London has had barriers on the Thames since 1984. (Getty)

It's starting to seem like Mayor Bloomberg is the only one who doesn't think storm barriers are a worthwhile investment. Not only do Governor Cuomo, MTA chief Joe Lhota and both Jerry Nadler and Chuck Schumer think it's a good idea, but so do 80 percent of New York City voters, according to a new Quinnipiac poll out today.

They were asked, specifically, if it was worth spending billions—no exact amount, or source of funds beyond the federal and state governments was given—on new waterfront infrastructure. Only 14 percent thought it was not worth the cost. Support was even higher when the pollsters asked if the cost was justified it if the storm protections could "reduce the cost of disruption and restoration." Then, 88 percent supported the new infrastructure, compared to 6 percent who did not support.

But the whole "worth it" debate is at the heart of the issue. Mayor Bloomberg has said time and again he does not believe sufficient protections could be built, at least at a cost making such efforts worth it. One person who believes this will happen anyway, because of American political vagaries, good and ill, is Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman.

Hurricane Sandy was a toll paid for procrastination. The good news? We don’t need to send a bunch of Nobel laureates into the desert now, hoping they come up with some new gizmo to save the planet. Solutions are at hand. Money shouldn’t be a problem either, considering the hundreds of billions of dollars, and more lives, another Sandy or two will cost.

So the problem is not technological or, from a long-term cost-benefit perspective, financial.

Rather it is the existential challenge to the messy democracy we’ve devised. The hardest part of what lies ahead won’t be deciding whether to construct Eiffel Tower-size sea walls across the Verrazano Narrows and Hell Gate, or overhauling the city’s sewage and storm water system, which spews toxic waste into rivers whenever a couple of inches of rain fall because the sea levels have already risen so much. These are monumental tasks.

But more difficult still will be staring down the pain, dislocation and inequity that promise to upend lives, undo communities and shake assumptions about city life and society. More than requiring the untangling of colossal red tape, saving New York and the whole region for the centuries ahead will become a test of civic unity.

So while Mr. Kimmelman agrees with the majority that big infrastructure must be built, he also agrees with the mayor, that so, too, must smart construction—or no construction. "At this point there’s no logic, politics and sentiment aside, to FEMA simply rebuilding single-family homes on barrier islands like the Rockaways, where they shouldn’t have been built in the first place, and like bowling pins will tumble again after the next hurricane strikes."

Still, tell that to all the people whose lives have been upended by the storm. It will be like swallowing a bitter pill after be socked in the stomach.

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."

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.