The La La Landers say that gravity fed water can make it all the way to the sixth floor in NYC, so why worry about water? Well!

How many floors of real estate in NYC are above the sixth floor? Let's see, there's the World Trade towers, the Empire State building, the ...... hmmmm.... why **most** of the floors are above the sixth! Geez. I wonder what floor the mayor's bunker is on?

And how does gravity fed water become potable, I wonder? Let's see, if filtration and treatment plants go berzerk, I wonder how many people on the first six floors will end up with Montezuma's Revenge? I wonder how they'll like sharing the toilets with all the people coming down from the tenth floor?

I think there's LSD in their water already. How else could you say, "I love New York" otherwise?

-- paul leblanc (bronyaur@gis.net), December 11, 1999

Answers

Paul, one thing to remember is that the majority of people who LIVE in the city, live in Brookyn, Queens, the Bronx, and all those brownstones in Manhattan. LOTS of buildings less than six stories, in fact most of the buildings in the city are three or four storeys. The real estate that you're talking about is largely commercial (yes, of course, there are plenty of high-rise apartments, mostly in lower Manhattan and midtown). If nothing else, gravity fed water to most of the buildings in the city will allow people to flush their toilets at home. In a short-term water disruption scenario, and remember, it will be the weekend, this could be extremely important. As long as New Yorkers, who are used to great drinking water from the tap, are careful about boiling or drinking bottled water, a couple of days of no filtration may not be a killer. Obviously, more than a couple of days, and the mood will change, like by the time Monday morning rolls around and people need to go back to work. It all depends on how long it lasts. And, FWIW, the Mayor's bunker is on the 23rd floor.

I don't know if Staten Island gets its water from the Catskills or not.

BTW - New York City really can be a wonderful place to live, if you do it right. Where do you live Paul?

-- (pshannon@inch.com), December 11, 1999.

New York City can really be a wonderful place to live.

Guess there already is LSD in the water supply. ;-)

-- cgbg jr (cgbgjr@webtv.net), December 11, 1999.

NYC a wonderful place to live.... Undoubtedly true at this time. However, times they are a changin' ... like in 3 weeks.

-- King of Spain (madrid@aol.cum), December 11, 1999.

I'll second that, Patrick. NYC is great. Of course I am saying this from Vero Beach, FL, where the weather is in the 70s and I have watered my veggies this morning.

-- Mara (MaraWayne@aol.com), December 11, 1999.

New Yorkers, keep saying to yourself "NYC is a wonderful place to live" (As well as people from LA.) Then you will stay out of this beautiful valley where I live in NE Oregon.

-- morgan (bitbybit@eoni.com), December 11, 1999.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/19991211/t000112932.html

Saturday, December 11, 1999 | Print this story

Expecting Best, Bracing for New Year's Worst

Y2K: New York City thinks it's ready for whatever Jan. 1 may bring.

By JOHN J. GOLDMAN, Times Staff Writer

NEW YORK--After spending more than $300 million on plans that include a state-of-the-art command center complete with filtered air to thwart chemical and biological attacks, officials here believe New York is fully prepared to face potential problems as the millennium looms.

More than 37,000 police officers will be on duty New Year's Eve, 7,000 in Times Square alone; and officials have stockpiled 50,000 heater meals--add water and the food gets hot--for anyone who needs them, along with extra generators, a three-month supply of batteries and extra suits for protection against hazardous materials. In addition, schools with old-fashioned coal-burning furnaces have been identified as shelters in case of power failures.

The list of preparations continues for pages.

But the bottom line is that officials who gathered in the emergency management center in Manhattan's World Trade Center complex for a drill this week believe problems, if any, will be minimal.

Seated before computer consoles in a room with walls designed to withstand 200-mph winds, representatives from both the federal and state governments, the utility companies and about two dozen city agencies practiced dealing with emergencies ranging from snowstorms and water main breaks to terrorism.

"Are there going to be some problems? Sure," said Jerome M. Hauer, commissioner of the mayor's office of emergency management. "There will be some glitches here and there. Are there going to be citywide blackouts all over the United States? Is the sky going to fall? The likelihood is nil.

