Tag: Hurricane Sandy

Preliminary notes to a diagram of Occupy Sandy

If I were you, I’d take some time to read Adam Greenfield’s Preliminary notes to a diagram of Occupy Sandy:

Occupy Sandy’s effectiveness constitutes both powerfully impressive testimony as to what ordinary people can achieve when organized in a horizontal, leaderless, distributed and consciously egalitarian network, and a rebuke to the seeming inability of the centralized, hierarchical and bureaucratic organizations to which our society has hitherto entrusted mission-critical disaster recovery functions to cope with what this responsibility demands of them.

Between last week and this, with the cheerful help of everyone I spoke to (and particular thanks to Easton, Lev and Caitlin), I’ve begun to map the process flow at 520 Clinton: to identify the site’s major discrete functions, chart the flow of people, material, information and other resources between them, and identify any blockages or breakdowns in these flows. The rest of this post consists of preliminary notes toward just such a map.

via Preliminary notes to a diagram of Occupy Sandy « Adam Greenfield's Speedbird.

Into the vault: the operation to rescue Manhattan’s drowned internet

Miles of copper is ruined not only in the cable vault at Broad Street, but also at 20 or so manholes around the area. Even worse, paper insulation in the copper wiring sucks water through the cabling from capillary action, destroying cabling even in dry areas. Levendos says it’s “far too tedious, time consuming, and not effective of a process to try and put this infrastructure back together,” so Verizon’s taking the opportunity to rewire with fiber optics instead. Service has been restored to FiOS customers for over a week — unlike copper, fiber optics aren’t damaged by the water. As part of this process, crews have already pulled fiber up the major corridors — including Water, Broad, and Pearl Streets — to ultimately connect the fiber network to buildings.

Into the vault: the operation to rescue Manhattan's drowned internet | The Verge.

Accessible Transit – NYC Subway Hurricane Sandy Service

With the extensive damage wrought by Hurricane Sandy on the Northeast it is unsurprising that the New York Subway has been especially hard hit. Many of the underground river crossings were fully flooded, but luckily most of the rolling stock has been spared and all of the large capital projects (East Side Access, 7th Line extension, and the Second Avenue Subway) have received little to no damage.

What hasn’t been spared are people’s commute – which has been brutal due to the lack of power below 34th Street. This means that even if all cross river tunnels were dry and open for operation there would be no service due to power loss. Below is the Accessible Transit map for the New York City Subway during partial shutdown. This is the sixth installment of my Accessible Transit Map series – an unofficial map, not sanctioned by the MTA or NYCTA. As in previous maps, I have removed all stations which are not handicapped accessible.

Maps represent corporeal objects, through convenient fictions; a representation which works for a majority of its users. But where are the maps for the disabled or those require additional accessibility? Wouldn’t the mother with newborn in stroller need a different map then those without the need to lug all the accoutrement’s of childhood? Equally, those in a wheelchair require a map different then one which the walking can use. I decided to rectify the situation by editing the maps of major metropolitan transportation systems, in order to create a map for those who are not represented on the official map.

Midtown Detail

Overall Map

You may download the Accessible Transit NYC Subway Hurricane Sandy Service map here:

Other Accessible Transit Maps for your perusal: