Posted Dec 5, 2012, 6:51 PM
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New Yorker for life
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Borough of Jersey
Posts: 51,747
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/ny...s&emc=rss&_r=0
Still Building at the Edges of the City, Even as Tides Rise
By JIM DWYER
December 4, 2012
Quote:
...The plan, as a news release from the Long Island Rail Road said, was “to fight water with water.” It looked like a good, prudent idea. Then the storm came. The force of the rushing water simply shoved aside the bladder — approximate weight, 133 tons — and the flood moved toward Penn Station. Only the pitch of the tunnel diverted it away from the station and into another tunnel. The bladder was left in shreds. As one railroad worker said, “There was so much water in the yards, you could have gone surfing.”
That episode came to mind on Tuesday morning at the groundbreaking for a 26-acre real estate project at, and above, those same train yards — what Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said was “one of the largest private developments ever undertaken in the country.” It is called Hudson Yards.
A hefty portion of the project’s 26 acres is within the 100-year-flood plain, just as the World Trade Center development is, farther south. At least for now, Hurricane Sandy does not seem to have slowed the momentum of history, more than two centuries of building right up to the margins of the three islands and mainland that make up New York City.
Has the storm influenced planning for the yards? Not much, Ms. Rose said. “The inherent design of the Yards is resilient toward flooding due to the fact that our platform puts our first floor well above the flood plain,” she said. “All of our electrical and support systems are above grade.”
The platform is years from being built; the developer has yet to line up tenants for that mass of buildings. The groundbreaking on Tuesday was for the project’s south tower, which is actually just outside the yards, at 30th Street and 10th Avenue. It is not on a platform.
“The south tower, however, does have some systems below grade since it’s on terra firma,” Ms. Rose said. “Since Sandy, we’ve made some minor adjustments to the design to make it even more floodproof.”
A fuel pump will be moved to a higher spot, and the elevator pits will be waterproofed and sealed, she said.
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