"But the responsible thing to do is plan for it."

Most attention has focused on Times Square, where some estimate that as many as 2 million people may gather to watch a crystal ball drop to mark midnight. But 328 other public events are scheduled in the city on New Year's Eve--including a celebration in Brooklyn that could draw large crowds and a mini-marathon in Central Park that could attract hundreds of runners.

Because of concerns about potential terrorism, security is being tightened at such symbolic sites as the World Trade Center, the Statue of Liberty, the stock exchanges and Rockefeller Center.

Times Square poses a special security challenge. The celebration--complete with puppet shows, more than 500 costumed dancers and a new 6-foot diameter, 1,070-pound Waterford crystal ball that will start to descend just before midnight--is designed to last for 24 hours.

The ceremonies here will begin in the early morning, just as midnight approaches in the South Pacific, and will end at 6 a.m. New Year's Day.

The arrival of the millennium in different parts of the world will be marked in Times Square 24 times. Drummers and dancers will perform under a gentle shower of cherry blossoms when Japan and Korea enter the new century, and the classic sounds of Carnival in Rio will be heard as the millennium reaches Brazil.

All 7,000 officers assigned to Times Square are receiving a special day of training that stresses crowd control and quick response.

The crowd will be kept in designated areas, and there will be an emergency evacuation route every 200 feet. Five giant video screens are being placed on nearby streets for those unable to enter Times Square, because police veterans of past New Year's parties say it can hold only about 700,000.

Utility crews and emergency service personnel will be positioned throughout the city to ensure rapid responses in case of massive traffic jams.

Starting Dec. 29, more than 100 crisis managers will begin duty in the emergency management center. The FBI and the Police Department will operate separate centers--with shared information.

As the millennium moves around the world, it will provide planners in New York with a preview of potential problems they may face.

And a representative from California's Department of Information Technology will be in the emergency center to relay information to authorities awaiting the stroke of midnight on the West Coast.

Officials in Los Angeles say they have spent $110 million to prepare for the worst.

Hauer predicts that reassuring the public could be a big part of his job as information flows in from other parts of the world.

"I think the issue that people have not addressed is the impact of what's going to happen overseas," he said, "and I think that could have a major impact on the collective psyche here in this country.

"Let's say the ATM machines go down in Fiji, and that is going to be reported all over the news. . . . It's very important we understand that as quickly as possible and understand what went on because people are going to start hitting the ATMs here. They are going to start getting nervous."

So what do authorities think will happen after the ball drops in Times Square?

"Hopefully, we will be greeting the new morning . . . and everything will have been a big yawn. . . . At the end of the day we will have said that it was pretty boring," Hauer said.

If not boring, certainly sober. Unlike many New Yorkers, the crisis managers gathered in the command center won't toast the millennium with champagne. "We don't have any booze," Hauer said.

-- watch (what@they.do), December 11, 1999.

Pshannon, yup, sure, anybody can get by without water for a few hours. But a few days? Intermittent failures over weeks or months? So, you nailed it as far as the crucial factor (duration of failure).

NYC is not sustainable for more than a few days at best. Therefore, I would never agree that it is designed properly. It is not a great place to live for **me** because it as far from sustainable as humanly possible. I live in suburbs which arn't sustainable either, but there is breathing room out here and the egress is not going to be blocked by humvees.

NYC has the potential to be a war zone like Beirut or Grozny. There is nothing great about that. It has the greatest potential of any city to get nuked or bio'ed, and it simply cannot sustain itself long enough to even evacuate itself properly. There is no evacuation possible. I would not be surprised if they locked you in and threw away the key in order to contain problems.

To me, "great" is something beautiful, and sustainable. NYC is ugly and unsustainable. Rural life is great if you are lucky enough to swing it in the right location.

-- paul leblanc (bronyaur@gis.net), December 11, 1999.

The reason that some of us say that NYC is in a much better water situation than cities like Chicago and LA is this.

