NYC Subway System

As a student of history and business, one of my natural curiosities is thinking about "what can go wrong" in the world. Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it. The past has lots of lessons about things that can have a pretty negative effect upon civilization. Unfortunately, it often happens that some problems which are in plain view to a few people are only obvious to everyone else in hindsight.

I read a pretty interesting book several years ago, called, The World Without Us. Written by Alan Weisman, the book discusses what would happen to various parts of our civilization if humanity suddenly disappeared tomorrow. It's not a judgemental book, and doesn't attempt to provoke reactions by suggesting how humanity would disappear. It just discusses what would probably happen IF humans magically disappeared from the surface of the planet in a short period of time (something like 24 hours, if I remember correctly).

One of the earlier chapters in the book, if I remember correctly, talked about the New York City subway system, and its vulnerability to flooding. I believe that the background behind the concept was related to the gradual rise of sea levels related to global warming. After all, if you remember "An Inconvenient Truth," you'll know that some humans (only a billion or so) would be significantly affected by a rise in sea levels of only several feet.

But now that Hurricane Sandy is hitting New York City (during a full moon, no less, which increases tidal surges), there is a very real chance that storm surges will produce effects similar to or exceeding the situation described in "The World Without Us."

I can only hope that Sandy will not cause as much damage as could potentially be possible in a worst-case scenario. Looking at articles on the net from earlier today, it appears that people have talked about the potential for the subway system to be non-functional for [possibly] a couple of days. In reality, there is a small chance that the subway could be down for far, far longer than that.


Here's an interesting quotation from Gizmodo:

Most people may not realise it — or never have occasion to think about it — but NYC’s subway system is susceptible to flooding. The possibility is quite real.

What most people don’t know is that we depend on just 700 fragile water pumps to keep the tunnels dry — some a century old.

In fact, if someone powered down all these pumps tomorrow, the entire subway network would be inundated in just a few hours. To give you an idea of how complex and massive this system is, it pulls 50 million litres of water out of the subway on any sunny day. No rain. Not even a single drop of water from the sky. If Sandy manages to kill the power of any of the fragile old pumps protecting the system, there may be some serious problems.

On a rainy day, the pump system is absolute chaos, to the point where the MTA — NYC’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority — lives in permanent panic, fearing events like Sandy, the hurricane system that is approaching the little town right now. “At some point, it would be too much to handle,” said the head of the hydraulics team back in 2006, Peter Velasquez Jr, “you’ve got rain plus wind. It basically would shut down the system. You hope not. You pray that it doesn’t.

“To give you an idea about how bad this could be, some of the oldest pumps in the NYCTA system were bought second-hand from the builders of the Panama Canal. I worked for the TA many years ago and even then the pumps were considered a serious problem. The Panama Canal was finished in 1914.”

One of these days, I'm thinking about writing a series of blog posts about other potential disasters that are surprisingly possible for our modern society. To clarify, I'm not the slightest bit concerned by the Mayan "end of the world" predictions for this December. I think that the "end of the world" is all fear-mongering (although to a small extent, it will probably be somewhat of a self-perpetuating phenomena, at least on a micro scale, for certain people). It is only random chance that nature has produced this hurricane, possibly the strongest in decades on the north-east coast, on the same weekend that Canada experienced its strongest earthquake in fifty years. That earthquake was 7.7 RS, which happened here in BC on Saturday night while I was in the shower (with a follow-up this evening at 6.2 RS).

Anyway, a friend of mine (Drew Dudley) had an interesting conversation with me about "Black Swan" events a few years ago. I think that you'd find some of the scenarios to be interesting, if not always likely. I feel like it would be interesting to make some blog posts along those lines in the weeks leading up to December 21st.


Here's a buy-link to "The World Without Us" if you'd like to check it out:

"The World Without Us" on Amazon

Edit, 24hrs later: Unfortunately, it looks like a worst-case scenario has been realized. See this article from half an hour ago.

Osaka, Japan

I flew to Osaka (Japan) this past weekend for a show. Although I’ve travelled pretty extensively before, this is my first time in Asia, so it’s been a great adventure so far.

I started by trying to fly to San Francisco for a visit on Wednesday night. Unfortunately, I flew through Montreal and then Chicago. I got to Chicago with no problems, but when I arrived there, I found out that there had been a huge snowstorm there the previous day, which had cancelled over a thousand flights. It was really nice outside at the time, with very little snow on the ground, so I didn’t really think that there were going to be any problems. However, when I got onto the plane, the airline eventually said that they couldn’t fly us to San Francisco because there were no pilots left in the airport – the pilots for our flight had been diverted to fly another plane earlier, to help catch up on the backlog of stranded passengers.

