New York's $215 Million Emergency Gas Tanks Are Apocalypse Infrastructure

The seas are going to keep rising, and the super-storms are going to keep coming, so scattering a bunch of giant gasoline storage tanks across the nation for emergency use is probably a good idea. Still, nothing signals the nation's impending Mad Maxification quite like news that the US government is spending $215 million to build 500,000-gallon tanks—the first of many—explicitly for use in future Hurricane Sandy-like crises.

“Building on lessons learned from recent extreme weather events like Superstorm Sandy, today we are announcing the establishment of a refined petroleum product reserve for the region surrounding New York Harbor and the Northern New England area to help ease the effects of potential future gasoline supply disruptions," Ernest Moniz, the US Secretary of Energy, said in a statement.

After Sandy, two refineries were shut down, and blackouts left hundreds of gas stations without power, the New York Times reminds us. Twenty-five fuel terminals were also temporarily shuttered. Some residents, businesses, and government agencies went without gas for nearly a month, before the Pentagon began delivering fuel.

Also notable is the fact that this move is in direct response to the acknowledged specter of climate change: “In addition to our mitigation and international efforts, the president’s Climate Action Plan calls on us to take measures today in order to better prepare for the effects of climate change we already see occurring here at home,” Moniz said.

In that sense, consider these facilities a pair of giant, oily band-aids. It's an effort to hurricane-proof a region under seige. The federal government, stymied by a science-oblivious Congress, has failed to take any meaningful action to forestall the arrival of climate change. So now it's got to build apocaylpse infrastructure for use in the increasingly inevitable climate disaster.