-textile tubes and covered with marine plantings. On the Lower East Side of the island, Mr. Cassell and his team envisioned extending Manhattan by a block or two — with additional landfill — to create space for another new park and a salt marsh.
Beyond serving as recreation areas, these engineered green spaces would sop up and reduce the force of incoming water.
“When there’s a storm surge, it creates an enormous amount of energy,” Mr. Cassell said. “Wetlands absorb that energy and protect the coastline.”

As a complement to the parks and marshes, Mr. Cassell’s team would re-engineer the streets in the neighborhood to make the area better able to handle surging waves, creating three variations of roadway. On so-called Level 1 streets, asphalt would be replaced with absorptive materials, like porous concrete, to soak up excess water like a sponge and to irrigate plantings in the street bed. Level 2 streets, planned for stronger surges, would send running water into the marshes at the island’s edges and also into prepositioned ponds meant to collect runoff for dry spells. Level 3 streets — the only ones that might require a shift in the current city grid — would be parallel to the shoreline and designed to drain surging water back into the harbor.

“We weren’t fully going back to nature with our plan,” Mr. Cassell said. “We thought of it more as engineered ecology. But if you look at the history of Manhattan, we have pushed nature off the island and replaced it with man-made infrastructure. What we can do is start to reintegrate things and make the city more durable.”

Red Hook and Gowanus

Oysters to the Rescue
The architect and landscape designer Kate Orff based her plan to shield the Red Hook and Gowanus neighborhoods of Brooklyn on the outsize powers of the oyster. “The era of big infrastructure is over,” Ms. Orff said. By placing her faith in a palm-size bivalve to reduce the effects of surging storms, Ms. Orff said, she is “blending urbanism and ecology” and also “looking to the past to reimagine the future.”


Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Red Hook, Brooklyn, was hit hard last week by flooding from Hurricane Sandy.

Red Hook, in particular, was thrashed by Hurricane Sandy as some of the local inlets, like the Buttermilk Channel and Gowanus Bay, spilled into the low-lying area, swamping public housing projects and sending water rushing so high through the streets it occasionally swallowed up cars and bicycles.
Ms. Orff’s proposal., created by a team at her design firm Scape/Landscape Architecture P.L.L.C., envisions a system of artificial reefs in the channel and the bay built out of rocks, shells and fuzzy rope that is intended to nurture the growth of oysters (she calls them “nature’s wave attenuators”).


Scape/Landscape Architecture

WATERWORLD A reef constructed from rock and shell piles to host oyster growth, as seen in a rendering for a proposal in Brooklyn. Such a structure could filter water and mitigate storm surge.

The Bay Ridge Flats, a stretch of water that sits off the coast of the Brooklyn Army Terminal, was once home to a small archipelago of islands that protected the Brooklyn coastline. The islands have long since disappeared because of dredging, and Ms. Orff would replace them with her oyster-studded barriers, which, over time, would form a sort of “ecological glue” and mitigate onrushing tides, she said.


Scape/Landscape Architecture

AQUACULTURE Oyster beds as depicted in a rendering for a proposal in Gowanus, Brooklyn. The shellfish could be cultivated by community groups and seeded on a planned reef, part of a water filtration and surge-mitigating system.

At the same time, she imagines installing oyster beds along the banks of the Gowanus Canal in a series of what are known as Floating Upweller Systems (Flupsys) — essentially, artificial shellfish nurseries. A powerful fan blows aerated water through a group of eight chambers in which oysters or mussels can be grown. The chambers protect the budding oysters from predators like starfish. Above the Flupsys, Ms. Orff would place a public walkway for joggers and strollers, punctured every so often by hatches that could be lifted to permit a view of the nature below.
“This is infrastructure that we can do now,” she explained. “It’s not something we have to think about and fund with billions of dollars 50 years down the road.”
Oysters have the added benefit of acting as natural water filters — a single one can clean up to 50 gallons of water a day. By being placed in the Gowanus Canal, Ms. Orff hopes, they could further purify what has already been named a federal Superfund site. She wants, by way of her project, to change how we think about infrastructure projects.

“Infrastructure isn’t separate from us, or it shouldn’t be,” Ms. Orff said. “It’s among us, it’s next to us, embedded in our cities and our public spaces.”

Staten Island
A Bridge in Troubled Waters


CDM Smith, Inc
A rendering of a storm barrier with a drawbridge on Arthur Kill, intended to protect Staten Island in a Category 3 hurricane.

A few years ago, Lawrence J. Murphy, an engineer in the New York office of the global engineering firm CDM Smith, was asked by the local chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers to propose a way of protecting northern Staten Island from the forces of a Category 3 hurricane. He came up with a plan to build a classic storm-surge barrier across the Arthur Kill, the tidal strait that separates Staten Island from the mainland of New Jersey, designed to act in concert with similar barriers in the East River, the Narrows and the waters near the Rockaway Peninsula.
Staten Island was ravaged by Hurricane Sandy, as entire neighborhoods were flooded, a 168-foot water tanker crashed onshore and city officials said that most of the fatalities in the city occurred there. It is arguably New York’s most exposed borough, surrounded not by peaceful rivers but by oceanic channels like the Arthur Kill and, of course, the Atlantic itself.
Mr. Murphy’s concept, created with his partner, Thomas Schoettle, calls for the construction of a damlike structure with suspension towers spanning the Arthur Kill. Tidal gates below the surface would open and close as needed.


Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times

A rescue from Dongan Hills, Staten Island, on Tuesday.

According to the Army Corps of Engineers, Category 3 hurricanes (Hurricane Sandy was a Category 1 storm, downgraded by the time it reached New York) would produce surges of slightly more than 14 feet above normal sea levels. Mr. Murphy designed his barrier to protect against “overtopping waves” of an additional 8 feet, for a total height of 22 feet. He also designed a complex system of locks and drawbridges to accommodate the numerous commercial ships that navigate the kill.
Mr. Murphy’s barrier would be run by a trained staff and would operate on emergency power in the event of an electrical failure. Because strong tides pass through the kill, he would also outfit the barrier with tidal generators, which, as an extra benefit, could produce electricity.
Nor did Mr. Murphy ignore the possibilities of public recreation. “The concept design of the Arthur Kill Storm Barrier has been made with a focus on aesthetics to create a destination,” he wrote in his proposal. “The multiuse path can provide bicycling and walking opportunities. Fishing and bird-watching amenities can also be provided.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/ny...nted=3&_r=0&hp

[luisr]

Se te hace posible dar un poco más de detalles de la situación en Long Island? Espero que esté todo normalizándose poco a poco.

[Ultramatic]

I just got back...

I decided today to top off the tank, boy was I in for a rude surprise. There's about 15 gas stations in my neighborhood. ALL were closed save 3. Each of those had lines stretching for over twenty blocks. The police were everywhere, barricades were set up on many surrounding streets, it was surreal. Some of the stations that were closed had long lines anyway, people waiting, hoping a tanker truck would arrive. And talk about price gouging...the Gulf station by my home was selling a gallon of regular for $4.59. was $3. 89 prior to Sandy. But my jaw positively dropped when I saw the Gulf station on McGuinness Blvd, $5.00 a gallon and a $40 dollar limit. So I gave up, went to Pathmark on Atlantic Ave. I expected them to have been restocked by now. Nope, very little produce, meats, frozen food, baked goods. No eggs, paper products. Very little soap and detergents. Something is very wrong when even supermarkets can't restock.

I know I should be thankful for what I have, and I truly am. Especially when there is so much death, destruction and misery just a couple of miles away.



Give people, if you can, to the charity of your choice.




I heard that LIPA has restored power to many sections of Long island.

[luisr]

Allá no congelan los precios de artículos de primera necesidad y de la gasolina como se hace en PR cuando se declara aviso de huracán o de tormenta tropical?

[Ultramatic]

Se supone qué si.

[Ultramatic]

New York City Mayor orders odd-even gasoline rationing



By Ellen Wulfhorst
NEW YORK | Thu Nov 8, 2012 6:33pm EST

(Reuters) - New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Thursday ordered the emergency rationing of gasoline due to a severe shortage caused by Superstorm Sandy.
Based on license plates ending in odd or even numbers, drivers will be allowed to buy gasoline on alternating days, Bloomberg announced at a briefing. Licenses ending in a letter are eligible to buy gas on odd-numbered days, he said.
The system, which follows a similar rationing regime implemented in New Jersey last week because of Sandy, begins at 6 a.m. on Friday in all of the city's five boroughs, he said. It will remain in effect until further notice.
The region has been hard hit by fuel shortages since Sandy hit ten days ago, due to power outages and inventory that has been stranded at refineries and terminals.
"Last week's storm hit the fuel network hard and knocked out critical infrastructure needed to distribute gasoline," the mayor said in a statement. He called the rationing system "the best way to cut down the lines and help customers buy gas faster."
Bloomberg said only a quarter of the city's gas stations are open. His count was far lower than the estimate by the AAA automotive organization that 65 to 70 percent of the city's nearly 800 stations were open and sold gas on Thursday.
A spokesman for the mayor said City Hall was estimating the number of retail stations that were open at any given time, while the AAA count included stations that may have had gas at least once during the day but may have run out of fuel and closed.
Emergency vehicles, buses, taxis and certain other vehicles are exempt from New York City's rationing system.
In New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie announced an odd-even rationing system for 12 counties that began on Saturday.
(Reporting by Ellen Wulfhorst; Editing by Dan Burns and Phil Berlowitz)


http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8A71EM20121108


Ok, NOW I'm pissed.

[Terick]

Oye Ultra por que no traes fotos de los barrios puertorriquenos. Seria interesante ver como viven los boricuas alla.

Un saludo

[Ultramatic]

Hacen muchos años qué los barrios puertoriqueños han desaparecido aqui. La vasta mayoria de puertoriqueños se han retirado a otros lugares como los suburbios de Westchester, Long Island y New Jersey. De los que quedan, están regados por toda la ciudad.

Como ya la migración puertoriqueña hacia estos lares es casi nula, pues los vecindarios tradicionales han cambiado drásticamente con muchas personas de otros estados y/o países.

Me imagino qué en la Florida y en otros estados, habrán vecindarios puertoriqueños. Pero aqui, esa epoca ha pasado.