Chilling Effect: Air-Conditioner Repairs Undermine Coolant Restrictions

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

A repair technician in New Jersey removed an air-conditioning unit that uses HCFC-22, which is banned for use in new units, to install a new one that uses a different coolant, R-410A.

When Mark Spector's central air-conditioning system stopped cooling his Trumbull, Conn., home this summer, he sent an S O S to his repairman. What happened next illustrates the myriad challenges the United States faces as it tries to phase out the popular but environmentally devastating cooling gas that was in Mr. Spector's unit.

Articles in this series describe the impact of the rising demand for coolant gases, a growing contributor to global warming.

The Environmental Protection Agency has tried to reduce use of this gas, HCFC-22, which depletes the ozone layer and contributes to global warming, by imposing strict quotas on its production. Since 2010, it has also banned the sale of new air-conditioning units containing the compound, and has promoted recycling of the gas from old machines so it will not be released.

But what followed at Mr. Spector's home circumvented all the agency's rules and good intentions: Instead of finding and repairing the hole in his aging unit, a complicated task, a serviceman pumped in more coolant, which leaked out by the next day. When Mr. Spector called around for another solution, a salesman offered to swap in a new condenser unit, but one that still used HCFC-22 — meaning one more American home would continue relying on an environmentally damaging coolant for years.

HCFC-22 is being phased out of air conditioners worldwide under an international treaty called the Montreal Protocol, and the United States has aggressively pressed poor countries to pick up the pace. But the United States has yet to put its own house in order. And, with 140 million central air units still running on HCFC-22 in this country, it is a major offender.

Leaks abound in working equipment. Coolant seeps out of discarded equipment in landfills. Regulatory loopholes allow manufacturers to sell parts that rely on HCFC-22, so systems using the old gas can be refurbished rather than replaced. There is almost no reclamation of the gas from old machines for recycling. The E.P.A. is behind schedule in imposing rules to ratchet down domestic production, and smuggling is rarely detected. Even where there are regulations — for example, repair technicians are legally bound to collect old gas rather than vent it — there is little enforcement.

And, as Mr. Spector discovered, many of the environmental crimes and misdeeds that keep the country dependent on HCFC-22 happen on your property, most likely without your knowledge.

"It's totally illegal to vent gas, but it's also totally inconspicuous," said Stephen O. Andersen, a former E.P.A. official who has campaigned for better controls on cooling gases. "I always watch like a hawk when they're in my yard," he said of technicians.

The concentration of HCFC-22 in the atmosphere is 218 parts per trillion, more than double the amount two decades ago, and it gets there in a number of ways. Low-quality or old equipment leaks, and detecting the colorless and odorless gas without pressure-testing devices is difficult. Sometimes the release is intentional, because it costs less. For example, installing a new part properly usually requires first siphoning a machine's coolant into a canister, for later replacement. But it is quicker, though illegal, just to cut the line. A technician saves half an hour on a job, and the customer gets a smaller bill.

Bobby Ring, who runs a servicing company in suburban New Jersey, said that makes it hard for him to compete. "There are contractors out there who refuse to make the investment in recovery equipment to reclaim or recover refrigerants, and no one is looking, so — phsssst — they let the refrigerant escape," he said.

Although large companies, which are required to report use of the gas, have been fined for large leaks, the E.P.A. has never prosecuted a residential service company for intentionally releasing HCFC-22.

Asked about the lack of backyard enforcement, David Bloomgren, a spokesman for the E.P.A., said it is "a challenge to locate or obtain evidence of illegal venting," so the agency focused on large polluters but encouraged homeowners to report possible backyard violations they observed to an E.P.A. tip site at epa.gov/tips/.

While it is hard to quantify exactly how much coolant is illegally released from America's residential air conditioners, the E.P.A. estimates that only 7 percent of used coolant is turned in for recycling.

"The vast majority of it hits the sky," illegally vented, said Kevin Zugibe, chief executive of Hudson Technologies Inc., a company set up to recycle HCFC-22. Under the Montreal Protocol, the United States has until 2015 to cut production and imports of newly made HCFC-22 to 10 percent of what it was a decade ago.

Without a much better supply of recycled HCFC-22, the United States will not be able to do that — or have enough to service all the older air conditioners, grocery store freezers and other refrigeration equipment.

