Is there will to avoid disaster using technology?

Professor Scott A. Mandia of Suffolk County Community College projects terrible consequences for this area if a major hurricane hits, as I wrote about last week in this space. For Shelter Island, a Category 4 hurricane “inundates” — “except for a few high points” — the island, says the meteorologist who teaches courses in weather and climate change at the college.

This information is included in a series of web pages on which he relates how a Category 4 hurricane also “inundates” with severe flooding “entire communities” on Long Island. And even a lesser hurricane, one of a Category 3 strength, would mean “much of the North and South Forks are entirely under water.”  Here is the website.

Professor Mandia discusses the cause for the increased severity of hurricanes: climate change. As he writes: “There has been an observed increase in tropical cyclones since the mid-1990s. Warmer oceans have played a significant role in this increase.” On his web pages, he summarizes studies detailing this.

Professor Mandia explains: “All coastal storms are now worse due to sea level rise caused by human activities that are warming the climate. A warmer climate means more ice melt, which adds water to our oceans. Warmer water expands and thus rises upward, a double-whammy for sea level rise. Imagine a basketball hoop ten feet above the floor and consider a dunk to be a storm over-topping a sea wall or other barrier. Now imagine humans have caused that floor to rise by a foot. It is much easier to dunk a basketball now. More flooding just like we saw in Sandy, Harvey, Maria, Florence and every hurricane from now onward.”

Climate change is caused by the use of fossil fuels.

Al Gore, who first took on climate change as a U.S. senator and continued as vice president and now a citizen-activist, said in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek last month: “We’re still treating the atmosphere as an open sewer. We’re putting 110 million tons every day of man-made, heat-trapping pollution into the sky…That’s why the oceans are getting so hot. That’s why Hurricane Florence intensified so rapidly. That’s why there are fish from the ocean swimming in the streets of Miami at high tide—because of the melting ice and sea level rise.

“The scientists were spot-on in warning us about all of those consequences,” said Mr. Gore. “Now the evening news every night is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelations…This is a really critical choice that we have to make. We must change. The second question: Can we change? We have the ability and the technologies to do it.”

Professor Mandia on his web pages says the impacts from a major hurricane “point to a likely future disaster in Suffolk County.”   He says of Long Island, “Given public complacency, the amount of people needing to evacuate, the few evacuation routes off Long Island, and the considerable area affected by storm surge, more lead-time is needed for a proper evacuation than in other parts of the country.” http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/38hurricane/hurricane_future.html

The situation would be different for relatively lightly populated Shelter Island as compared to the rest of Long Island but, still, Shelter Island would be seriously affected by a major hurricane.

What’s being done? The key factor causing loss of life and damage from a hurricane is storm surge. If a Category 4 hurricane strikes, the storm surge, says Professor Mandia, would be more than 20 feet and as high as 28 and 29 feet, in some areas of Suffolk and Nassau Counties.

On Suffolk’s South Shore, in the early 1960s when I started out as a Suffolk-based journalist, the Army Corps of Engineers first began advancing its Fire Island to Montauk Point Project, to bolster 83 miles of Long Island’s south shore to, in large part, ostensibly withstand hurricanes. The scheme is still around as a $1.3 billion project. But the dunes reinforced in the project would rise, at their highest, to 15 feet — about half the height of the worst hurricane storm surge estimated.

Until less than 100 years ago, folks in this area wouldn’t think of building houses on barrier beaches. The most they’d put there would be “shacks” — with no expectation of them lasting a long time.

As Professor Mandia notes on his web pages: “Unfortunately, in the past decades, the coastal population has also increased substantially which further increases the hurricane risks.”

And then there is the federally subsidized flood insurance program that “almost rewards people for building in dumb locations,” said Professor Mandia in an interview.

We must eliminate the cause of increasingly severe hurricanes by ending reliance on fossil fuel and moving to green, clean, non-polluting, sustainable energy led by solar and wind power. As Mr. Gore says, “We have the ability and the technologies to do it.”