Comment Re:Not all that hard (Score 1) 203
FDR Drive may need a flood wall south of the Brooklyn Bridge.
The FDR may need some kind of protection against flooding, but not the part south of the Brooklyn Bridge -- it is an elevated roadway at it's southern end, from Pitt street (north of the Manhattan Bridge) to Whitehall street at the entrance to the Battery Park Underpass. The underpass, which is a tunnel, definitely needs some kind of protection against flooding (Sandy filled it end-to-end with water) as does the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel (now the Hugh Carey Tunnel, also filled with water by Sandy and still not operational), the Holland Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel and the Queens Midtown Tunnel.
More importantly, those are just the problems that we had with this hurricane. The shoreline of southern Manhattan has actually been extensively expanded over the last 200 years. Protecting that man-made land from rising water seems likely to involve significant unforeseen difficulties. It seems safe to say that the whole city hasn't been built to withstand this kind of environmental attack (mostly because it seems safe to say that work in Manhattan has been done as cheaply and quickly as possible). What if the foundations of the towers for the Brooklyn Bridge finally wash away? They're not resting on bedrock. Much of the Lower East Side and Chinatown are built over land that used to be a swamp.
Finally, while this thread is limited to consideration of how to protect the borough of Manhattan, pretending that the other boroughs and neighboring states don't exist makes this a foolish exercise. The question shouldn't ever be "How can we protect Manhattan?" It should be "How can we protect the tri-state area?" In the words of Harry Buttle,* "We're all in it together."
* I mean Tuttle!