Windfall

by McKenzie Funk

  Before I left his office, Olthuis led me downstairs to a private screening room, where we sat back in plush leather chairs to watch the Dutch Docklands corporate movie. He turned on the projector, and a disembodied male voice, clipped and Euro-accented, came in over the speakers. “They say we use only 10 percent of our capacity for thought,” it intoned as electronica began pumping in the background, “and we know we use only 30 percent of Earth’s capacity for life, for living. Well, it’s time for all that to change—and it’s the Dutch who are doing it.” The screen filled with a shot of a roiling blue ocean. “Many centuries of living with water, much of it below sea level, have taught us all we need to know about controlling our wet environment,” the voice continued. Images of floating highways, mosques, neighborhoods, and apartment blocks flashed before us. “Even when confronted with endless stretches of open sea, we are their master . . . It’s all researched, tested, ready for takeoff. So just think of all that idle water in your community and, together with Dutch Docklands, start putting it to work. Because where there is nothing, anything is possible.”

  “That last sentence, I really, really like,” said Olthuis. “Because there’s all this water.”

  • • •

  SOUTH OF OLTHUIS’S OFFICE, the greatest port in Europe, Rotterdam, the point of entry for most of the Continent’s oil, was being turned into a showcase of the Netherlands’ climate readiness. One morning I joined a group of a dozen mostly American urban planners on a tour led by local officials and the Dutch multinational Arcadis, a $3.3 billion, twenty-two-thousand-employee engineering firm that derived its name from Arcadia: in ancient Greek mythology, the nicest place on Earth. The company logo was a fire salamander, an animal at home on land or in water. The senior Arcadis representative with us was Piet Dircke, the director of its international water program. “I’m one of the people who’s leading all of the Dutch efforts to get a position in the U.S. based on climate-change adaptation,” he told me. “I’m trying to connect the international ambitions of Rotterdam to cities like New York and New Orleans and San Francisco.”

  What was billed as the Rotterdam Climate Proof tour started on land at the edge of the North Sea, at the crown jewel of the Netherlands’ Delta Works, the Maeslantkering, an enormous storm-surge barrier at the mouth of the port. The barrier consisted of two curved, floating gates that swung closed, then sank into place when one computer system—known as the BOS—predicted a storm surge of at least three meters and told another system—BES—to enact the closure sequence. It was among the largest moving structures on the planet. Each steel swing arm was twice as long as the Statue of Liberty is tall. The Maeslant barrier took six years and $500 million to build and install, and when it was finally in place, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands came herself to inaugurate it. Since then, it has been used only once, in 2007. It was built to withstand all but a one-in-ten-thousand-year storm, though climate change, we were told, could muddy the math.

  The planners on the tour busied themselves taking photographs of the open swing arms and clambering up what passed for a hill to try to get an angle on the whole Maeslantkering. It was impossible. It was too big. Inside a visitor center, a guide showed us around a scale model, and after we were suitably impressed, we left for the center of the city. Near the historic headquarters of the Holland America Line, we boarded a water taxi, and soon we were cruising through a four-thousand-acre expanse of former shipyards that had become one of the largest development sites in Europe.

  “Rotterdam’s ambition is to be one of the places where the new future will be created,” the port’s redevelopment manager said after we’d clambered out to join him on a pier. We followed him into an ornate building that once belonged to the RDM shipyard. “RDM” no longer stood for Rotterdamsche Droogdok Maatschappij, he assured us. It meant Research, Design, and Manufacturing, and the site was being retooled as a futuristic campus for research institutes and technical universities attempting to solve the problems of the world. In adjacent buildings, students were perfecting zero-emissions go-karts, conversion kits for hydrogen-powered buses, and the Sustainable Dance Club, where the power of dancers’ footwork kept the lights on. “We’ll be a center for water tech and for clean tech—the Silicon Valley of the lowlands,” he continued. “People will come even when sea levels are rising.” A planner from the San Francisco Bay Area raised his hand. “But why invest here rather than somewhere else, like Singapore, Shanghai, or the Silicon Valley?” he asked. The port manager smiled. “Because we are turning a threat into an opportunity,” he said. “We’re sending a message to the international community: If you set up shop here, we can guarantee that we will keep your feet dry.”

  Having decided to be the global leader in climate adaptation and water knowledge, Rotterdam had created a network it called Connecting Delta Cities, hosting conferences and hastening the flow of its experts and expertise to member cities on six continents. Across the harbor from us, firms including Shell, BP, IBM, and Arcadis had been persuaded to take part in the Rotterdam Climate Campus. “It will likely be floating,” an official told us. Elsewhere in the harbor would be floating neighborhoods and floating laboratories, and some RDM students would be housed on the SS Rotterdam, the onetime flagship of the Holland America Line. “We even have a floating prison,” someone said.

  Some innovations were already springing up abroad of their own accord. In New Orleans, Brad Pitt’s Make It Right foundation and the Los Angeles architecture firm Morphosis would unveil the Float House, which could rise up to twelve feet on guideposts as floodwaters destroyed its neighbors. Pushing a similar design was the professor behind the Buoyant Foundation Project, who described her areas of research as “the study of wind loads on tall buildings, the aerodynamics of wind-borne debris, strategies for the mitigation of hurricane damage to buildings, and the origins of early 20th-c. Russian avant-garde architectural theory in 19th-c. mystical-religious slavophile philosophy.” But when it came to seawalls, storm-surge barriers, and other city-scale defenses, firms like Arcadis couldn’t help but believe that their services were needed. “The consequence of ‘New Orleans’ is that the Americans have placed orders with a number of Dutch companies to the value of 200 million dollars,” read a quotation from Piet Dircke in one of the Port of Rotterdam’s pamphlets. Arcadis had seventy-one projects in the New Orleans region alone, including part of the two-hundred-foot-wide Seabrook Floodgate, a mini Maeslantkering. And Dircke, I learned, had been to New York City four times in the previous six months.

  Dircke and I sat together on the water taxi ride back. “Of course we build on our Dutch reputation as that very small but very brave country battling for centuries against the sea,” he said. “Climate change brings opportunities. You get new challenges.” He brought up the Elfstedentocht, the Netherlands’ famous speed-skating competition, lamenting that ice-skating was becoming an indoor sport. “Are we not living in a crazy world? I’ll tell you what is even more crazy: You can do pretty good skiing now in Holland. It’s down in the south, and it’s called Landgraaf: an indoor ski area. Everybody was laughing about it until two years ago, when they opened the World Cup ski season there. There was no snow in the Alps, and Landgraaf had snow. You know what happened after the World Cup? The Austrian and Swiss teams quickly booked training periods for the next year. In Holland! Imagine the world, a couple years from now, when we have only indoor skiing and no snow on the mountains. And it seems we are already adapting to it. It is normal.” He chuckled. “We are already adapting. Our minds are adapting.”

  Dutch companies had already helped build storm-surge barriers for Venice, New Orleans, London, and St. Petersburg—metropolises that could afford to pay much more than any island nation could—but increasingly they looked at New York City. The task would be complex and lucrative. “You can’t seal off New York with just one barrier,” Dircke said. “You need an East River gate. On the New Jersey side you need a gate. At the Verrazano Narrows you need
a gate. And you need a gate near Jamaica Bay if you also want to protect JFK airport. There are four holes, luckily not more than that.”

  It was three years before Hurricane Sandy began forming in the southern Caribbean and spinning its way north. A conference had just been announced by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) to look at some of the first designs for a New York storm-surge barrier, and Dircke would soon be on his way to the city to present Arcadis’s idea. “It is very exciting,” he said. I decided to follow him there.

