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Will Climate Change Swamp the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island?

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Michelle Jahn
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« on: December 26, 2013, 04:26:57 pm »

Guarding Liberty

Statue of Liberty National Monument's former Superintendent David Luchsinger has a disaster-filled resume. With the National Park Service for 36 years, he volunteered to work Park Service lands in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

He was in New York for Sandy. Ditto for Hurricane Irene. He spent 1991's Hurricane Gloria and the nor'easter that followed at NPS lands on Fire Island—after which he spent two weeks canoeing over flooded land to his office.

He was also in NYC for September 11. That night, he grabbed a NPS boat and two Park Service rangers and closed down New York Harbor at the Verrazano Bridge. The Coast Guard, who would normally do the job, he says "was occupied with everything else that was going on."

Those experiences worked in Liberty's and Ellis's favor.

"One of the first things I did here—in fact on my first day on the job at Liberty and Ellis—I was supposed to sign off on a project agreement that would have called for our historic Ellis Island museum collection to be moved. I refused to do it and said, 'Unfortunately, you've picked a guy from Louisiana, and you're asking me to put my invaluable collection in a 50-year floodplain and I'm not going to do that,' " he says.

The project would have moved the collection to a building that flooded up to two feet deep during Sandy. "We would have lost our collection."

Tomorrow's Monument

Other problems weren't as easy for Luchsinger to circumvent.

A year to the day before Sandy hit, Liberty was closed for safety renovations and upgrades and to install a handicapped elevator that would go all the way up to the observation deck. Liberty reopened on October 28, 2012. It was open for exactly one day.

None of those upgrades were damaged during Sandy, but the energy infrastructure of both islands—HVAC and other mechanical systems, all housed in basements—were destroyed. "We've made this a very sustainable park—something it wasn't beforehand, but we've learned from experience," says Luchsinger. For example, the electric system of Liberty was moved to the second floor of an old incinerator building, well above flood level, and it was operational in time to reopen the statue to the public on July 4, 2013.

Ellis Island followed on October 28, 2013. There's little in the way of exhibits or videos at this stage, even the computer room where visitors can look up family members who immigrated through Ellis Island is still shuttered. The current visitor experience on Ellis is remarkably similar to what an immigrant might have seen: the baggage room and, upstairs, the great hall where the huddled masses awaited their personal interviews. It won't reopen in full until May.

"The only reason we're open on Ellis is because during restoration, the restorers put back the old radiator system. We were never going to use it, because we had a modern air handler system, but that got washed out," notes Luchsinger. "The only reason we're open is the old steam heat radiators."
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