: Hurricane Ida Raises the Question: How Can Cities Keep Subways Safe in an Era of Climate Crisis Flooding? #WorldNEWS As the remnants of Hurricane Ida passed over the northeast Wednesday night, dumping

Hurricane Ida Raises the Question: How Can Cities Keep Subways Safe in an Era of Climate Crisis Flooding? #WorldNEWS
As the remnants of Hurricane Ida passed over the northeast Wednesday night, dumping a record-shattering 3. 15 inches of rain on New York City in a single hour, water began to pour into the city’s subways.
The system flooded in 46 locations and the MTA cut service across all lines overnight. Rescue operations had to be carried out to reach those unlucky enough to be caught in at least 15 subway cars stranded by flood waters and hundreds more people were rescued by police from stations. No one was injured, the MTA said.
The worst of the storm, which prompted city authorities to issue New York’s first ever flash flood emergency, has passed. But the events of summer 2021 have forced commuters all over the world to reckon with the vulnerability of their underground train systems as the climate crisis makes heavy rains and storm surges more common. Back in July, pedestrians in New York and London shared videos of station entrances almost entirely submerged. Later that same month in the eastern Chinese city of Zhengzhou, subway flooding reached a nightmarish worst-case scenario: hundreds of riders were trapped in cars as waters rose around them. Fourteen people drowned.
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Public transit agencies from New York to Tokyo have undertaken massive and expensive projects in recent years to make their systems more waterproof, says Singdha Garg, head of adaptation research and performance at C40, a coalition of cities focused on the climate crisis. “But with the size of these systems, the age, the cost—no city in the world is completely there: we will keep seeing cases of flooding. ”

Cai Xingzhuo–JIEMIAN NEWS/VCG/ Getty ImagesFlowers at the entrance of Shakoulu subway station to mourn those who died after getting trapped in a flooded subway on July 28, 2021 in Zhengzhou, Henan Province of China.
Safety is “in the DNA” of public transit agencies, according to Corentin Wauters, a rail expert at the International Association of Public Transport, and as the threat of extreme weather has grown in recent years, most major systems have developed plans to keep riders safe.
“In Paris, for example, where the last really major flood occurred more than a century ago, [the local transit agency] has a very well-established emergency plan,” Wauters says. The agency has developed a large stockpile of sandbags, aluminum barriers and concrete blocks to protect the metro, which opened in 1900, and carries out regular drills for transit workers and other city government departments to work together to deploy them.
Newer systems have climate protection embedded in their design, Wauters says.