hurricanes

Mega-Cities Face Peril as Climate Change Intensifies

Christina Conklin and Marina Psaros

In his major post-storm speech, Mayor Michael Bloomberg noted that in 2050, one-quarter of the city’s land and 800,000 residents would be within the one-hundred-year flood zone. But instead of talking about the devastation as an opportunity to reshape the city’s shoreline to better reflect future sea levels and more frequent storm surges, he doubled down. “As New Yorkers, we cannot and will not abandon our waterfront. It’s one of our greatest assets. We must protect it, not retreat from it,” he said.

Gary Rivlin’s ‘Katrina’ Portrays a Destroyed City and Its Painful Recovery

Lee Polevoi

Katrina opens with a compelling set piece that encapsulates many of the book’s themes—the chaos after Katrina made landfall, the lack of emergency coordination among local officials, dire situations made worse by crippling issues of race. On August 30, a group of predominantly black residents, seeking to escape flooding and destruction in their neighborhoods, crossed a bridge spanning the Mississippi for the relative safety of suburban Gretna, a predominantly white community. 

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