♪♪♪

-If we understand how nature is trying to shape New York City,

then maybe we can make New York City

fit into the nature of the place

and then, that way, make it possible to live in the city

into the next 400 years

and maybe the 400 years after that.

-From the sky, it's clear that New York City was boldly built

right to the water's edge.

It's a coastal city surrounded by water on all sides.

♪♪♪

Just a century ago, there was more cargo tonnage and people

passing through this port than all other major harbors

in the country combined.

With 578 miles of coastline,

all that water is now New York's greatest threat.

-The real challenge for us in the 21st century is,

can we be as wise as we are smart?

We're so smart about so many things.

We're so clever and yet, somehow,

when it actually comes to making hard decisions,

the wise decisions based on what we know,

we have trouble doing that.

I don't know how many more examples nature needs to give us

to do the right thing.

-The world's great cities

face threats they have never before encountered.

New York...

Tokyo...

London...

Miami...

The threats come from the sea,

from above and from below.

These are the problems and their solutions...

♪♪♪

...for when the water comes.

[ Waves crashing ]

-A Mayor of the City of New York

has ordered a mandatory evacuation.

All residents are urged to comply

with this evacuation request.

-In 2012, superstorm Sandy catches New York by surprise.

The city is flooded with 1.6 billion gallons of water

containing raw and partially treated sewage.

The storm surge, measuring over 13 feet,

engulfs New York with over 700,000 tons of debris.

It is the worst natural disaster in the city's history.

Trever Holland is a resident and an attorney

in a neighborhood called Two Bridges.

-It's on the Lower East Side,

and it's called Two Bridges because our neighborhood

is located between the two bridges,

the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge.

-The median household income

in this inner-city neighborhood of 38,000 people

is just over $21,000.

That's well under half of the average median income

of New York City. -It's an affordable

neighborhood, working-class individuals.

We're in a very diverse neighborhood,

one of the most diverse in Manhattan.

Different economic levels. Different races.

Different creeds. Different religions.

I mean, it's one of the reasons why I love living here.

-Two Bridges is situated on New York's floodplain.

At five to 10 feet above sea level,

parts of it will be completely underwater

if sea levels rise by six feet

in the next century, as predicted.

-Someone had talked about storm amnesia,

and I think that does happen

because you forget how bad it was.

One of the more vivid scenes I remember

is that we take a look in the backyard area

where our playground is...

There were three or four homeless people,

who didn't get the notice that a storm was coming.

They don't have cell phones. They're not watching the news.

They just realize that the water is rising.

And they were basically trapped in an area

and they were standing in water

trying to figure out how to get out of this.

I remember that vividly thinking,

"How many people didn't get the news flash

that a storm is coming?"

And they were just sleeping along the river

and then all of a sudden the water came up.

♪♪♪

These are porters.

They stayed overnight. They had no choice.

This one is actually South Street.

This was early in the storm.

The water had just come over the edges.

When you think of Manhattan,

you kind of think, "Oh, apartment buildings."

You don't really think that, you know, a building flooding,

especially in our particular neighborhood.

This was the point where

we could no longer enter the street.

I mean, this is the side of the building

and that's actually the sidewalk you can see on the right side.

It had already gone up to the four-foot wall

that is outside of our building.

And, looking down from the street,

a sea of water, or a river of water.

-Two Bridges got slammed by the storm surge in 2012,

and it will be slammed again.

-We know that there's gonna be another big hurricane.

That hurricane could come next year,

and they're gonna blame the politicians

for not acting fast enough.

We have to recognize that climate change is here.

We know that there's gonna be sea-level rise

and we know the storms are getting more intense.

We should find ways, have a plan,

for people to live in a safe way.

We're so creative about our science

but, somehow, we haven't really brought

our full suite of creativity to this question.

♪♪♪

This place is on the edge, it's on the edge of the continent,

and that's what makes New York City so special,

and that also is what's threatening New York City

going into the future.

-New York City faces two challenges.

The first is the inevitable fact

that the city lies in a hurricane zone,

and storms will continue to come no matter what.

-My kids are 10 and 15.

I know that they're gonna have to live with this

the rest of their lives.

I think this is something that is embedded in us

as people who have had to live through it.

-The second is rising sea levels.

-I think that people in New York understand

that sea level is rising and that it's a critical problem.

How much it's rising? And how we'll adapt?

Those are still open questions.

-The challenges are clear, but what are the solutions?

How can New York adapt and survive?

-We're gonna go out and we're gonna just swap one instrument,

put in a new, fresh instrument

so we get good-quality measurement.

-Philip Orton works on the front line

of the effort to measure the rising seas.

He monitors the Hudson River, gathering present-day data

to predict and maybe prevent future catastrophe.

-We've got a buoy offshore.

It's got a SONN, an instrument that has many sensors on it,

that's measuring pH, the oxygen, salinity of the water,

temperature of the water, water elevation...

There's instruments all up and down the Hudson.

It'll send the data to the Internet

which we take into our database.

