The more accurate version of this question would really be something like, "Why do some trees fall over in a storm while others stay standing?" The answer is more complex than a simple distinction between old, rotted, and weak vs. young, healthy, and strong. Instead, writes Mary Knudson at Scientific American blogs, trees fall because of their size, their species, and even the history of the human communities around them.

“Trees most at risk are those whose environment has recently changed (say in the last 5 – 10 years),” Smith says. When trees that were living in the midst of a forest lose the protection of a rim of trees and become stand-alones in new housing lots or become the edge trees of the forest, they are made more vulnerable to strong weather elements such as wind.

They also lose the physical protection of surrounding trees that had kept them from bending very far and breaking. Land clearing may wound a tree’s trunk or roots, “providing an opportunity for infection by wood decay fungi. Decay usually proceeds slowly, but can be significant 5-10 years after basal or root injury.” What humans do to the ground around trees — compacting soil, changing gradation and drainage “can kill roots and increase infection,” Smith warns.

Read the full piece at Scientific American Blogs

Image: West Philly Storm - Trees Down, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from kwbridge's photostream

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Short version: yes, but it's not easy. "To win, New York ratepayers have to show that their power company was not just slow or inefficient. Instead, Kreppein said, under a 1985 New York Court of Appeals ruling called Strauss v. Belle Realty, electric company customers must establish that the utility was grossly negligent — that its conduct was way outside the bounds of reasonableness." Alison Frankel at Reuters. Read the rest

As you can imagine, the situation here in New York is dire, what with the still-large amount of people who have yet to even get their power back. But Staten Island (and the Rockaways, and Long Beach, most of the south shore, not to mention Red Hook, parts of New Jersey... you get the idea) was hit particularly hard, with entire houses being destroyed. According to Gothamist, 5,200 residents of the borough have filed for FEMA housing, but Gov. Andrew Cuomo is considering one location specifically designed to provide a large amount of people (about 900) heat, food, and temporary shelter: Arthur Kill Correctional Facility. Yup. A prison. That's been shut down for about a year. Sound familiar? Like the plot of the third season of The Walking Dead? Living in an abandoned prison makes sense, of course -- for all the same reasons it made sense as an option during a fictional zombie apocalypse. Wow, things are that bad? Some of those thousands of displaced residents might say it is. But it's just an idea at the moment. (via Gothamist) Read the rest

Superstorm Sandy brought fossils up from the ocean depths.

Everyone, just shut up and give them all your money: Louis C.K., who hosted Saturday Night Live in New York City in the midst of Sandy's chaos, and Long Island native Jerry Seinfeld are both planning separate comedy shows to benefit storm victims. Louis C.K.'s two shows will take place on Staten Island, one of the hardest hit areas of New York, on November 17 at St. George Theatre. Tickets are currently being sold through his site, and he urges everyone to ignore any possible scalpers.

Seinfeld, who was served lunch by my very own grandmother when he attended Massapequa High School, will be adding an additional Long Island show for December 19 at the NYCB Theatre in Westbury as part of his December tour. All proceeds will benefit Sandy victims, as well as the earnings from last night's show at Brooklyn College and the newly-scheduled December 6 show at St. George Theatre.

While it's not exactly a surprise that two comedians with incredibly strong ties to New York would want to do something to give back, it's still always nice to report that celebrities have hearts. In case you needed a reminder.

Photo credit: St. George Theatre

(via Gothamist, CBS New York) Read the rest

Belle Harbor, Rockaway, November 6th, 2012. Kate Black.

Kate Black has been volunteering in post-Sandy recovery efforts in the Rockaways and other areas surrounding NYC where people lost power, homes, and belongings in the storm. She has also been photographing the people and places she encounters. Above, one of many images captured on Election Day. Read the rest

A Q&A piece on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration begins with this incredibly disconcerting sentence: "During each hurricane season, there always appear suggestions that one should simply use nuclear weapons to try and destroy the storms."

Really? Seriously, America?

Anyway, the entire piece ends up being pretty fascinating, as research meteorologist Chris Landsea explains why nuking a hurricane would be a bad idea ... besides, you know, the obvious reasons.

... an explosive, even a nuclear explosive, produces a shock wave, or pulse of high pressure, that propagates away from the site of the explosion somewhat faster than the speed of sound. Such an event doesn't raise the barometric pressure after the shock has passed because barometric pressure in the atmosphere reflects the weight of the air above the ground. For normal atmospheric pressure, there are about ten metric tons (1000 kilograms per ton) of air bearing down on each square meter of surface. In the strongest hurricanes there are nine. To change a Category 5 hurricane into a Category 2 hurricane you would have to add about a half ton of air for each square meter inside the eye, or a total of a bit more than half a billion (500,000,000) tons for a 20 km radius eye. It's difficult to envision a practical way of moving that much air around.

