Lessons Learned in the Wake of Sandy: Saving Transit Means Taking the High Ground--Literally

Theo Spencer, Senior Advocate, Climate Center, New York

As the six month anniversary of Hurricane Sandy rolls by, the passage of time is giving us a clearer picture of what preventive measures really worked. Thanks to an excellent series running this week on WNYC, we can see that New York did a good job of protecting its trains and subways cars while New Jersey didn't.

The stories, part of WNYC's Life After Sandy series, detail among other things how New Jersey used incorrect data and maps to determine a safe place to store it's trains during the coming storm.

As WNYC's Kate Hinds and Andrea Bernstein note:

If officials had entered the right numbers, they would have predicted what actually happened: a storm surge that engulfed hundreds of rail cars, some of them brand new, costing over $120 million in damage and thrusting the system's passengers into months of frustrating delays.

But the fate of NJ Transit's trains - over a quarter of the agency's fleet - didn't just hang on one set of wrong inputs. It followed years of missed warnings, failures to plan, and lack of coordination under Governor Chris Christie, who has expressed ambivalence about preparing for climate change while repeatedly warning New Jerseyans not to underestimate the dangers of severe storms.

The reporters found a tale of two agencies: one in New York that planned well in advance for extreme weather events, and on in New Jersey that didn't.

The stories are part of a lengthy investigation in partnership with The Record newspaper (Bergen, NJ), and New Jersey Public Radio. Reporters looked at hours of testimony by the (greater New York) Metropolitan Transit Authority and NJ Transit officials, as well as hundreds of pages of internal documents. They also interviewed transit officials and climate and weather experts.

When reporters for WNYC and The Record asked NJ Transit officials for their official extreme weather planning documents, they both received the same thing-a three page memo. That memo appeared to be the extent of NJ Transit's plan, and all but the first page had been blacked out.

NJ Transit's basic response was that the yard where their trains were stored had never flooded before, and that no one could have predicted the severity of Sandy. That's not sitting too well with New Jersey Transit riders who endured months of delays in the wake of the storm, and have seen little evidence of a more enlightened approach to extreme weather preparedness.

New York's MTA, on the other hand, developed detailed plans to prepare for an extreme flooding and storm surges. The plans involved moving trains to higher ground, and pulling electrical signals from tunnels prone to flooding. Thanks to such measures, the MTA was able to get its systems up and running soon after the storm, and only 19 of its 8,000 rail cars were flooded.

Back in 2008, the agency prepared a forward-looking report and plan: MTA Adaptations to Climate Change--A Categorical Imperative. Among the actions recommended in the plan:

Identify MTA facilities and programs subject to climate risk; Identify main climate change impacts to MTA facilities and programs; Apply future climate change scenarios by time slice; Develop implementation plans, including timeframes for implementation; Monitor and reassess adaptation strategies according to unfolding of climate change and developments in climate science...

You get the point. The MTA's assessment was part of the PlaNYC which represents probably the single best climate preparedness initiative in the United States. Post-Sandy MTA and New York officials are looking to future impacts and how best to prepare for them.

New Jersey, and other states and cities, should take note.

http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/tspencer/lessons_learned_in_the_wake

Watch out for the Watch Dog: Climate Threat to the Federal Government.

Theo Spencer, Senior Advocate, Climate Center, New York

Earlier this week the Government Accountability Office (GAO) added Climate Change to its "High Risk" list. The agency biennially updates its list of programs and operations at "high" risk for waste, fraud, abuse, mismanagement or needing broad-based transformations.

The agency noted:

Climate change poses significant financial risks to the federal government, which owns extensive infrastructure, such as defense installations; insures property through the National Flood Insurance Program; and provides emergency aid in response to natural disasters. GAO added this area because the federal government is not well positioned to address the fiscal exposure presented by climate change and needs a government-wide strategic approach with strong leadership to manage related risks.

The GAO acknowledged that policymakers see climate adaptations measures as a risk management strategy to protect people and businesses, "but, as we reported in 2009, the federal government's emerging adaptation activities were carried out in an ad hoc manner and were not well coordinated across federal agencies, let alone with state and local governments."