We collect the data for the forecast model.

Much like with the weather forecast,

you can merge the best information you have

to form the initial conditions

in order to launch your next forecast.

-These gauges help Orton understand

which parts of the city are most at risk

when the next big storm or hurricane hits.

♪♪♪

After Sandy, Orton's data was used in modeling

to see what New York would look like

with six feet of sea level rise by 2100.

-So this is a satellite map showing New York City

without any flooding.

Shown here is Broad Channel, The Rockaways, Lower Manhattan,

and over here is Staten Island.

If you get six feet of sea-level rise,

the everyday average high tide

is gonna start flooding a lot of neighborhoods.

It's high tide in 2100.

This is now showing tidal flooding of places like

South Street Seaport, Lower Manhattan,

a lot of flooding around Jamaica Bay,

also on Staten Island.

Hundreds of thousands of people being flooded at that point.

It's uninhabitable when you start getting flooded

so many times per year.

That's tidal flooding, but then there's also storm surges.

We can also look at what 2100 would hold

if we had a very severe storm like Hurricane Sandy,

plus six feet of sea level rise.

A much larger percentage of the coastal zone is flooded,

the West Side of Manhattan, the Tribeca district,

Wall Street, Battery Park, Lower East Side.

-Sandy flooded 51 square miles --

17% of the city.

With six feet of sea rise,

those numbers would be closer to 100 square miles

or about 1/3 of the city underwater.

-This kind of flooding would be catastrophic.

There's massive infrastructural elements

for a city of 8 million people that are in the flood zones.

Transportation system, the tunnels, the subways,

the electrical system,

and of course a lot of these things were flooded

just by Hurricane Sandy,

so if you envision six feet of sea-level rise,

then a great deal more is at risk at that point.

The whole city could be disabled in this kind of flood scenario.

It's almost certain if we don't

reduce our carbon-dioxide emissions

that we'll have sea level rise of that scale

in the 22nd century.

New York City's 300 years old.

At this rate, we won't make it to another 300 years.

♪♪♪

-When we designed and built New York,

we did not think of floods and storms.

-New York's century-old subway system

is a disturbing example of the challenges the city faces

from rising seas and powerful storms.

The subway moves almost 6 million people every day,

the largest transit service in the country,

with 840 miles of track --

enough to stretch all the way to Chicago.

But it's now in critical need of maintenance

as New York adapts to the perils of climate change.

-This is the South Ferry station.

Water entered actually through this entrance

and went all the way down the stairs...

...and flooded the entire station.

There was actually three, four feet of water on the mezzanine.

Everybody was surprised that the whole station got flooded.

Nobody anticipated that much water coming in

and actually flooding the whole station.

First of all, there was urgency to get service back,

so there was urgency to get all of the water out,

pump everything.

There was like...

7 or 8 million gallons of water

that had to be pumped out,

and it took weeks to pump it out.

So, once they pumped out all of the water,

then the station was assessed to see what was damaged

and what had to be done.

♪♪♪

-Joe Lhota is the chairman of

the Metropolitan Transit Authority.

He says that the city's 14 submerged subway tunnels

are in jeopardy due to storm surge and rising seas.

-The subway system was built

over about 115 years ago now.

And when they opened it,

I don't think they ever envisioned the rising tides

that we're experiencing now in the 21st century.

Pretty much all of our tunnels were damaged.

Not just to the actual rail equipment

but to the side of the walls.

We had South Ferry station here in Lower Manhattan

that was pretty much brand-new, completely renovated

that was completely destroyed.

The water went all the way up to the steps,

its two stories below ground, it was completely flooded.

We need to rebuild the system.

-Dr. Klaus Jacob is a disaster-risk and climate expert

In 2011, he released a study

that warned it would only take a single superstorm,

combined with sea-level rise,

to flood and destroy the city's most vulnerable subway tunnels.

-We did the studies in close cooperation

with the engineering staff

of the Metropolitan Transit Authority,

whose subdivision runs the subway system.

Looking not only at the present,

but for the 2030s, 2050s, 2080s

and the end of the century.

Our focus really was climate change

and how would New York City adapt to that rising sea level

with storms superimposed on top.

Our results showed that the Achilles' heel of New York City

would be the subway system.

We had computed that it would take only about 40 minutes

to fill whatever can be filled.

But if you have six feet of water already in addition,

a city like New York City has no choice but to take action.

-The subway is just one of

several critical infrastructure assets

New York City has to protect

from rising sea levels and powerful storms.

-It's $7- to $8-billion problem.

It's not just the subways --

we also have numerous bridges and tunnels.

We also have the commuter rail lines,

Metro-North and the Lower Allen railroad

that we need to make resilient.

Because that's how people get to and from work,

to and from school.

They're the arteries that allow

the lifeblood of the metropolitan area

to stick together.

-New York's population is at its highest in history

and shows no sign of declining.

8.6 million people now call the five boroughs home

and that population has risen 5.5% since 2010 --

leading the state in population growth.