Attacking weak tropical waves or depressions before they have a chance to grow into hurricanes isn't promising either. About 80 of these disturbances form every year in the Atlantic basin, but only about 5 become hurricanes in a typical year.

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“Scientists and engineers were saying years before Katrina happened, ‘Hey, it’s going to happen, folks. Stop putting your head in the sand.” —Malcolm Bowman, professor of oceanography at the State University at Stony Brook. In 2009, he and other experts convened at a meeting in NYC of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and issued warnings that surge barriers or tide gates would help protect. Read more in James Glanz and Mireya Navarro's NYT report. Read the rest

In an Army Corps of Engineers press release, details on the astounding rate at which workers are draining water from New York's subway and transit tunnels: "To date, the USACE has used about 50 pumps of various sizes to remove 64 million gallons of water from the New York City mass transit system. Operations are ongoing at six sites, with pumps removing about 116,000 gallons per minute. The 696,000 gallons the pumps are draining each minute exceeds the amount of water in one Olympic-size swimming pool (660,000 gallons). There were roughly 600 million gallons in the tunnels when pumping operations began on Thursday, Nov. 1." (via Noah Shachtman). Read the rest

Yesterday, I got to have a great conversation on Minnesota Public Radio's The Daily Circuit. Host Tom Webber and I spent a good 45 minutes talking about Hurricane Sandy, climate change, and why it's so hard to talk about the connections between the two in an easily digestible, sound-bite format. In the meantime, he might have gotten some good sound bites out of me. Read the rest

Katrina survivors talk to New York.

Gas supplies remain extremely limited in New York and New Jersey, nearly a week after hurricane Sandy, and the power's still out for many in those states and others, such as nearby Connecticut.

New Jersey governor Chris Christie signed an executive order announcing a state of energy emergency and instituting gas rationing for the purchase of fuel by motorists in 12 counties, starting today at noon.

Make way for price-gouging entrepreneurs!

Try this, to get a taste of how bad it is: search for "gasoline," "gas," or "generator" on NY Craigslist right now. Gas sales I've found on Craigslist range from $5 to $20 a gallon, but there are probably ads at higher prices. My favorite was the 55-gallon drum of gas for a thousand bucks. Unleaded! Cash only, folks.

Not only is this exploitative, it's explosive. A black market of gasoline reselling, without appropriate safety measures, seems to me like a recipe for tragedy. Read the rest

It's normal for backup generators to fail. If we want a more reliable system, we'll have to change the way the grid works.

Burnt houses next to others that survived in Breezy Point, Queens, after Hurricane Sandy, on October 31. (Reuters/Adrees Latif)

At The Atlantic, a big-picture gallery of photos from AP and Reuters photogs and others, documenting the scope of damage in NYC, NJ, and other areas hard-hit by the recent "Superstorm" Sandy. This is way bigger than "some lights are out," folks.

BB Archives: Hurricane Sandy posts. Read the rest

The time-lapse covers two days of the hurricane's assault on New York, from the early morning of October 29 through Oct. 30.

Jeff Simmermon at Time Warner Cable's HQ in NYC writes: "To help New Yorkers in hard-hit areas like Lower Manhattan and Staten Island who are without power, we are deploying multiple vehicles with mobile charging stations and free WiFi access points. Local residents are welcome to charge their consumer devices such as smartphones and laptops and access a 4G WiFi connection. New Yorkers can follow @TWCable_NYC on Twitter to learn the location of the vehicles, which will make extended stops initially this afternoon in the residential areas of the Chinatown, Flatiron district and West Village." Read the rest

Photo: Michael Tapp

Salt water is still winning. Unfortunately.

Remember back during the Fukushima crisis, when you heard a lot of talk about why the people trying to save the plant didn't want to use sea water to cool the reactors? There were a number of reasons for that (check out this interview Scientific American's Larry Greeenemeier did with a nuclear engineer), but one factor was the fact that salt water corrodes the heck out of metal. Pump it into a metal reactor unit and that unit won't be usable again.

Now, the corrosive power of salt water is in the news again — and this time it's ripping through New York City's underground network of subways and utility infrastructure. I like the short piece that Gizmodo's Patrick DiJusto put together, explaining why salt water in your subway is even worse than plain, old regular water:

When two different types of metal (or metal with two different components) are placed in water, they become a battery: the metal that is more reactive corrodes first, losing electrons and forming positive ions, which then go into water, while the less reactive metal becomes a cathode, absorbing those ions. This process happens much more vigorously when the water is electrically conductive, and salt water contains enough sodium and chloride ions to be 40 times more conductive than fresh water. (The chloride ion also easily penetrates the surface films of most metals, speeding corrosion even further.) Other dissolved metals in sea water, like magnesium or potassium, can cause spots of concentrated local corrosion.

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