By California residents love to complain about the weather. When my daughter went to college in Santa Cruz, she found that the least bit of drizzle would inspire a chorus of whining about the weather. Growing up in New England, she just didn’t get it. Northern California residents may be more
Gas Lines Point to a Need for Resilience
Gas line in Summit, New Jersey following Superstorm Sandy. At this gas station, only doctors and nurses were allowed to get gas, with supervision by local police. Photo: Tom Sulcer, Create Commons license By now we’ve all seen the photos of houses buried in sand along the Jersey Shore, burned-out
Hurricane Sandy and the Case for Resilient Design
Flooding of FDR Drive in Lower Manhattan on October 30. 2012. Photo: Beth Carey, Wikimedia Commons While most of us in the Northeast were making last-minute preparations for the massive storm on Monday, I was sitting in Hartford’s Bradley Airport, about to catch one of the last flights out before
By Resilient design trend? Modern floodgates appear in vulnerable areas.
Walking along Flat Street in Brattleboro, Vermont this morning before businesses opened, I saw a sign that an important lesson about resilience had been learned over the past year. The floodgates were up in numerous doorways. Flat Street, as some readers may recall, lies in the floodplain of the
Sea-level Rise, Storm Surges, and Delaware’s Resilience Challenge (with a Sandy update)
Update Note, October 30, 2012 With Post-tropical Cyclone Sandy still whirling around somewhere to my west, the article below feels prescient. It wasn’t of course – there was no advance knowledge of this particular storm – but what just happened with Sandy is well in line with climate change trends.
New York City’s (Lack of) Resilience
There’s a great article in today’s New York Times, “New York is Lagging as Seas and Risks Rise.” In a nutshell, with 520 miles of shoreline, New York City is highly vulnerable to rising sea level and storm surges, and the City isn’t doing enough to address its vulnerabilities. The
Fundamentals of Resilient Design #1: Making the Case
I thought a lot about resilience last year, during a six-week sabbatical bike ride through the Southwest. I covered a little over 1,900 miles, most of it over land that hadn’t seen a drop of rain since the previous fall; some of those areas—mostly in Texas—still hadn’t received significant precipitation months after my return home.