-I have looked at the evolution of New York City

over its 400 years of existence.

It has undergone so many mutations.

I mean, it did not look anything like it looks now.

Why should it look in 100 years anything like it looks now?

-Clues to the future challenges New York City faces

may be found in its past --

in urban development that started over 300 years ago.

-I remember getting a call from Bill

not that long after Hurricane Sandy,

and he asked if we have maps which show,

in a really dramatic fashion,

how the landfill in New York City

had an impact on the severity of the storm.

-My name is Bill Johnson.

In 2012, I was director of the state-wide mapping program,

part of the Division of Homeland Security & Emergency Services.

They were hoping that the maps would help them understand

the underlying issues related to the storm.

And so, we started thinking about

how we could help her with this work.

-My reaction to this kind of request was excitement

in that we had means to contribute

to helping the city become a more resilient place.

-We started thinking about overlays of aerial imagery

with historic maps.

-We had all of these maps here in digital format already

and we had them stretched over the same geographic grid

so that they lined up when we compared them.

-Those were the raw ingredients we needed.

We had an accurate representation

of everything that had changed

between 1609 and 2012 as evidenced in an aerial photo.

So, when we overlay this 1860 map on the 1767,

what's immediately apparent is

that there's a tremendous expansion.

Here's the 1767 shoreline I'm tracing with my finger.

So, all of this from here out to here is new.

We overlay that on the modern map of Manhattan,

and you can see how much of Lower Manhattan

is actually constructed on the man-made, reclaimed land.

-An area which was formerly undeveloped

is the scene of a project in which is employment is provided

for both skilled and unskilled workers.

A long bulkhead was built

to reclaim land from the waters of the bay.

-Almost four square miles of modern-day Manhattan

is built on landfill added all along the city's coasts.

-We took the Sandy storm-surge data and overlaid it on top

to see if there was alignment between the man-made lands

and where the flooding occurred from Sandy.

And what we can see

is that it very dramatically aligns with the man-made area.

What this really reveals

is that the flooding from superstorm Sandy

is largely man-made.

The flooding occurred largely as a result

of 400 years of human activity

that basically created a new floodplain.

And that floodplain is densely filled with

modern, urban infrastructure --

subway tunnels, power-plants --

and that's where we saw the damage

from flooding from Sandy.

-The reclaimed land Johnson identifies

is a critical part of the U.S. economy.

Banking, finance, technology, communication, insurance --

more Fortune 500 companies have offices here

than anywhere else on the planet.

-We are the financial capital of the country,

if not the world,

we are the center of arts and media.

Many of the media companies for this country,

if not the world, are headquartered here.

We have to get it right because of what we mean

to the economy of the country and the economy of the world.

And we need to do better.

-Despite dire warnings,

63% of New Yorkers who were under mandatory evacuation

stay put through Sandy.

Many stay because they have no choice.

-That's typical in a lot of the affordable neighborhoods

in New York City, and it's a stark contrast

to a lot of the other neighborhoods.

People just don't have the resources to leave.

They shelter in place

and they're used to sheltering in place

during the typical disasters that we've had in New York.

Where are they gonna go?

-The city has created new evacuation zones

that can accommodate 3 million New Yorkers.

-You don't want to put people's lives at risk.

You have hundreds of thousands of people,

if not millions of people affected

by the decision to evacuate.

It is costly as well.

You're opening shelters, there's an economic impact

but you have to say life safety is the most important thing.

There's certainly always going to be a challenge

with people making that decision --

do they want to leave their homes?

And the best thing you can do

is tell people you have to take this seriously.

-But evacuation is a band-aid solution

for a life-threatening problem --

rising sea levels that will make parts of the city

permanently uninhabitable,

unless innovative engineering can make a difference.

That takes political will.

-My name is Dan Zarrilli.

I'm the chief resilience officer

and the senior director for climate policy and programs

here in the mayor's office.

There's been a lot of activity to make sure that we are

more aware of what it means to live by the coast

and that sometimes you may get wet

but we're continuing to invest and make sure that

we are able to bounce back quicker from those events

and that we are building a stronger New York City

at the end of this.

The vulnerabilities aren't just something

that's going to show up in 100 years.

They're here, they're now,

and we need to invest to mitigate those risks

and that means that we're looking at a full range

of coastal-defense investments.

We're implementing them, new building code regulations,

new zoning code regulations, upgrading our infrastructure.

-In the search for solutions to save the city,

Dan Zarrilli has turned to the private sector.

-We are not an infrastructure-forward country

right now. -Vishaan Chakrabarti

is one of the architects and urban thinkers

who is tackling the problem head on.

-The last time we were was under President Eisenhower.

-The highway construction program initiated by Ike

is the biggest peace-time enterprise ever undertaken.

It will cost tens of billions. -That was the last time

this nation moved a quantum leap forward

in terms of its infrastructure and we haven't done it since.

-The elimination of waste spending

made a balanced budget possible. -As much as I love New York,

our biggest problem in my mind

is that we have substandard infrastructure

that's over 100 years old.

