Speaker Quinn weathers the storm. (NYSUT/Flickr)

"Millions of New Yorkers have stories" from the hurricane, Council Speaker Christine Quinn declared this morning during a soaring, post-Sandy speech at the Association for a Better New York. Among those stories was Ms. Quinn's own.

It was an emotional moment that came during what was otherwise a wonky, if powerful, policy-laden address to the city's business leaders during which the council speaker (and presumptive mayoral candidate) called for at least $20 billion in new infrastructure across the five boroughs to protect against future disasters. The story, from the summers of Ms. Quinn's youth, underscored her belief that the city must seize upon this disaster to create a stronger (or at least drier) future.

"My grandfather came over on a boat from Ireland with a third grade education and worked his way up through the ranks of the Fire Department," Ms. Quinn explained. "Rockaway Beach offered him a chance to rent a bungalow in the summer, to afford a little place on the ocean just like the rich people he saw in the magazines. It was his own piece of the American Dream."

And also Ms. Quinn's. "I can remember walking along the boardwalk as a young girl with my late mother and aunt," she said. "It’s one of my favorite memories of my mother, of how much that place meant to her and to my whole family.

But it is no longer a place for dreamers, at least not now. "Last week, visiting with families in the Rockaways, I saw that boardwalk lying in pieces, tossed into street corners or crashed into people’s homes."

As if defying Mother Nature, Speaker Quinn wants to make sure that never happens again. She announced today that the City Council, in partnership with the Bloomberg administration, will accelerate two studies analyzing what kinds of risks the city faces from storms, and what could be done to mitigate them.

She expects New York will spend billions implementing new infrastructure to combat future disaster, which she predicts would cost around $20 billion. Ms. Quinn believes the federal government should cover most of those costs, pointing to the government response to Hurricane Katrina as a precedent. She also announced that Senator Chuck Schumer is putting together a study of his own with the Army Corps of Engineers that will help the city determine the best defense for the city from future disasters, as well as the general rising of the tides due to climate change.

"Let me be clear, this is not an academic exercise," Ms. Quinn said. "It will produce a concrete blueprint for action, along with a price tag for any and all projects."

The speaker pointed to the now very voguish topic of Dutch-style sea barriers as one possible solution for the city.

"In the Netherlands, they’ve spent billions of dollars on miles and miles of connected barricades like dams, dikes, walls, and levees," Ms. Quinn said. "In more recent decades they added massive storm surge barriers at critical locations. The largest one, which has a really, really, long, unpronounceable Dutch name, stretches five and a half miles from end to end."

"At the City Council," she added, "we would have just called it the Ed Koch Barrier." The crowd all chuckled, this being a reference to a fight earlier this year over whether or not to rename the Queensboro Bridge after the former mayor.

On the smaller side, the speaker called for major investments in the city's sewers, to stave off sewage flow into the city's waterways during storms, due to our combined sewer overflow system. She also wants soft infrastructure that will help absorb stormwater, like permeable pavement and green streets, or new marshlands, known as bluebelts, that help purify runoff. She called for buffers around subway grates, raising station entrances, even out-there technologies like industrial balloons that would seal the subways and other subterranean infrastructure off.

There should be revisions to the building codes and the development patterns, which the city's Building Resiliency Task Force will undertake. Through the Urban Green Council and the Real Estate Board, the task force will be holding emergency sessions to assess the rebuilding effort following the storm.

"We also must rethink the way we build in neighborhoods that were destroyed by the storm," Ms. Quinn said.

She called on Con Ed and other utilities to strengthen their substations, protect their power plants and to bury their electrical wires where it makes sense. "I want to send a clear message to ConEd today," the speaker declared. "We will not tolerate you simply passing these costs on to ratepayers." She also said the region needs to improve its gas and oil infrastructure to prevent the kind of shortages and long lines New York saw after the storm.

We must do all these things not only for us, Ms. Quinn said, but also, and more importantly, for the future.

"Millions of New Yorkers have stories just like mine," the speaker said. "We will make sure our children and our grandchildren have those stories too–not of a Rockaway destroyed, but of a Rockaway reborn."

