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.

Gabriel & Dresden in Boston

I just got back from an interesting weekend in Boston. I flew down to see a Gabriel & Dresden show, but also to actually meet them, courtesy of a mutual friend, Kate.

For those of you who aren't familiar with electronic music, these two are incredibly talented. Among other things, Dave Dresden is a talent scout for Pete Tong, and was a journalist for DJ Times, Mixer, DMA, and Billboard magazine, where he has done interviews with Paul Oakenfold, Moby, Todd Terry, Sasha & Digweed, Puff Daddy, BT, The Crystal Method, Keoki, Josh Wink, the Chemical Brothers, and Deep Dish. Josh Gabriel was the sound designer for the Oddworld video games, was co-founder of Mixman Technologies (remixing software), did work for for Warner Brothers & Sony Music, and was the mastering engineer on Disney's "Aladdin" soundtrack.

As a duo, the two of them are very highly ranked as DJ's (23rd in the world, to be exact), according to the current standings on www.thedjlist.com. They also have their own record label in San Francisco, called Organized Nature. However, they are probably most well known for their production skills, whether it is individually, as a duo, or in partnerships with other musicians and producers (including releases under the monikers Andain & Motorcyle). For the non-electronica fan, they are probably most well-known recently for "Tracking Treasure Down," which was #1 on Billboard a few months ago, in July of this year. Here's a link to the video for that song on YouTube (the link is visible on my real blog, but not in the Facebook feed):



Aside from that well-known hit, they have a very extensive string of other #1 hits over the past few years, and they've worked directly with or done remixes for a huge variety of well-known artists, including Coldplay, New Order, Tiesto, 4 Strings, Paul Oakenfold, Roger Goode, Sarah MacLaughlan, Jewel, Afrika Bambaataa, Armin van Buuren, The Crystal Method, Dido, Nelly Furtado, Fischerspooner, Groove Armada, Annie Lennox, Britney Spears, Depeche Mode, Madonna, and others.

Anyway, the weekend got off to a bit of a rough start when I forgot to go through my luggage carefully before flying. I've probably taken at least 300 commercial flights before, so I definitely should have known better, but I wasn't really thinking. I have a "travel bag" which is always packed, but the last time I used it was when I was just travelling in Canada. Consequently, when I got to airport security, I had to throw out my shaving cream (because it was in an aerosol can), and my drugs (you'll note that I said drugs, not narcotics). Then, the officer going through my bag asked me if I really expected to be allowed to take a wine opener on the plane. I guess the large pointy metal stabbing tool and sharp knife didn't exactly meet regulations.

I got to Boston pretty early on Friday morning, which led to a new dilemma, since it was 10am and I couldn't check into the hotel until 2pm. I don't normally drink before 5pm (unless it is a continuation of the previous night's festivities) but I thought that since I was on vacation, I'd make an exception, so I went to an Irish Pub for breakfast. And lunch. The Pub was about three doors down from the hotel, and there were several hundred students staying at the hotel for a Harvard Model United Nations event, so there were people to talk to everywhere.

After lunch, I went back to the hotel. That evening, Kate and another friend picked me up, and we went out for drinks to a pizza place & bar beside Fenway Park. We were planning to meet Josh & Dave fairly early, but their plane had been delayed in Chicago due to winds, so they didn't get into Boston until around midnight. When we went back downtown to meet them, they were having problems checking in because it was past midnight and the hotel computers wouldn't let people claim their room after midnight, so they came up to my room for about an hour before the show while they tried to sort things out.

The rest of the night was pretty fun. Rise was a fantastic little after-hours club. It was smaller than I expected, about the same size or smaller than the after-hours clubs I usually frequent in the Maritimes, but the cleanliness was unbelievable, and the lighting was incredibly well-done for such a small venue. Rise is a private members-only club (plus a limited number of guests for each member), so I think that most people who were there actually knew each other. Once they got started, Dave & Josh played until 7am, and it was a pretty interesting set since they played a fair number of their own tracks, and I knew quite a bit of the music. They ended the night with their remix of "The Wings" by Gustavo Santaolalla - I think that the original might have been the closing track from Brokeback Mountain.

All in all, it was a lot of fun. It's been a few years since I've been to Boston, but it has so many universities and students around that it completely reminds me of Halifax. There are very few US cities that I'd ever want to live in, but Boston would probably be the one exception (or maybe San Francisco).

Saturday night was pretty fun too, but that's another story. Coming home was fairly uneventful, except that our flight crew didn't show up for the flight out of Newark. It was kind of funny actually, since they eventually had to be paged on the airport intercom system: "Paging flight crew XXX, can you please report to gate C99. We need you to fly a plane."