I think we really need to step back and holistically look at

all the infrastructure in the city.

Do we have train stations that function properly?

Do we have subways that can run in these situations?

In the world's richest country,

and the richest city of the world's richest country,

are we gonna say that we're not gonna do something about this?

-The question remains, does New York City really need

to spend huge sums on expensive mega-projects

to protect itself from rising sea levels?

The answer may lie in a vault in Massachusetts.

Historical records reveal evidence

of previous mega-storms in New York,

and researchers look for patterns to determine

if they are getting more frequent and worse.

-This is the sea-floor-samples lab.

It's a national archive of all the sediment cores

that have been taken over the last several decades.

-Jeff Donnelly is a senior scientist

at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

-There are samples from all over the world.

Tens of thousands of them.

We maintain this archive so that scientists can come

and resample cores that may have been taken

long before they were even born.

-These core-sediment samples

were taken by scientists in New York, dating back to 1721.

-One of the things that makes New York especially vulnerable

to hurricane strikes is the sort of shape of the coastline there.

You've got the bight

where New York and New Jersey come together.

As a storm comes up the eastern seaboard,

it's focusing water into that bight

and causing greater levels of storm surge.

-Just like tree rings can tell the story of climate change,

core-sediment samples offer clear signs

of powerful hurricanes across the past 300 years.

-You can see these really distinctive sand layers here

that are deposited within the salt marsh peat

and it's these layers that tell us about

the high-energy event that occurred,

so it's hurricane waves and storm surge

overtopping the beach

transporting the beach sand into the salt marsh.

We already had well-documented the 1821 hurricane

but didn't really have a very good modern analogue

for which we had modern measurements.

Hurricane Sandy provided an opportunity

to do a comparison with these earlier events.

We know from the documentary record that

the storm surge for 1821 was actually even higher than Sandy.

It was probably about 14, 15 feet worth of storm surge.

The 1821 hurricane hit

when sea levels were about two-feet lower.

-Every century, the city gets slammed.

-You don't even need the bigger and badder storm than 1821,

you have 1821 come back,

you've already gotta add two feet to that

just because of the sea-level rise that's occurred since then.

-Donnelly's findings confirm

superstorm Sandy was not the exception, but the rule --

common to every century.

In fact, the storm surge in 1821

was 1 1/2 times the height and strength of Sandy.

-They're more of an order of once every 70, 80, 100 years.

-New York's population then was just over 120,000 people --

most of whom did not live on the water's edge.

-In the next century, sea level is forecast to rise

at least three more feet, so you can imagine

how much more infrastructure and people are at risk

as every foot sea level rises.

-Donnelly's findings confirm

that New York has always been hit by hurricanes.

The next storm is coming, and more people than ever

will be living along New York's coasts when the city floods.

♪♪♪

This is how New York City's coast looked in 1821,

when the last mega-storm before Sandy hit --

stark, wild, flat and vulnerable.

It's a salt marsh in New Jersey, 20 miles from Manhattan.

♪♪♪

-It's interesting to know that sea level goes up and goes down

but if you want to correlate it with climate,

you need to know when.

-Horton and his team also use core-sediment samples

to research the prehistoric climate of New York.

But instead of focusing on the patterns of sand layers,

they look at microscopic organisms to determine

if sea levels have risen dramatically

in the prehistoric past.

-The four meters of sediment represents approximately

the last 2,000 years of Earth's history.

It's a nice sample.

We take these cores back

and we try and record precisely how sea level has changed.

Has it accelerated? Has it decelerated?

And then correlate those with changes in climate.

♪♪♪

The microfossils that we're looking at under the microscope

are single-cell organisms known as foraminifera.

Okay, let me have a look.

-Horton's looking for microscopic fossils

that come from the marsh when water is at its highest

and lowest.

The presence of these fossils

gives a clear picture of changing sea levels

across hundreds of years.

-So, based upon the changes in the abundance

of any individual species

tells you how sea level has changed through time.

-The research shows that for well over 1,500 years,

sea levels were stable.

200 years ago, that changed --

not coincidentally, with the Industrial Revolution.

-Beginning in the latter part of the 19th century

is where sea level accelerated.

When we correlate climate and sea level,

we see a near-perfect relationship --

whenever climate warmed, sea levels accelerated.

One of the fundamental questions

that, as climate scientists, we are asked is,

is the modern rate of change unprecedented?

We were able to show that

the rates of sea-level rise in the 20th and the 21st century

had not been seen for the previous 2,000 years.

The latest projections predict

that New York City would receive

an upper estimate of sea level of around two meters by 2100,

or around six feet.

We're living in a very, very unusual time.

We have a clear choice, and therefore we still have hope.

But if we don't make urgent action, then all bets are off.

-With a six-foot sea rise, according to Horton's research,

a full 280 square miles of New York will be lost forever,

a sunken city.

600,000 New Yorkers will lose their homes.

300,000 jobs will be displaced or lost.

The poorest will take the hardest hit,

with 12,000 public-housing units cut off by the sea.

