Shit’s Fucked Up, Dude
The Daily News joins in the fear mongering, showing us how in the event of a strong hurricane, the entire Rockaway peninsula could be toast:
Posted: June 19th, 2006 | Filed under: Fear Mongering, Queens, The Weather, We're All Gonna Die!Disaster is brewing in the Rockaways.
More than 100,000 people live on an 11-mile spit of sand with just three routes to the mainland. A moderate hurricane would cover the peninsula with water — and a heavy one would obliterate everything.
But even as the city’s emergency planners are practicing how to evacuate the Rockaways to save lives, city housing officials are eagerly pushing plans to build almost 4,000 new homes there — right in the path of coastal storms.
“It’s insane,” said Queens College Prof. Nicholas Coch, a nationally recognized hurricane expert. “People who live in Rockaways are really playing roulette with Mother Nature.”
Hundreds of upscale homes, priced higher than $500,000, already have been built at Arverne by the Sea, an $800 million development on land that had lain fallow for decades.
Demand is strong and the city Housing Preservation and Development Department envisions thousands more homes rising nearby — thanks to the allure of New York’s last undeveloped beachfront property.
“People are only as smart as their collective memories,” said John Lepore, head of the local Chamber of Commerce. “There’s not been major, major storms for a while, and people have become affluent, and everybody wants to live near the water.”
New Yorkers generally don’t think of their city as vulnerable to the kind of deadly storms that hit New Orleans, Miami or Houston. But experts say the city has been thrashed before — and is coming due for another devastating storm.
“Why do we forget our own history?” Coch asked. “We have a major development in an area where history has shown that hurricanes have done tremendous damage.”
An 1893 hurricane destroyed homes and hotels along the south-facing coast of the Rockaways, and subsequent storms reshaped sandbars and inlets of the area. A 1938 hurricane that ravaged Long Island swamped stretches of the Rockaways.