This didn’t seem like it would be a problem – they said that they were going to fly in a different crew from New York to take our plane to San Francisco, so the delay would only be a few hours. However, by this time, the storm had moved so it was over New York, which meant that it took a couple hours longer than expected for that crew to get out of LaGuardia. By the time they arrived in Chicago, the airline decided that those pilots couldn’t take our plane to San Francisco, because it would put them over their daily flight time limit. Our entire flight ended up getting cancelled, which was a disaster because that put all of us into the huge pool of people waiting to fly stand-by. I then ended up getting bumped off or passed over for the next four flights to San Francisco, as the airline tried to slowly catch up on the backlog.

In the end, I did get to San Francisco, but not until after midnight (about twelve hours later than expected). I was a little disappointed by that, because that was the stop on the trip that I was looking forward to the most. However, on a positive note, it was the one night on the trip where I could mostly easily deal with not showing up. Hopefully I’ll be able to reschedule for a visit later this spring, or maybe right after the summer ends.

The rest of the trip went smoothly, and the flights to Vancouver and then Japan were uneventful. We crossed the International Date Line, so it suddenly became Friday afternoon instead of Thursday afternoon. I was a bit nervous getting into the airport because my passport was only valid for two more months and Japan requires a foreigner’s passport to be valid for six months from the time of arrival. However, I had the itinerary to prove that I had a flight already booked to leave the country a week later, so that didn’t turn out to be a problem. Dan Elliot from the Oasis Lounge picked me up at the airport, and took me directly to his club, where I started to orient myself to the Japanese culture. A few hours later, a friend of mine (Ian Warney) showed up. Ian is a DJ and is living in Osaka teaching English. We went out for a night on the town, and I met a bunch of people that evening.

On Saturday, I spent the day touring around Osaka, and taking photos. That evening, I played at Oasis, which turned out to be a very fun night. Ian found me again on Sunday night and we went out for more sightseeing, and then we ate at a nice restaurant in a skyscraper overlooking Osaka.

So far, Japan has been great. There are far fewer foreigners here than I had imagined, but that’s about the only real surprise. The only big challenge so far has been trying to figure out the subway system. I’ve been on subways all around the world (London, New York, Paris, Moscow, and a ton of other smaller cities) but the Osaka subway has been the most confusing that I’ve seen, by far. The fare varies depending on how far you are going, and you have to buy a ticket getting on, then electronic gates scan it as you leave your destination station and don’t let you out if you didn’t pay the right fare. If you didn’t pay enough, you have to go back to another machine and do a “fare adjust” on the ticket. The Osaka (and Toyko) subway systems are not one large system, but instead are a whole bunch of separate lines run by different companies, so transfers can get complicated with ticket changes. Finally, there are very few signs in English, to make things even more confusing. However, after a few days, it was starting to make sense to me. Some of the stations are incredibly busy though – there is one station which has an average of three MILLION people per day passing through it. That’s pretty impressive, considering that the subways shut down at 12:30am and don’t start again until 5:30am.

A few other interesting notes so far:
- The cities are very clean compared to North American cities.
- There is apparently very, very little crime in Japan, and people feel completely safe and comfortable walking around anywhere in the cities.
- I have only seen a few children in the entire time I’ve been here – the Japanese must hide them away somewhere.
- I thought that I might get away with not running into anyone I knew during my visit, but on Sunday night a friend who had gone to university (Kyohei) saw me downtown and luckily had the time to spend an hour or so touring with us. That was an interesting coincidence, considering that Osaka is pretty big (nine million people, I think).
- There are far fewer Western chains than I had expected (lots of Starbucks & MacDonald’s and KFC, but that’s about it).
- A small but noticeable percentage of the population wear face masks in public and while working, either to limit the spread of diseases, or to protect them from smog & allergies.
- The amount of seafood is astounding – it is available everywhere, even as snack food in convenience stores.

Needless to say, I’ve been able to take a ton of interesting photos so far. I’ve got two photo pages up on my website now from the Osaka portion of my trip, and I’ve tried to add many more observations about Japan in the captions to the photos. Here is a link to the Osaka photo pages:
http://www.djbolivia.ca/photos_osaka2007a.html

After I left Osaka on Monday morning, I had three days scheduled in Tokyo, so I’ll write more about that part of the trip in a few days.