Senator Schumer (far left) and Congressman Nadler (far right) at the mouth of a flooded Brooklyn Battery Tunnel—the kind of damage both hope to prevent. (Jay Fine/MTA)

There has been a big debate in (local) government about how best to respond to Hurricane Sandy going forward. There is the governor's camp, which argues for redesigning great swaths of the city and state's built environment; and the mayor's camp, which both before the storm and after, argued that the city could never really protect itself from these kinds of disasters, so it was up to citizenry to protect themselves. The city would help with evacuations and the like, but really, don't build near the sea or count of some fancy new sea gates to protect you, the mayor insisted.

During the recovery, The Observer would ask major officials into which camp they fell. Both Senator Charles Schumer and Congressman Jerry Nadler (who represents much of the formerly flooded downtown Manhattan) put themselves in the camp of doing more, building more, protecting more.

"For the future, we have to look into it," Senator Schumer said.

He stressed that if anything, the storm serves as a wake-up call to action for investments and practices the city should have been undertaking already anyway because of sea rise due to climate change. "We were going to have look into it anyway, with the waters rising and climate change," the senator said. If anything, Sandy may have saved us from something far worse in the future, the quiet, creeping tides that go largely unnoticed.

The senator did not have any specific ideas on what might be good measures to undertake, but he seemed eager to get into the discussion. "We’re just at the beginning of thinking about it," the senator said, saying that the clean-up efforts would have to come first. He did say he would work to wrangle money from the federal government to help pay for any solutions the city comes up with. After all, if the Army Corps and the treasury help keep up the flood protections surrounding New Orleans and the rest of the Mississippi Delta, why not do the same for new York Harbor?

Congressman Nadler, on the other hand, had plenty of recommendations. He is a bit of a waterfront infrastructure wonk, after all, having called for trans-harbor freight rail and other interesting investments in the past.

"Certainly Lower Manhattan, we should have much higher seawalls," Mr. Nadler said. "We had a 14-foot surge. Why couldn’t you have a wall around Lower Manhattan that went up 14 feet? I don’t know how much it would cost, but it would be a heck of a lot cheaper than the cost of a flood." He said the gates could even be retractable, but something like them seemed prudent.

Utilities were another major concern. "The Con Ed station at 14th Street, that cut off a quarter of a million people," the congressman said. "That, and other facilities like it, should be waterproof. They should not be flood-able. You could insulate them. They could be made like fortresses. Given how valuable they are, how crucial they are to lives and fortunes, they should be."

Mr. Nadler also echoed a now-familiar recommendation, to build some serious infrastructure around the harbor to help protect from other storms. "To me, we should consider to protect the city through the kinds of storm gates that Rotterdam and London have," he said. The congressman even rattled of what should be built where, such as gates and sluices at Perth Amboy, Hell's Gate and the Verrazano Narrows, thus cutting off much of the harbor from a storm surge.

"It's big, but you could do it," Mr. Nadler said. He also acknowledged the considerable, but worthwhile costs of such an investment. "The cost estimate for that is 10, 12 billion dollars, but to two or three of these storms, even one of them, is more than that," he said. Indeed, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli calculated an $18 million cost to the city as a result of the storm, but that includes the entire five boroughs, much of which would not be protected by these fancy new sea gates.

This is a problem Mr. Nadler fully acknowledges. "The problem is it wouldn’t protect Coney Island, Sea Gate or Jamaica Bay," he said. "It would protect downtown, Brooklyn, Hoboken and Jersey, but it’s not the answer to everything. It’s something to consider seriously, but unfortunately, given the geography of the city, there’s no way you do a storm gate that would give you broader protection.

But he still thinks it would be worth pursuing. "I don’t think it’s right to dismiss these proposals off hand," Mr. Nadler said. "They should be studied carefully, and a lot of them should be done. Maybe the storm gates, maybe not, but certainly Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn would be much better protected. And our electrical facilities. Also our subways." By protecting these critical pieces of infrastructure through a large project like sea gates, it might save the government money on other, smaller investments that would then not be necessary.

Whatever winds up being the appropriate solution, big or small, Mr. Nadler agreed with Mr. Schumer that something must be done.

"People say the worst case scenario could happen—it just did, almost," the congressman said. "It could have been a little worse. But people after Irene said, oh, all the hype, it didn’t happen. It just did. Now you have to look at all these proposals and realize these kinds of things can happen, especially with climate changes, the seas are getting warmer, it means there’s more energy for these, there’s going to be higher waves, harsher storms, more often.

:We have to protect ourselves. Things that weren’t practical in terms of the investment, now they will be."