  • • •

  ANOTHER BOROUGH, ANOTHER auditorium, another conference on sea-level rise. This time it was not at Columbia in upper Manhattan but in the decidedly less imposing environs of New York University’s Polytechnic Institute in downtown Brooklyn, not far from where insurance companies were quietly dropping clients near the Gowanus Canal. The ASCE’s “Against the Deluge” conference was the rare scene where the line for the men’s bathroom was always far longer than that for the women’s. It had the air of what was then a lost cause. There was a single paying exhibitor—“Please visit our exhibitor,” implored the organizers—who was an eager Texan waving flyers at all the old men as they waited for the provided spaghetti dinner, which was served cold. The Texan’s invention, FloodBreak, was an ingenious, self-deploying floodgate that was big enough to protect one’s garage but unfortunately not at all big enough to protect Manhattan. Inside, scientists explained the growing threat to New York: The one commonality with Bangladesh was that sea levels here were rising faster than the global average, a foot in the last century. This rate could double just as the city faced more powerful hurricanes. At risk, a city employee told the half-empty room, were 802,000 buildings worth $825 billion with contents worth $560 billion. Another speaker highlighted Breezy Point, the Queens neighborhood that would be flattened by waves and fire in Hurricane Sandy, as particularly at risk. The scientists were followed by engineers and architecture firms presenting rival storm-surge barrier designs, and the Arcadis team gave a sales pitch that was more subtle than the Texan’s—and much more effective.

  Dircke’s proposal for the Narrows was a beautiful design—“An extra landmark for New York,” said a colleague—that combined the Maeslantkering with two other famous barriers in the Dutch Delta Works, the Hartel and the Eastern Scheldt. It would allow passage of the biggest ship in the world, the 1,300-foot-long, 185-foot-wide Emma Maersk, while also protecting the most moneyed place in the world, Wall Street, from a twenty-two-foot surge. Not including the other three barriers the city would need to be fully sealed off, the design would cost a very roughly estimated $6.5 billion, more than double the price of the Netherlands’ Room for the River project. The Arcadis presentation featured spinning animations of the gate action and an aerial glamour shot of the New York Harbor of the future, safe behind its floodgates and beneath a sunny sky. When it was over, the assembled engineers gave a rare applause.

  There was one downside to any design that used the Narrows to protect Manhattan from storm surges—a necessary evil—and Dircke was straightforward about it. As everyone knows, when water is blocked, it doesn’t just disappear. It flows elsewhere. If a surge came barreling toward a Verrazano barrier, it would do the hydrological equivalent of a bounce, and it would land somewhere else. Arrochar and Midland Beach on Staten Island, Bath Beach and Gravesend in Brooklyn—these and other immigrant-heavy neighborhoods were just outside the Narrows, poorer than the core, just above sea level, and slated for an even bigger surge. Manhattan would be saved, and they would likely be underwater.

  When Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in late October 2012, there was not yet a barrier, just a hint of what could come. On Staten Island, a sixteen-foot storm surge swamped Midland Beach and Ocean Breeze and Oakwood Beach, and twenty-three people died, more than in any other borough—the vast majority of them south of the Narrows, the vast majority of them by drowning. In lower Manhattan, water flooded subway tunnels and power stations, and the cityscape went dark, with one exception: At 200 West Street, close to the island’s southernmost tip, Goldman Sachs headquarters was ringed with a massive wall of sandbags, and backup generators kept the lights on all night. Across the stormy Atlantic, in the Netherlands, Arcadis’s stock jumped 5.6 percent, capping a 43 percent rise for the year.