First; they do have a gravity feed water system which will provide SOME water to the city. Chicago and LA depend on electrically driven pumps to get any water to their citizens.

Second; NYC's water supply is not filtered now. The entire watershed which feeds NYC's aqueducts is basically off-limits to any development so that the city doesn't have to build a filtration plant. There's still a big cat fight between NYC and the EPA over whether the city will have to build a filtration plant within the next few decades.

NYC insists that they can tighten restrictions on activities within the watershed. One of the Kennedy kids was or is big into driving that issue. Upstaters are almost fearful of seeing additional land being declared off-limits, to the point of towns being removed "for the good of the city".

The friction caused by these restrictions is one of the big "upstate versus downstate" battle cries. Large portions of several counties are included in the NYC watershed and are excluded from county tax roles.

The loss of property taxes means the counties which quench NYC's thirst are some of the poorest in New York state, yet their citizens' properties are taxed at a higher rate to make up for the untaxable property. And the poverty rate in those counties is substantially higher than neighboring counties.

Ask Big Dog to comment on living with the economic hardships of NYC's water system and the NYC "Water Police" roaming around his upstate abode. Of course, that's what he gets for living on the wrong side of the river.

WW

-- Wildweasel (vtmldm@epix.net), December 11, 1999.

paul leblanc,

Actually cities are potentially much more sustainable than suburbs. Building are stone and connect to each other, thus moderating and maintaining cold and heat appropriately.

Cities tend to be served by mass-transit so there is proportionately less truck and auto use -- the gravest waste of energy known to man. This means that product and produce, as well as people move efficiently.

Cities bring people together, instead of isolating them. Conversation is civilization and thus democracy has a chance of working there

I could go on.

Pete

-- Peter Starr (startrak@northcoast.com), December 11, 1999.

Thanks for the plug, WW!

Viable towns were "offed" over the past sixty years (ie, buried under water) to serve the Big Apple with our version of Evian. Heartbreaking to many - a big Bronx cheer for the local politicians who sold this county to NYC for less than what the Indians got several centuries ago.

We have five brands of cops up here, last I checked. That could be good news or bad news, I 'spose, if TEOTWAWKI -- as could the threat of terrorism to those water resources.

On the positive side (for us personally), that's downwind and downwater from where we live by some miles, as the 4x4 flies. Speaking of water, we do have lots of wonderful water ourselves, the scenery is great, the people are poor but self-reliant and all the children are above-average. I have traveled a fair bit of the world and nearly all of the U.S. and this patch of land is the equal or better of most anywhere I've seen.

As for NYC? Trying to find a local to say something kind about that city is much like trying to get Hilary to explain how she turned a tiny investment into commodity riches in a day. Speaking of which, despite NYC, everyone here is for Guiliani. That tells you something.

-- BigDog (BigDog@duffer.com), December 11, 1999.

A requirement for anyone to believe that living in NYC can be "great" is --- that he NOT have spent the first 40 years of his life in that miasma (1926 through 1965 in my case.)

Never forget: we New Yorkers wrote the book on how to destroy community.

Bill

-- William J. Schenker, MD (wjs@linkfast.net), December 12, 1999.

Poor me, my grammar is deteriorating at the same rate as Y2K remediation reliability. The phrase should have read: "--- that he had NOT spent the first 40 years ..."

Bill

-- William J. Schenker, MD (wjs@linkfast.net), December 12, 1999.

I LOVE love love New York, and always will.

My last big night out on the East Coast was at the State Theater at Lincoln Center, then wandering the avenues of the Apple and soaking up the people-watching...

...then I got on a plane and moved my tushee out of there as far away (Hawaii!)and as fast as I could!

If the term "toast" means anything in a Y2K context, then it refers to the NY situation - the most precarious of any metropolitan area.

BTW, New York's water doesn't have LSD in it. It's still the best- tasting H20 of any city I've been in... unless that's the flavor of LSD?

-- Sara Nealy (keithn@aloha.net), December 12, 1999.