Train drain on the L-line. (MTA/Fickr)

Update, 11/6 11:42 a.m.: The MTA just announced that the L-train tube under 14th Street has been pumped out and "damage is currently being assessed."

Original post: Since we have become your defacto North Brooklyn subway depot—just take a look at the Popular Stories box right now—here is the latest from those skinny-pants filled lines. According to the MTA's evening service advisory, the Newtown Creek tunnel on the G-train has been pumped out while pumping work remains for the L.

As we previously reported, no tunnel saw more flooding than the L, which is among the reasons the MTA left it until the end of its recovery operations to pump out, because the more water, the longer it takes. Among the reasons the 4/5/6 and 2/3 were up and running so quickly is they needed minimal pumping. They also carry more people, making them, arguably a greater priority. Just don't tell that to the people living in North Brooklyn.

Meanwhile, the G-train may be clear of water, but signals still need to be repaired from what rushed in, which was salt water, remember, and thus more severe. Once repaired, the signals need to be tested. It does not appear that there will be G service tomorrow morning as a result, but the MTA has surprised us before, so keep those fingers cross.

In the meantime, remember, the B43 gets you pretty darn close to the bridge into Queens, and thus the No. 7 train to Midtown, so don't get stuck relying on the B62 to get you to work tomorrow. The MTA did say it will be running extra B62 buses to compensate for the absent subway service, as well.

The agency also reiterated the importance of getting these lines up and running again. "The top subway priority is now restoring service on the G and L trains through northwest Brooklyn, where alternate service on the J and M trains was extremely crowded," the statement read.

Meanwhile, service has expanded on the A/C lines, with the A-train running once again to 207th Street in Inwood, the last stop on the line. The C-train will start running to 168th Street in Harlem once again as a result. The B-line will also begin running, from Bedford Park in the Bronx all the way down to Kings Highway in Brooklyn, though neither that or the Q yet reaches Coney Island, which was hard-hit by the storm.

The MTA is also trying to figure out how to increase 1-train service through signal adjustments in order to allow for more riders on the West Side, where there was considerable crowding on the Seventh Avenue line during this morning's commute.

Deja vu: NOLA and NYC. (Getty)

How many more lives will be lost and how much damage will it take for us to realize that Sandy was part of a continuing menacing pattern of extreme weather events that are here to stay? In 2005 it was Katrina, last year Irene and now Sandy. But around the world, extreme weather has crippled nations and destroyed property since 2000. You may think this has been going on forever, since the time of Noah, but this destruction has been escalating, with more damage every year than any similar span in recorded history.

Insurance losses in the U.S. averaged $9 billion in the 1980s. Katrina alone cost nearly $100 billion, with an average of nearly $40 billion a year in the 2000s. If we include Japan, the destruction to the globe in the last couple of years is unparalleled. Is this global warming or something else? No matter what the cause, there is a clear pattern of severe weather causing catastrophic human losses. This pattern, according to the National Research Council, is going to continue. We have to do more than hope it won’t happen here (wherever here is). The data indicates that a disaster is coming to you, or near you, in the near future, if you live in an urbanized coastal area. More than 60 percent of all Americans do.

So, what to do?

First, like anyone in trouble, we have to acknowledge that we have a problem. Our problem is that since World War II, we have built too much of our housing and commercial structures the wrong way and in the wrong places. We have built single-family homes on slabs, so that when severe rains come, the water washes through our structures in raging torrents, destroying everything in its path. We have covered over too many wetlands on the presumption that floods occur only once every 100 years. We have grown too dependent on a cheap-fuel, high-energy living pattern that is crippled by any loss of power from a fragile electric grid.

Secondly, we have created a land-use pattern that we cannot support. We build in areas too close to the sea or to large bodies of water. We even create bodies of water near homes. This is a recipe for the trouble we see. Third, we are forced to evacuate our homes in times of danger by going out on highways that were not built for this, when the most intelligent evacuation should be into shelters near where we live, work and go to school. Finally, we have not built any backup systems for our fragile, over-taxed utilities. So in times of danger, these systems fail when we need them the most.

Here is what New York, what America, must consider going forward.

After Sandy, we need to reposition and not merely rebuild. Sandy presents the ideal opportunity to think about reorganizing Lower Manhattan with stronger, smarter—and higher—transportation modes. Building tidal barriers around the tip of the city is important, as well as creating better links between New York and New Jersey so evacuation and train travel can create more options for human movement in good and bad times.

