Nine years after Hurricane Sandy, residents of Lower Manhattan are still vulnerable to rising seas. The fight over a plan to protect them reveals why progress on our most critical challenges is so hard. Credit...Daniel Arnold for The New York Times To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. The day after the storm swallowed her neighborhood, Nancy Ortiz woke before dawn to buy ice. It was 2012, and Hurricane Sandy had reclaimed Lower Manhattan for Mother Nature. Making landfall near Atlantic City, it swept north, ravaging the New Jersey coast, destroying thousands of homes and inundating New York City with waves as high as 14 feet. Sandy shuttered Wall Street, rattling global markets, and for a moment the storm restored Manhattan’s early 17th-century coastline. A brackish murk of waist-high water submerged all the landfill that humans had dredged, salvaged and shipped to widen the island, and that now supported the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. It also swamped a large cluster of public housing developments and a beloved but bedraggled ribbon of greenery built by Robert Moses during the 1930s called East River Park. In the dark, Ms. Ortiz tiptoed through a shambles of overturned cars and shattered glass to her Acura TSX. The storm had knocked out electricity to 250,000 people in the area, including those in Vladeck Houses, the oldest public housing project on the Lower East Side. As president of the Vladeck tenants’ association, Ms. Ortiz knew there were many diabetic residents who would need to keep their insulin cold. She figured help wasn’t likely to come quickly; for public housing residents, it rarely did. So she got into her car and headed north, some 15 miles, all the way into the Bronx, before finding a store selling 10-pound bags of ice. Into the night she navigated Vladeck’s dark stairwells, knocking on doors. Though Ms. Ortiz’s neighborhood was one of... |