  ELEVEN

  BETTER THINGS FOR BETTER LIVING

  CLIMATE GENETICS

  The yellow-fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti, better known today as the primary carrier of dengue fever, is a container breeder. It lays its eggs in the pools of rainwater left in the things we leave outside our homes: buckets, vases, cups, yard ornaments, clogged gutters. The most proven way to eradicate the disease is to clean up those things or to constantly dump out their water, which for public health authorities is a grueling, house-to-house, yard-to-yard fight. And the more plastic human life becomes, the more our detritus becomes mosquitoes’ habitat, the harder dengue is to control. There is still no vaccine for it, and Aedes aegypti bite mostly by day, making bed nets largely useless. Urbanization, globalized trade, and increasing air travel have also helped grow dengue into a global epidemic three thousand times more prevalent than it was in the 1960s: every year, as many as a hundred million infections and twenty-two thousand deaths in more than a hundred countries. Aedes like it hot, and they prefer humans to any other animal. They are attracted by the CO2 we exhale with every breath, and their potential range expands, many scientists believe, with every ton of CO2 our industries emit.

  Aedes aegypti is originally from Africa, and Aedes albopictus, the other species that can transmit dengue, is from Asia. One or both are now found in twenty-eight U.S. states, Florida chief among them: In 2009, the first American dengue outbreak in seventy-five years took place in Jimmy Buffett’s and Ernest Hemingway’s paradisal Key West, the southernmost and hottest city in the Lower 48. A tourist had returned sick to New York, and soon the disease was tracked to a quiet street in Old Town. There were twenty-seven confirmed cases that year, sixty-six the next. A CDC team took random blood samples and estimated that 5 percent of Key West’s population—more than a thousand people, many of them asymptomatic—had been exposed to dengue. In its mild form, the disease causes headaches, fevers, rashes, bleeding gums, and intense joint and muscle pain. Its more severe form, known as dengue hemorrhagic fever, brings nosebleeds, purple splotches under the skin, and possibly death.

  Pending regulatory approval, Key West would soon also be the site of the United States’ first release of genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes. The flagship product of a British company called Oxitec, the patent-protected Aedes aegypti OX513A was a kind of Trojan horse. Sent out by the millions to breed with native Aedes, the modded mosquitoes carried a suicide gene that would theoretically doom the next generation to an early death, making dengue transmission impossible. Genetic modification was the logic of climate adaptation taken one step further: Instead of changing how and where life was lived, it would change, however modestly, what life was.

  I visited Key West in August, when the weather is at its stickiest. With the air-conditioning on max, the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District inspector John Snell drove me one morning to the highest point in Old Town, elevation eighteen feet above sea level, and parked his pickup. Nearby was the city’s historic cemetery: nineteen palm-dotted acres where tourists came to see the grave of the forty-inch-tall midget “General” Abe Sawyer, who was buried in a full-size plot; the headstone of a hypochondriac waitress named B. Pearl Roberts, which read, “I told you I was sick”; and the resting place of the nurse Ellen Mallory, who treated yellow fever victims in the early nineteenth century, decades before anyone connected the disease to mosquitoes. While not the island’s original cemetery—that one was destroyed by a colossal 1846 hurricane, its bodies left strewn in trees—it was old enough to be the most difficult part of Snell’s beat. The graves of nearly 100,000 people, four times the island’s living population, translated to lots of fresh flowers. �
�Some of the vases are just a constant, constant battle,” Snell said. “The ones I can tell have been there a long time, I’ll just go ahead and dump them out. But fresh ones I treat, half a larvicide tablet in every vase.” He went through two hundred tablets a month.

  Snell was one of eight home inspectors in Key West—twice as many as the city had before the dengue outbreak. He wore wraparound sunglasses and a white collared shirt, and when we left the truck, he was carrying a jury-rigged ski pole–water scooper in his hand, larvicide and a turkey baster in his black fanny pack. He was tasked with ridding some forty blocks and eleven hundred homes of Aedes, and his workload ebbed and flowed with the seasons. Warmer temperatures accelerate not only mosquito development but the incubation period of the dengue virus; inspectors have a shorter window to stamp out both host and disease. “In winter, in the dry season, it’s not that bad,” Snell said. There were two weeks to catch mosquito larvae before it was too late. But in the hot, humid summer, he had only four days.