We need to develop local power generation systems interdependent with the grid so we can generate local power for days and perhaps weeks using solar, wind and even tidal power generation. Every neighborhood needs to have local clean water cisterns. In San Francisco and Japanese cities, this is standard, and now in New York and throughout the nation it should be too. How else to provide local fresh water for an extended period of time, not only for drinking but also fighting fires quickly using local trained volunteers?

We have to commence a strategic retreat from many coastal areas, particularly in the Carolinas, Virginia and parts of New York and several other states. This may take 50 or more years, but it has to begin with offering people new resettlement options post-disaster rather than reinforcing current dangerous patterns. Even for those who elect to stay, the rebuilding should be more resilient, with deeper setbacks and barriers. Moreover, we must use state and federal rules to curb coastal building.

These ideas may not be popular, but a century ago, creating our great National Parks system was not popular in many quarters, either. Our parks are the envy of the world. We save nature. Now, saving nature and saving lives have to work together to make stronger communities in a stronger nation.

Edward J. Blakely is Honorary Professor of Urban Policy at the University of Sydney. He headed the Office of Recovery Administration and Development after Hurricane Katrina. His book, My Storm (Univ. of Penn. Press, 2011) recounts his experiences in New Orleans.

The road to recovery. (Kristen Artz/Mayor's Office)

A storm from the tropics blew through town last week. It left wintry weather in its wake, along with a path of destruction that has left as many as 40,000 New Yorkers temporarily homeless. Half of them are expected to be unable to go home for weeks or months, assuming they even have homes to return to. Serious damage to heat and electrical infrastructure in apartment buildings and homes on the waterfront are among the most serious issues that have created a housing crisis for the city following Hurricane Sandy.

"Many of the fears we have is that with cold weather coming, we have to make sure people can stay warm," Mayor Bloomberg said at an afternoon press briefing. "Among the hardest hit are the Rockaways and Staten Island. A lot of places aren't gonna have electricity but are going to experience the cold. That is the next big problem for us."

At a separate briefing with the mayor and FEMA this morning, Governor Cuomo echoed the Bloomberg administration's concerns. "People don't like to leave their homes, but the reality is going to be in the temperature, and then we are going to have tens of thousands of people who need housing solutions right away, and a variety of housing solutions," the governor said. He added that a morning meeting with local, state and federal officials was mostly spent figuring out ways to house those in need for weeks or even months.

Temperatures are expected to fall to 37 degrees tonight in the city, with a high in the mid-40s tomorrow and a low in the mid- to low-30s tomorrow night. Areas on the water are expected to be even colder, with temperatures falling into the mid-20s in the Rockaways and Coney Island.

The mayor said that once power is restored by the various utilities, from Con Ed to the Long Island Power Authority, which provides electricity to the hard-hit Rockaways, many people will be able to return home to their houses and apartments with heat and light, bringing down the estimated evacuation count from 40,000 to about 20,000. But many buildings, even once power is back, will not be operational because of damage to their internal utilities from the storm surge.

"Over the past few days, we have been going block by block to identify the issues blocking many of them from getting the power back on," the mayor said. "We're resolving many of the issues one block and even one house at a time. Even when some of the power is turned back on, the buildings are going to be out of commission for a long time because of damage to their boilers and electrical systems."

Both the mayor and the governor are stressing that people without power should go to one of the city's 15 shelters for protection from the elements. The city has also set up warming centers to help combat the conditions. "If you find yourself shivering uncontrollably or see someone who is disoriented, those are signs of hypothermia," the mayor said. "You really should get to a warm place, covered with blankets, a hot water bottle, anything you can do to get them warm quickly."

A big issue has been for public housing residents, whose buildings are aging and have fragile infrastructure. "Some 45,000 public housing residents live in the coastal areas designated as Zone A, many of them in the Rockaways," the mayor said.

The desperation of the situation was underscored by FEMA director Craig Fugate, who made it clear that many more New Yorkers have been seriously effected besides those currently without reliable shelter. "Our administration numbers give you some sense of the magnitude, but right now, as of this morning, we have 86,000 households have registered for assistance already directly deposited into those accounts is $96 million," Mr. Fugate said.

Those numbers are only expected to rise in the coming weeks as people get power back and lives return to enough normality that more claims can be filed.

"We don't have a lot of empty housing in the city, so it's hard to find it when we need it," Mayor Bloomberg said during the closing remarks of his afternoon press briefing.