The people working the problem on the ground

now seek solutions,

to rebuild and protect New York for the 22nd century.

This is what's called, the BIG U.

It's an ambitious megaproject

that would protect the $500-billion business sector

in lower Manhattan,

the epicenter of the American economy.

-My name is Kai Uwe-Bergmann.

-Uwe-Bergmann is an architect who leads the BIG U project.

-We have proposed 10 miles of contiguous flood protection

stretching from West 57th, 58th Streets

along the entire coastline

to the tip where Battery Park is right now,

and then back up the East River to the 30s.

That would protect all of the geography

that is currently below the flood line.

-The BIG U is a massive sea wall, in places 20-feet high,

that would protect the most vital business district

in the U.S. from sea-level rise of up to 15 feet.

Its surface would be primarily parkland,

with sports facilities, playgrounds,

and bike and walking paths

all along the 10 miles of coastline

it is designed to protect.

-In the case of New York,

there was a realization that climate change

is something that we need to address.

You can think of the BIG U as actually a giant gutter,

because it also is dealing with all of the rain

that's hitting the streets while a hurricane event

or a storm event is happening.

The BIG U has also a contiguous bike trail,

so if it were all built out, all 10 miles,

you could ride a bicycle for 10 miles

and never cross a street.

You could say that the coastline of Manhattan

is actually going from a working waterfront

to one that is about leisure,

it's about health and well-being

and making the waterfront accessible.

-The BIG U will be realized in stages,

the first being a 2.5-mile stretch on the Lower East Side.

The city has approved the plan, with a budget of $305 million.

Trever Holland lives in a neighborhood

the BIG U would protect.

As a lawyer and a resident,

he took part in meetings with the developers,

who say the project would protect Two Bridges

from the rising sea.

-This neighborhood has planning fatigue.

We've been to dozens of meetings.

Dozens of meetings about what we're gonna do.

We're gonna change this, we're gonna add this,

and a lot of those plans wind up on the shelves.

You go through this process of trying to figure out

a way to protect the neighborhood

and you wind up with a nice, big, glossy booklet

that sits on a shelf and nothing happens.

-That's not Holland's only problem with the BIG U.

-We fought so long to get access to the waterfront.

And now, one of the solutions that they're proposing

is to basically close it off.

We're gonna build 10-foot walls all made of concrete

and you'll be protected -- Good to go.

We've been asking "Is this the only solution?

Is there anything else, or are we just looking at walls?

I mean, what have other cities done?"

-Holland's not alone.

There are others who think the BIG U

is a step in the wrong direction.

-In Rotterdam, they are designing

underground parking garages,

so if they know a storm is coming,

they evacuate the cars and they build that parking garage

so that it can be a water-holding tank

that holds millions of gallons of water.

So that water doesn't go out into the community

and then when the water recedes,

they have a mechanism to pump the water out

of the parking garage.

The parking garage does double duty.

So, there are ways to design around these problems.

I don't think the answer is you're gonna retreat from

all of Lower Manhattan.

We have to figure out how to build things more resiliently.

-Geophysicist Klaus Jacob has other concerns.

-How high do you make those seawalls

before you are in a prison?

And that's not a sustainable solution.

-That's a dystopian picture.

It's just a wall.

And most of it, in fact, is just a concrete and rebar wall.

And I think that going in that direction

makes our cities more brittle.

It's so easy for that wall to break.

I mean, I worked in New Orleans for eight years. Walls break.

Unexpected things happen, a barge whacks up against it.

There's always something unexpected.

-Hill's greatest concern is that all walls

eventually have to come down.

She believes in building in layers,

with every generation contributing to

the work done by the last.

-A wall, that's rigid, that's fixed in place.

The design is only for that specific location.

We should spend that same amount of money

to put things in place that can be added to.

We need to build the foundation for future generations.

-Urban architect Pippa Brashear

agrees that living behind a wall is a future she cannot imagine.

-It's fundamentally gonna change the culture.

Is that the New York City we want to live in?

It's not the New York City I chose to live in.

One of my greatest fears for the future of New York City

is that we won't get past that protect question.

-I'm a little bit of a sceptic in anything that says,

"Oh, we're gonna keep the water out over here,"

because it's gonna go somewhere.

It was conceived of as a big giant wall.

And they might've said, "We're gonna put grass on it

so it'll look nice" but it's still a big giant wall.

This notion that we're just gonna build a giant fence

around New York City and keep this from happening,

is not either practical or, in some ways, ethical.

-It's anything but a dumb wall.

-Kai Uwe-Bergmann welcomes others

to come up with a better idea.

-It is going to be a place that a person can actually go,

inhabit, use 100% of the time

and then be reassured that it's actually protecting them

against the sea surges.

-He says a short-term radical solution

is better than none at all.

-I think the biggest risk is not doing anything.

Many of these communities have heard repeatedly

that something would be done,

and I think that the biggest fear is that another storm event

would come and flood them out of their homes again

and they have to deal with the loss.

