the subway is in danger! hurricane snooki is on its way to new york, and if it rains just a little bit then the entire subway system is going to shut down and you new yorkers are going to have to start hunting for rats and running from the zombie apocalypse.
There's a massive storm headed to New York, one that may flood the subway. What most people don't know is that we depend on just 700 fragile water pumps to keep the tunnels dry—some a century old.
In fact, if someone powered down all these pumps tomorrow, the entire subway network would be inundated in just a few hours. To give you an idea of how complex and massive this system is, it pulls 13 million gallons of water out of the subway on any sunny day. No rain. Not even a single drop of water from the sky.
On a rainy day, it is absolute madness. To the point where the MTA—NYC's Metropolitan Transportation Authority—lives in permanent panic, fearing events like Nicole, the tropical storm system that is approaching the little town blue right now. "At some point, it would be too much to handle," said the head of the hydraulics team back in 2006, Peter Velasquez Jr., "you've got rain plus wind. It basically would shut down the system. You hope not. You pray that it doesn't."
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