At his press briefing this evening, Gov. Cuomo made a surprise announcement, actually in the middle of talking about what dismal shape the PATH train is in—there appear to be some five miles worth of flooding, the length the line under the Hudson from New York to New Jersey, so that is one thing that will probably be submerged for some time to come. But a place that will not be is the World Trade Center, which, after flooding a good 15 to 20 feet across the site only three days ago, is now dry and in working order.

"Work will recommence at the Ground Zero site tonight," Gov. Cuomo declared. I was just congratulating some of the workers; there was tremendous flooding at the Ground Zero site. We went from seeing the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel turned into a flume, we walked up the World Trade Center site, where water was cascading into the site from every imaginable angle, at such a decibel level it was disorienting. The entire site was flooded."

But through an almost miraculous, and certainly Herculean, pumping and recovery effort, led in part by the Army Corps of Engineers, the site has been cleared in a fraction of the time anticipated. "They originally anticipated it would be two to three weeks before they could get back to work," the governor said. "But instead of two to three weeks, they've gotten it done in three or four days, and the work will recommence tonight on the site, and you'll see light on again at the site."

And indeed we did on the way home, along with a few other buildings way downtown, including the Goldman Sachs headquarters, the American International Building with its red spire and 7 World Trade, with its roof lit up bright as a candle. It just so happens that earlier in the day, The Observer spotted a construction lift in operation on Larry Silverstein's World Trade Center tower 4, but it was not clear if it was an inspection or construction work.

While it could still be days, if not longer, before downtown finally gets all its lights back, it is nice to see these buildings back up, especially given their symbolic nature. "The Ground Zero site will be illuminated once again," Gov. Cuomo said. "New York goes back to work."

Mr. Chakrabarti previously served as director of the Department of City Planning's Manhattan office, so he was around when much of the waterfront planning by the Bloomberg administration, and the thousands of condos that came with it, were taking shape. Mayor Bloomberg, at least before the storm hit, was fine with things proceeding as they were on the waterfront, with little investment in new protections and infrastructure, while former deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff, who helped hatch many of these plans, wants more of both.

Mr. Chakrabarti has taken a more urgent stance. "The thing we as a city have to understand is, we've been promoting all this waterfront development, and most of that waterfront development is happening in the zone that is getting evacuated right now," he said in a telephone interview. "We're talking about thousands and thousands of housing units. It's fine for that housing to be there, but we have to figure out a way to protect it all."

But Mr. Chakrabarti also has a simple solution. Well, if the world's largest floodgates would qualify as simple.

It just so happens Mr. Chakrabarti was in Rotterdam when we reached him Monday morning. He had just gotten in on a trip with his students to study the Dutch city's reclamation of its waterfront after years of industrial semi-neglect (sound familiar?). The idea was to translate the Dutch practices into a model for a new Long Island City, buoyed by the arrival of Cornell's tech campus. "Rotterdam has some new, extraordinary examples of these new live-work environments, including urban manufacturing, housing and office space all mixed together right on the waterfront," Mr. Chakrabarti said.

But that was not the near-divine inspiration he had experienced being in the Netherlands' second-largest city, which also happens to be home to the world's largest port—one that can ill-afford to shut down, even for the foulest of storms.

"It's extraordinary to be here, because Rotterdam, in the 1990s, they built sea gates twice the size of the Eiffel Tower at the mouth of the Rhine to protect the city from storm surges," Mr. Chakrabarti explained. "I think we seriously have to think about doing this in three places probably --at the Verrazano, at Perth Amboy and at Hells Gate--to really protect the city."

The advantage of such an approach is it allows easy passage for ships while protecting the harbor during the worst incidents. After the storm surge passes, the gates reopen and life can get back to normal. No flooded basements and, especially, no flooded subways.

The costs are obviously astronomical. It was $4 billion to build the sea gate, known as Maeslantkering, or the Maelstrom Barrier, which was completed in 1997. While twice the size of the Eiffel Tower sounds big, the Verrazano Narrows is more than three times as wide as the Rhine span, and that leaves two other gates to be constructed. The cost could easily surpass $10 billion, likely making the kind of damming gates Mr. Chakrabarti is proposing the most expensive infrastructure project ever undertaken.