-Broad Channel is a little island in Queens,

in the middle of Jamaica Bay.

It is a tiny place.

I don't think anybody ever heard of it...

unless you live in, you know, in the area.

I have talked to a lot of people that live, you know,

in Manhattan and they have no idea what Broad Channel is.

I've been here, you know, since I'm four years old.

The same neighbors I had as growing up

are the same neighbors I have today.

My wife was born in Broad Channel also.

Her whole family's from the town.

♪♪♪

-For years, Bassetti lived in a world

that somehow escaped change.

Then, about a decade ago,

high tides flooded the streets, even on sunny days.

-You just get used to it.

The high tide comes up, I gotta get my daughter to school.

"All right. Get on my back,"

and you piggy-back her up to the corner

to get her to school on time.

This was a full-moon high tide.

This picture is one of my favorites.

Day I was taking my son home from the hospital.

He was just born. He was three days old.

When you live in Broad Channel,

you take off your shoes and you carry him down the block.

That is total Broad Channel-living right there.

-Superstorm Sandy

turned the inconvenience into a catastrophe.

-You couldn't stop it.

There's nothing that could stop that water from coming in.

-Bassetti and his family evacuated to Brooklyn...

...and returned two days later.

-So, when I finally get to my house I go,

"Well, this ain't that bad."

Well, it didn't get bad

until we started doing the work, you know.

First, all right,

let's start throwing out everything that's wet,

you know, let's empty out underneath the sinks,

underneath the closets, let's get rid of these couches.

♪♪♪

-By the time they are done, there is nothing left to save.

Bassetti joined the city's Build It Back program.

With a whopping $2.2-billion budget,

Build It Back encourages homeowners and businesses

to rebuild higher and stronger,

more resilient against the rising seas.

The city has replaced over 1,400 homes,

repaired and reimbursed 6,500 more

with about 1,000 remaining under construction.

-Build It Back is raising the home for me.

They're raising the house 11 feet from where it started from,

which would put me a few feet above that national flood line.

I'm hoping I'm prepared enough.

I'm hoping my house is raised high enough

where the water comes in and I'm not affected.

But I...

Who knows? It's Mother Nature.

You can't predict what she's gonna do.

-Frank is one of thousands who are determined to defend.

He'll never leave.

-Never even crossed my mind.

This was a great place to grow up,

and I want my kids to have the same environment.

The house behind me is the house that I own.

-But there was a second option -- "managed retreat."

New York City and State also encouraged people

to stop investing in flood-prone areas

and leave the land to revert to its natural state.

600 homeowners took this buy-out including Frank Moszczynski.

-Ocean Breeze was pretty much fantastic.

It really was. It was paradise.

I miss everything about it, most is the people that we lost.

-Two of Moszczynski's neighbors

died here during superstorm Sandy.

-It was the ideal spot to put something just to say,

"Hey, we'll never forget ya."

Both in their 80s, pillars in their community,

great people, and just not supposed to die this way.

We had a typical white picket fence,

front porch right here,

and my house would be from right here, on back.

Paradise 364 days a year, until the day the storms came.

My house still had about three feet of water in it.

It was still on the foundation,

but it had been completely submerged.

So, it was...

devastation.

I did go inside, everything was turned upside down.

And I knew there was gonna be nothing,

nothing at all savable.

And that's when it really hit me.

Three hours and we don't own anything.

One of the neighboring areas on the east shore

started talk of a buy-out.

One day I received a call from the governor's representative,

"Congratulations, you were very successful...

your area has the option of the New York State buy-out."

-Homeowners received full market value

for their houses in exchange for leaving.

-They took the house down and as you can see,

we're standing here and there's just grass growing right now.

It's doing what it was supposed to --

going back to nature, and nature is slowly reclaiming it.

And the animals are coming back, too.

Some people decided to stay.

You know what?

It's America, so they have choice.

If they wanna put themselves in that predicament,

and their family, that's their choice.

-One bold engineering project

is giving the coastal communities of Staten Island

hope.

-What if we just look at this a whole new way,

look at the problem a new way and look for new solutions?

-Pippa Brashear is an urban planner and landscape architect.

She works with a team that believes the answer

is to stop trying to fight the sea,

but to learn to live with it and even harness it to do good,

not harm.

-The design project that ultimately came out of it

was our Living Breakwaters project.

The project is located on the southern tip of Staten Island.

It was really pummeled by waves during Sandy.

Our Living Breakwaters project,

it's a system of offshore breakwaters.

Each of the individual breakwaters range

from about 300-feet long to 450-feet long

and they are spaced along the shoreline

to really protect it from the most damaging waves.

The largest breakwaters that are positioned to really knock down

those large storm waves, they have to be tall enough

that they're still peaking above the top of the water when

you have those really elevated surge levels like Sandy.

And so those crest elevations are at about 14 feet

above main sea level.

-Rather than a continuous sea wall,

the breakwaters are a series of raised surfaces

that slow storm surge.

It's an old concept,

but the ecological element is a new twist.

