Disaster Risk Reduction

Photograph by Eduardo Munoz, Reuters

AP Business Writers - by Jonathan Fahey and Peter Svensson - August 28, 2011

NEW YORK (AP) -- Below the streets of New York City, a network of pipes, cables and tunnels up to 200 feet deep transports power, gas, water, Internet traffic, trains, sewage and more. When Hurricane Irene hit the city Sunday, this underground network was largely protected from major damage.

On the island of Manhattan, only a handful of its 1.6 million residents lost power. And roughly 50,000 households in the city's outer boroughs of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island lost power.

Elsewhere, Irene left millions of East Coast residents without power, as winds knocked trees into above-ground power lines.

But while the city's buried infrastructure is safe from wind, it is vulnerable to flooding. Some experts say the city simply got lucky that the flooding wasn't more severe. The subway system is especially at risk, which is why transportation officials preemptively shut it down.

Homeland Security Newswire - August 18, 2011

A QuakeFinder network installation // Source: newsvine.com

Researchers at a Silicon Valley company are hard at work developing an experimental network of electromagnetic sensors that could predict large earthquakes as much as two weeks in advance; the theory behind the research is disputed, but Tom Bleier, the inventor and chief engineer behind project QuakeFinder, hopes to prove seismologists wrong.

Researchers at a Silicon Valley company are hard at work developing an experimental network of electromagnetic sensors that could predict large earthquakes as much as two weeks in advance.

The theory behind the research is disputed, but Tom Bleier, the inventor and chief engineer behind project QuakeFinder, hopes to prove seismologists wrong. Under the project, engineers will install roughly 200 five-foot tall sensors near fault lines in California to measure changes in underground magnetic fields and to detect electrically charged particles in the air.