New York Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced major four-year work to widen Manhattan’s southern docks to anticipate rising water levels due to global warming.
New York will start work this year to protect itself from global warming and rising sea levels. Manhattan, which believed itself to be invincible, remembered it was a peninsula when Hurricane Sandy hit it 6 years ago. South Manhattan had been plunged into darkness, the damage had been considerable and has not finished being repaired. Forty-four New Yorkers had lost their lives there.
When Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris agreement, the Democratic mayor of New York had sharply criticized the decision, “an immoral attack on the public health, safety and security of everyone on this planet”. He pledged to respect the climate agreement adopted in Paris in November 2015.
Still without waiting for a national initiative, Bill de Blasio wants to start work without delay in order to protect his city from the consequences of global warming.
An extension on the water
In a column published on March 13 in the New York Magazine, he describes his plan, estimated at some nine billion euros: on the one hand, to fortify southern Manhattan with grassy embankments in the parks and removable barriers, and on the other hand to extend the south coast of the district on the ‘East River and the Hudson.
The docks are to be extended approximately 150 meters on the water, for a distance of 5 kilometers extending from the Battery Park neighborhood to the Brooklyn Bridge, on the other side of the end of the peninsula. Work will start this year and should last at least four years.
Wall Street threatened
“We must protect this city, this country and this world from global warming. There is no federal plan to act today. We must act, and now,” insists the mayor of New York.
It must be said that in addition to housing, it is also the Wall Street district that is threatened. Six years ago, it caught water during Hurricane Sandy. A few hundred meters away, in the middle of the Hudson River, stands the Statue of Liberty. She hasn’t got her feet in the water yet, but she too will have to be taken care of sooner or later.
—