-Much of the breakwaters will be made from stone,

but we're also using these

bio-enhanced concrete armor units

to help jumpstart the ecology.

The chemical content of the concrete

has been adjusted to attract organisms.

This is a scale model of one.

It's about half the size of what the actual armor units will be,

four feet by four feet.

One of the premises that we had

was we have to actually restore the environment.

Historic habitats, wetlands,

oyster reefs have been decimated.

Can we recreate that complex aquatic habitat,

to really build back this environment?

-I think the Living Breakwaters project is great.

It's something flexible.

If the rocks don't work right there, you move the rocks

or you make a new pile of rocks.

Those strategies we can actually do

and we can export them to other cities.

There are opportunities and, you know,

there always gonna be surprises,

like oysters on those breakwaters.

Well, when the ocean is more acid,

I don't know about oysters, but something will live on there.

-People are looking for ways to buy time.

-I'm not sure we can reverse it, but can we slow it down?

Yes, I think we can slow it down.

At least as far as the subway system and our commuter rails,

I'm committed to make them as resilient as possible

for what we can expect over the next 100 to next 200 years.

-Right now we have about 104 subway entrances

that we find that are critical facilities

that are in the floodplain.

We use flex gates, marine doors.

-I call them submarine doors.

They basically close each entranceway.

They get locked in place, they're very heavy doors,

each one weighs about 3,500 pounds.

-These can be deployed in relatively quick time

to prevent water from entering the subway system.

These are stop logs.

What happens is, these two beams get locked in place

with these pins.

They get locked in place

and then as these logs are stacked,

the pins slide into this beam

and as they get stacked to the top...

...this whole area then becomes watertight.

-Another innovation is an inflatable plug

made of Kevlar and waterproof fabric.

The plugs blow up like balloons

to block tunnels against flooding.

Made from the same materials as the airbags on the Mars rover,

strong enough to cushion the spacecraft

if it lands on rocks,

these tough balloons fill up with 35,000 gallons of air

in just three minutes.

But the airbags need to be perfectly packed and deployed

to provide a watertight seal.

-I don't think much of the plugs,

those round balls that get filled up with air

that will plug it and all of that.

You need something a little bit better than some kind of plastic

or polymer filled with air to be able to block the water.

As we all know, water is extremely strong and powerful.

-And at $400,000 each,

the city decides they are too expensive

to plug all 14 of their under-river subway tunnels.

-It's very, very important

that we recognize that climate change is real.

And if you don't want to recognize

that climate change is real,

we do have to recognize the sheer fact

that water seems to be rising.

So, what do we do to mitigate that

and what do we do to mitigate

the risks that are involved in that

so we can continue to operate?

Are we better off than others?

It's hard for me to know because I've not done a comparison,

but I do know that we're a lot better off today

than we were five years ago.

-The new Whitney Museum in the Meatpacking District

appears to be one of the most flood-resistant museums

in the country and perhaps the world.

It was built for the future,

designed to be resilient

against rising sea levels and storm surge.

Its loading dock is protected by a waterproof flood door,

designed and built by naval engineers.

The outer concrete wall was reinforced

to become 100% waterproof.

Like the subway, the museum also has a "stoplog system" --

a deployable barricade that can be installed

in just eight hours in advance of an approaching storm.

That doubles Sandy's storm surge height in Lower Manhattan --

but it's in line with future projections.

Urban architect Vishaan Chakrabarti

believes that the survival of New York

depends on designs like the Whitney.

It comes down to new buildings that can endure

the inevitable rising water that's coming its way.

-You make sure the building can flood,

which means that you get

all of the vulnerable mechanical equipment

out of the basement.

-We're in the west tower of the American Copper Buildings

here on the East Side of Manhattan.

This building is designed around the 100-year floodplain.

Our elevators and our mechanical systems,

our power service, our pumps...

Those are all above that elevation.

-You make sure that there's a generator in the building.

It can't power the entire building,

but it can power the elevators,

it can power at least one outlet in every apartment

so you can charge a cell phone, get information and so forth.

Have at least enough light to live,

maybe keep a refrigerator running.

-We're up here on the 48th floor of the west tower.

This should be our penthouse apartment.

Sweeping views all over the city.

King of the world type of apartment.

Instead, we have two megawatts of emergency power.

We decided we're gonna put the generators up here

because by sacrificing the square feet up here,

even though we'd be renting them

for upwards of $130 or $150 a foot,

we figured by not using those square feet as an apartment,

we make all the rest of the square feet in the building

that much more valuable.

Even when there's no commercial power in this building,

you would be able to live here.

-Those basic things can actually dramatically change

what happens during a storm,

because if big buildings are equipped to do that,

you then don't have this massive exodus of people

who are trying to get out of their homes

with flooded streets, first responders,

all the other things that are happening simultaneously

with that crisis.

It's not a very high-tech set of solutions.

It's actually a fairly low-tech set of solutions.

-The lobby is built above the estimated high water mark

for flooding.

