Wind gusts are increasing, and New York City is not prepared
New York City has 250,000 street name signs and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of other signs — on roads, buildings, construction sites and parking lots. “We have 1,033,000 signs on the streets that we’re responsible for,” said Anthony Galgan, assistant commissioner of the Department of Transportation Planning and Management’s traffic control and engineering division. “They’re designed to last anywhere from 10 to 30 years.”
Those signs, almost invisible in their pervasiveness, might need a lot more attention in future. In particular, those signs — and many other components of the urban infrastructure—may need to be, at minimum, wind proofed. According to a recent study in the Journal of Engineering for Sustainable Buildings and Cities, researchers from the City College of New York, report that the city is not ready for the wind speeds that will likely hit it by 2050.
Tom Knutson, a climate modeler at the U.S. geophysical fluid dynamics laboratory, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, explained that most projections point to the same conclusion: hurricanes are increasing in the Atlantic basin. “We live in a hurricane prone region here in New York City and when they come along, they cause a lot of damage,” he said. Strong winds with a storm surge and rain can be a dangerous combination.
The authors of the new study said they wanted to better understand the intersection between engineering and science and climate. They studied the effects of the changing climate in several complex coastal urban areas, including in Puerto Rico, California, and New York. Part of their motivation to look at New York City was also to figure out, if they could, why some aspects of infrastructure were especially damaged by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 where wind speeds reached 80 miles-per-hour, the highest speed recorded in the city.