In the European Union, only recycled or reclaimed HCFC-22 can be legally used to service equipment. In Australia and Japan, recovery of the gas from old appliances is mandatory, and technicians receive a fee for collection.

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New York Reassessing Building Code to Limit Storm Damage

In the countdown to Hurricane Sandy last month, construction workers on a teeming pier in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, rushed to strap down materials and move forklifts and excavators into half-built structures to shield them from the tempest to come.

But the real storm preparations had been accomplished six years earlier, when Sims Metal Management approved a design for a state-of-the-art city recycling plant that is rising at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal.

Reviewing projections for local sea-level rise, the company and its architects decided to elevate portions of the site to heights exceeding city requirements by four feet. Using recycled glass and crushed rock discarded from projects like the Second Avenue subway line, they raised the foundation for the plant's four buildings and a dock.

The fill added $550,000 to the plant's costs of around $100 million, said Thomas Outerbridge, Sims Metal's general manager.

But it proved more than worth it. When a 12-foot storm surge swept through nearby streets and parking lots on Oct. 29, the plant's dock and partly completed buildings did not flood.

"It paid for itself long before we expected it," Mr. Outerbridge said. "It was built with the idea that, over the next 40 years, this would prove a prudent thing — and the proof came during construction."

For years, experts have warned that New York City has failed to keep pace with the threats posed by sea-level rise along the 520-mile coastline of the city's five boroughs. Builders that have taken steps on their own, like Sims Metal, have been relatively few.

But as city officials and real estate developers ponder a landscape of devastation from the South Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan to the Rockaways in Queens to Midland Beach on Staten Island, new flood protections for all building types suddenly seem inevitable, whether voluntary or mandated by new laws.

"Now there's a different calculus," the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, said. "You pay now or you pay more later."

Last week, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Ms. Quinn convened a new "building resiliency" task force to study potential changes in the building code and to make recommendations by the summer. Ms. Quinn said she anticipated that the city would require retrofits to reinforce existing structures and more floodproofing for new projects.

The chairman of the task force, Russell Unger, is executive director of the Urban Green Council, which advises the city on sustainable building issues. He said the new group would need to address both direct impacts from the storm, like structure collapse and flooding, and secondary ones, like power losses from utility failures. Levels of protection will have to vary according to location, building use and other variables, he said.

Speaking of the different expectations for different buildings, for example, Mr. Unger said, "we probably expect elevators at senior centers to work, no matter what happens."

Some of the potential measures are relatively simple, like keeping sandbags handy and installing floodgates at building entrances. Others are more complicated, like relocating critical equipment like boilers above ground level or encasing them in watertight enclosures and rebuilding houses on concrete piles.

The storm's aftermath also revealed a need for emergency generators to run at least one elevator in tall residential buildings and to pump water to high floors so the buildings remain habitable after a severe storm, some owners said.

Yet some builders say they have every incentive not to wait for government mandates and have taken some steps on their own.

At Queens West, the sprawling multiuse riverfront complex in Long Island City, Queens, the developer TF Cornerstone built higher over fill, eliminated basements, installed mechanical systems on the first and second floors and added floodgates at the entrances of five residential buildings, said Jon McMillan, the firm's director of planning. He said the firm was acting on advice from Architectonica, a Miami firm that is familiar with the ravages of hurricanes.

During Hurricane Sandy, Mr. McMillan said, the water did not reach the lobby doors of the five buildings, which are all occupied, so the protections were not tested.

Still, such provisions might have made a big difference at another TF Cornerstone property, the 52-story luxury high-rise at 2 Gold Street in Lower Manhattan, he said. The flooding there knocked out the building's electrical and mechanical systems, and residents of its 850 apartments have been told they cannot return home until March because the equipment, which corrodes with saltwater, has to be reordered and built.

"This is in the center of Lower Manhattan on the East Side, so we were not thinking about sea-level rise," Mr. McMillan said of the building, completed in 2005.

TF Cornerstone is now planning to create watertight, submarine-like enclosures for the electrical room and other equipment at 2 Gold, he said. And the firm is considering placing all mechanical equipment above ground in a new Midtown project it envisions building on the Hudson.