Even so, the building is designed to flood.

And when the water recedes,

the damage is minimal

and residents can go right back to their lives.

-What's unique about this lobby is the material selection.

The floor is stone, the walls are concrete, steel, and stone.

The portals are all steel

and the wood feature that we wanted in the lobby,

is set off the wall so that it's actually a vented system.

So if it ever did get wet,

we wouldn't be doing any sort of demolition and replacement.

The expectation is that eventually

something will happen,

and the building will get wet.

-Vishaan Chakrabarti has

his own megaproject under construction in Brooklyn,

one of the most ambitious and resilient plans

in the history of the five boroughs.

-Domino Park is a 3-million-square-foot

new neighborhood that's being built on the waterfront

in Brooklyn.

-Domino is a mixed-used development

with 2,800 condo units, 1/4 of them affordable housing.

Its main feature is a huge, six-acre park,

a quarter mile along the waterfront.

-We just went out to the community and we were very open

and honest with people and said, you know, "Look,

this needs to be more resilient."

And so, one of the first moves we had made

during the master-planning process

was to pull the buildings back from the water

and actually make a bigger park.

That resulted in more climate resilience in the long term

because that park has a tremendous amount

of porous surface --

grass, plant material that will take on water.

So what happens is, when a storm hits,

it will both slow the energy of the storm

and absorb like a sponge a lot of the water

that's coming into the community.

It's also designed with a natural grade of the land

so when the storm recedes,

the water will recede back into the river more quickly.

-The buildings will also have office and retail space,

so many residents can stay put through a storm surge.

-Domino is it's an interesting model to really think about

how you build in the world that we're gonna be living in

in the next 100 years or so

in terms of flooding and sea level rise.

-Developers and the City now work together

to harden New York against the rising sea.

This might prevent incidents

such as the transformer explosion in Lower Manhattan,

during Sandy... -Oh [bleep]!

-...that left 200,000 people without power, heat or light.

-Our electric grid now has the benefit of

an additional billion dollars of hardening

that has been placed into the grid

to make sure the lights stay on the next time.

We're dealing with a very complex set of new projects.

They've never been done before.

First of its kind in such a dense urban environment

and we're moving them as quickly as we can.

I'm hopeful about New York's future

because of the ability that New Yorkers have shown

to adapt to any number of challenges

over its nearly 400-year history.

We're gonna be here, we're gonna work with the threats,

we're gonna adapt and this is gonna be a thriving city.

-Many will defend,

but some will be forced to retreat.

That is New York City's inevitable future.

-I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all answer

to whether we should build or not in the floodplain.

There's hundreds of thousands of people in New York City

that live in floodplains.

And I think there are probably some cases where

it just simply doesn't make sense,

where it's not just a floodplain,

it's a highly vulnerable floodplain.

Retreat, in that instance, might make sense.

-What this means for the future,

it means seawall or levy protections,

storm-surge barriers.

Or the city could encourage more building

in population on higher ground

and do things to try to discourage

or buy people out who are in these low-lying flooded areas.

-There are some clear statistics out there

that for every dollar we invest in risk reduction

that there's a $4 avoided future cost.

Sandy was a $19-billion event

in terms of damages and lost economic activity.

From the risks of climate change,

that same event in the 2050s could be a $90-billion event.

-I think we have to prepare for the unexpected

and what that means is, how do you create a city

that can recover from any number of tough things happening to it,

whether it's a flood or a tornado or a terrorist attack.

Cities are vulnerable, cities have always been vulnerable.

Cities also have this extraordinary way

of being resilient and building back.

And so to me, it's always about the basics --

mobility, power, water.

Fixing this is not rocket science. Right?

It's simply a question of will.

-Urban engineering will be the determining factor

in just how New York faces its next great challenge.

It's a transformation that has to happen if it is to survive,

and even thrive, when the water comes.

-We have the situation that about 1 million more people

are expected to move to New York City

by the year 2030.

In addition, waterfront is still considered

the most desirable real estate,

which is a notion from the past

that doesn't hold for the future.

-If we're really going to adapt to climate change,

it's about behavior change, it's about us all thinking about

living with water differently.

And being willing to change and adapt over time.

-This is our home, and we want to keep it our home

and we want it to be a home for our children

and our grandchildren as well.

So, now's the time to start dealing with the problem.

-And I think if we do that, this city,

which is one of the greatest cities in the world,

will continue to be for a long, long time.

-Next time on "Sinking Cities"...

-Tokyo is like the Rolls-Royce of city and engineering.

It has most of the high-tech system

that you can find in the world.

♪♪♪

-Even though we have been trying our best,

I don't think we can say

that we are fully prepared for disasters.

-If you start to have a major flood on Tokyo,

we all going to pay.

-[ Speaking Japanese ]

-Tokyo is defenseless against such rainfall.

[ Indistinct shouting ]

♪♪♪

-To order "Sinking Cities" on DVD,

visit ShopPBS

or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.

This program is also available

on Amazon Prime Video.

♪♪♪