![]() ![]() Much of Washington metro system was built nearly 50 years ago, and the subways in New York and Boston are even older. A unit tracks inclement weather so that flooding hot spots can be monitored and workers can put out sandbags and check underground pump stations before the water arrives.īut keeping the water out is a constant battle. The authority also has an emergency flood response. "We are investing more in water mitigation today than we ever have," says Andy Off, executive vice president of capital delivery for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. In Washington, the transit authority has spent millions of dollars waterproofing leaky tunnels and plans to spend even more to keep water out of vents and station entrances. After Hurricane Sandy flooded miles of subway tunnels, New York poured millions of dollars into flood control for the nation's largest underground rail system. In Boston, the transit authority has started waterproofing stations and protecting tracks that are vulnerable to sea level rise. cities are a decade or more into adapting their subway systems to a wetter climate. "Looking ahead, authorities need to think very carefully about where they want to build new lines, new stations, new tunnels." "Every city should have a comprehensive review of flood risk for the underground system," Djordjevic says. The infrastructure bill moving through Congress allocates $66 billion for rail - a huge infusion of cash that could help fund retrofitting of old subway systems to keep water out and the building of new train lines in places that currently depend on cars. Some help could come from the federal government. Keeping water out of tunnels and stations is expensive, especially in places with aging, leaky subways built for a 20th century climate. That has created tension between the need to provide reliable, low-emissions mass transit options and the growing cost of maintaining underground transit in a wetter world. Dozens of subway systems around the world have experienced flooding, Djordjevic says, and he estimates it's likely hundreds of thousands of passengers have been directly affected. Earlier this summer, the remnants of a tropical storm dumped a month's worth of rain on New York City in the span of an afternoon. Zhengzhou received about a year's worth of precipitation in just one day. In China and around the world, the culprit is climate-driven torrential rain. Heavy rain has also repeatedly swamped underground tracks in Boston. It is the third time New York's subways have flooded this summer and the first time the National Weather Service issued a flash flood emergency warning for the city. Mayor Bill de Blasio issued a travel ban and warned residents to "stay off subways" as up to 10 inches of rain fell in some parts of the region in a matter of hours. Overnight, the remnants of Hurricane Ida flooded much of the New York City subway. Flooded tunnels and stations have disrupted service and stranded passengers in Boston, London, San Francisco, Taipei, Bangkok, Washington, D.C., and a host of other cities in recent years.īut the problem has taken on added urgency this summer, with multiple, high-profile subway floods driven by summer rainstorms. Global warming is driving dangerous and disruptive flooding in underground rail systems around the world. Here are 33 classics of the genre that register 11 on the cinematic Richter Scale.Rescuers carry a boat into the subway in Zhengzhou, China, in July after flash floods trapped passengers underground. In putting together this list, we stuck to the natural definition of ‘disasters’ – earthquakes and asteroids and, uh, geostorms, rather than rampaging kaiju and invading aliens. Roland Emmerich picked up the flaming baton a couple of decades later, finding new and inventive ways to reduce the planet to toast.Īnd as Netflix’s meme-spawning eco-tastrophe flick Don't Look Up proves, our appetite for destruction has hardly waned. Their heyday came in the ’70s where audiences inured of Vietnam, Watergate and economic woes were hungry for a more escapist breed of catastrophe and super-producers like Irwin ‘the Master of Disaster’ Allen were on hand to provide it. And unlike horror, where the peril can be contained or is even existential, the threat in this oeuvre is often limitless – there’s nothing like the future of the entire planet hanging in the balance to have you shifting uncomfortably in your easychair. Alongside the horror genre, disaster movies are cinema’s way of reflecting our deepest fears back at us. ![]()
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