The GAO is the federal government's non-partisan watchdog agency, and its investigations are taken very seriously. Thus it was sobering to read in the GAO release this week that:

In May 2011, we found no coherent strategic government-wide approach to climate change funding and that federal officials do not have a shared understanding of strategic government-wide priorities At that time, we recommended that the appropriate entities within the Executive Office of the President clearly establish federal strategic climate change priorities, including the roles and responsibilities of the key federal entities, taking into consideration the full range of climate-related activities within the federal government. The relevant federal entities have not directly addressed this recommendation.

So what does the GAO say is at stake here?

The federal government as property owner/manager-- The federal government manages about 650 million acres-29 percent of the 2.27 billion acres of U.S. land- for a wide variety of purposes, such as recreation, grazing, timber, and fish and wildlife.

Agriculture and housing-- The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation don't factor climate change into their planning and decision making. GAO in its release this week noted that they had warned as far back as 2007 these two massive insurance programs were at much greater financial risk due to climate impacts like increased extreme weather events, and that the agencies responsible for them had done next to nothing to better understand these risks. Those agencies have said little about their increased financial exposure since then.

Increased risk to states and localities-They don't have enough local data on things like temperature and precipitation projections to justify spending money to prepare for a changed future, the GAO reported in 2009. The GAO called on the White House to develop plans to help states and towns get this much needed data. Very little of that data is currently available.

Appropriate Disaster Response-Disaster relief money comes from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), but Congress woefully underfunds the agency's relief budget, leaving the government with vast financial exposure. To wit, the GAO reported in September of 2012 that disaster declarations have increased to a record of 98 in fiscal year 2011 compared with 65 in 2004. Over that period, FEMA obligated more than $80 billion in federal assistance for disasters. FEMA currently does not require states to consider climate change in the emergency management plans they must file to be eligible for federal funding. NRDC has petitioned FEMA to change that, and we are still waiting for a response.

Dangerous Disorganization-In 2009 GAO recommended the White House produce a over-arching climate adaptation plan, "including the establishment of clear roles, responsibilities, and working relationships among federal, state, and local governments." Yet in 2011 the watchdog agency found "no coherent strategic government-wide approach to climate change funding and that federal officials do not have a shared understanding of strategic government-wide priorities." Not much has changed since then.

So what does GAO recommend the feds do to limit the financial exposure of the government to climate impacts? More of the same, but some items are worth repeating:

• A government-wide strategic approach with strong leadership and the authority to manage climate change risks that encompasses the entire range of related federal activities and addresses all key elements of strategic planning.
• More information to understand and manage federal insurance programs' long-term exposure to climate change and analyze the potential impacts of an increase in the frequency or severity of weather-related events on their operations.
• A government-wide approach for providing (1) the best available climate-related data for making decisions at the state and local level and (2) assistance for translating available climate-related data into information that officials need to make decisions.
• Improved criteria for assessing a jurisdiction's capability to respond and recover from a disaster without federal assistance and to better apply lessons from past experience when developing disaster cost estimates.

We'll see what happens.

There is some good news coming from some parts of the government, though. On Tuesday President Obama in his State of the Union speech said:

I urge this Congress to pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change, like the one John McCain and Joe Lieberman worked on together a few years ago

But if Congress won't act soon to protect future generations, I will. I will direct -- (applause) -- I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take now and in the future to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy.

That means the Environmental Protection Agency continuing to protect the air we breathe and the environment we live in by limiting climate pollution from the number one single source: power plants.

As my colleague Dan Lashof recently wrote:

There are many, many actions the executive branch can take in the near term to help fight global warming. The most important of them is limiting pollution from the nation's existing fossil-fuel power plants. They're responsible for almost 40 percent of our country's carbon pollution. And an NRDC proposal released in December shows how, using its existing authority under the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency can cut power plant carbon dioxide emissions by 26 percent by 2020 and 34 percent by 2025 compared to 2005 levels.

Let's hope we see some action soon. The risks are very clear.

Thanks to Kelly Henderson for her assistance in preparing this blog entry.

http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/tspencer/watch_out_for_the_watch_dog