This is not simply a Dutch tradition. Following the North Sea Flood of 1953, the British built a flood barrier in the Thames. It did not open until 1984,  at a cost of £534 million, which would be £1.4 billion today, or $2.25 billion. So again, not cheap, but also important enough that some of our global coastal rivals have undertaken the investment.

In light of the projections of $20 billion in damages and lost productivity resulting from Superstorm Sandy, it makes more and more sense. Whether this is simply a "storm of the century"-type event or the new normal in an age of global warming can be debated, but even protecting the city from one more storm could make the investment worthwhile.

"Climate change is here, and we clearly have to acknowledge that these unusual weather events are going to become more and more frequent, and we're going to have to do something about it because we could lose much more than we're going to save if we don't invest in the right infrastructure," Mr. Chakrabarti said.

And he has an ingenious idea to help protect the city while at the same time paying for the infrastructure to protect it. In addition to the sea gates, barrier islands would help protect the city from flooding and storm surges. But rather than building small, disaggregate land masses, Mr. Chakrabarti proposes large islands and peninsulas that can accommodate new development on them. The investment in these new spaces would generate millions, even billions of dollars in tax revenues that would help pay for the critical waterfront infrastructure the city needs.

Specifically, Mr. Chakrabarti came up with a proposal known as LoLo, a 20-acre stetch of in-fill created using dredgings from the harbor—a job the Army Corps already has to do on a regular basis, so why not put that earth to a productive use? Over time, LoLo would be built up around Lower Manhattan, eventually connecting it to Governors Island, which would also become a more vibrant place as it would no longer require a ferry to get to.

"I think we just have to think of this in different terms," Mr. Chakrabarti said. "And a proposition like LoLo, it could pay for itself. It would be interesting to see if people think twice about that kind of action because we're going to need to generate the revenue to invest in that kind of infrastructure, and that could do it."

This is nothing new, either, as Lower Manhattan has spread and spread over the years, most recently with Battery Park City. While that area has become a flood zone because it was not built for these kinds of floods, LoLo could help mitigate the poor planning of the past. And it would help get us back in touch with our Dutch roots!

"They really don't treat the water in this kind of eggshell kind of way that they do in the United States," Mr. Chakrabarti said. "They reclaim the land, use dredging material, do a whole variety of things to reshape the shoreline, like we first did when we were New Amsterdam. The Dutch have unrivaled experience in dealing with flooding. They really know how to shape the water's edge, and I think we really have to rethink the way we deal with the water's edge, given what's happened with Sandy."

And the city, or at least the state, may finally be prepared to do that. Moments ago, Governor Cuomo said during a press briefing he believed something had to be done. "We have to take into consideration reforming, modifying our built environment, our infrastructure. This city, this region is very susceptible to coastal flooding. It's not something we had to deal with with any frequency whatsoever. So we're not built in a way that has the built in protections.

"I think it's a longer conversation, but I think part of learning from this is that climate change is a reality, extreme weather is a reality, it is a reality that we are vulnerable, and if we are going to do our job as elected officials, we are going to have to think about how to redesign as we go forward so we don't incur this type of damage as we go forward."

Here's one idea for you, Mr. Governor.

While The Observer shot a number of photos of the flooding in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn in the height of the storm, other parts of the city were heavily affected as well. In the gallery on the left, you can find a selection of what a few photographers were able to capture during and after the storm.

A soggy Bowery after a Feb. water mane break. (Bowery Boogie)

If you happen to live on the city's now-glitzy skid row, you should be high and dry, at least for the time being, so fear not for a slip-up during the mayor's storm update this morning. If you caught it, Mayor Bloomberg said the Bowery had flooded, when in fact he meant The Battery, according to his staff.

"There has already been some flooding already in the Bowery, as well as the FDR and some of the Rockaways," Mayor Bloomberg said. "We expect surge levels of 6 to 11 feet. A surge of 9 to 10 feet is possible along Coney Island and the Rockaways. And a surge of 11 to 12 feet may occur at the Battery Monday evening."

The press office confirmed after the storm briefing that he meant the Battery, not the Bowery. It seemed possible, perhaps there was a water mane break or some other disaster. However, if it was simply a storm surge, the city would be in serious trouble were the Bowery flooded, given that the infamous roadway is beyond even Zone C, the area expected to flood during a Category 4 hurricane. So basically, we're talking about Noah's flood.

That said, heavy rains could still leave the streets soaked, so be sure to wear your designer duckies if you head out into the Frankenstorm.