Some in the real estate industry predict a new appeal for midrise buildings. Thomas Guss, a broker who caters to an international wealthy clientele, said interest in smaller luxury residential buildings like the 19-floor Centurion, a condominium at 33 West 56th Street designed by I. M. Pei, had doubled since the storm. He said potential buyers had told him they feared being trapped in their apartments with no lights or water, or having to climb 50 flights of stairs.

"Suddenly, people who wanted the 50th floor now want the 15th," he said. "People realize that when there's no elevator, maybe the view is not as magical anymore."

Some developers worry about losing rentable space above ground to mechanical equipment. Others are reluctant to forgo the aesthetics of ground-floor luxury retail stores. Still, that lesson has been well absorbed in flood-prone areas of New Orleans and Hamburg, Germany, where homes have been rebuilt on stilts and waterfronts raised.

Some architects and building experts say the city should widen its efforts to plant more wetlands and parks that can serve as natural buffers to floods. "All the little blades of grass actually makes the flow of the water lower," said Susannah C. Drake, associate director of the Cooper Union Institute for Sustainable Design and the principal architect at dlandstudio.

What does not seem to be getting consideration, at least for now, is banning development altogether in the city's flood zones, humble or affluent.

"This is not a viable policy option in New York City, and to be honest, nor is it in any other major coastal city I've been working," said Jeroen Aerts, a water risk expert from the Free University in Amsterdam who has been hired by the mayor's office to assess flood protections. "The stakes of developers and general economic activities in the waterfront are too high."

In Mr. Aerts's view, the most realistic options for New York are to build levees and surge barriers, and elevate and floodproof buildings.

Ms. Quinn, a likely candidate for mayor when Mr. Bloomberg's term expires at the end of 2013, said changes in the building code were a far higher priority than rethinking zoning rules. But she said that nothing was off the table.

"I don't think there's anything that's taboo to discuss at this point," she said.

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Scientists See Advances in Deep Learning, a Part of Artificial Intelligence

Hao Zhang/The New York Times

A voice recognition program translated a speech given by Richard F. Rashid, Microsoft's top scientist, into Mandarin Chinese.

Using an artificial intelligence technique inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns, technology companies are reporting startling gains in fields as diverse as computer vision, speech recognition and the identification of promising new molecules for designing drugs.

The advances have led to widespread enthusiasm among researchers who design software to perform human activities like seeing, listening and thinking. They offer the promise of machines that converse with humans and perform tasks like driving cars and working in factories, raising the specter of automated robots that could replace human workers.

The technology, called deep learning, has already been put to use in services like Apple's Siri virtual personal assistant, which is based on Nuance Communications' speech recognition service, and in Google's Street View, which uses machine vision to identify specific addresses.

But what is new in recent months is the growing speed and accuracy of deep-learning programs, often called artificial neural networks or just "neural nets" for their resemblance to the neural connections in the brain.

"There has been a number of stunning new results with deep-learning methods," said Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University who did pioneering research in handwriting recognition at Bell Laboratories. "The kind of jump we are seeing in the accuracy of these systems is very rare indeed."

Artificial intelligence researchers are acutely aware of the dangers of being overly optimistic. Their field has long been plagued by outbursts of misplaced enthusiasm followed by equally striking declines.

In the 1960s, some computer scientists believed that a workable artificial intelligence system was just 10 years away. In the 1980s, a wave of commercial start-ups collapsed, leading to what some people called the "A.I. winter."

But recent achievements have impressed a wide spectrum of computer experts. In October, for example, a team of graduate students studying with the University of Toronto computer scientist Geoffrey E. Hinton won the top prize in a contest sponsored by Merck to design software to help find molecules that might lead to new drugs.

From a data set describing the chemical structure of 15 different molecules, they used deep-learning software to determine which molecule was most likely to be an effective drug agent.

The achievement was particularly impressive because the team decided to enter the contest at the last minute and designed its software with no specific knowledge about how the molecules bind to their targets. The students were also working with a relatively small set of data; neural nets typically perform well only with very large ones.

"This is a really breathtaking result because it is the first time that deep learning won, and more significantly it won on a data set that it wouldn't have been expected to win at," said Anthony Goldbloom, chief executive and founder of Kaggle, a company that organizes data science competitions, including the Merck contest.

Advances in pattern recognition hold implications not just for drug development but for an array of applications, including marketing and law enforcement. With greater accuracy, for example, marketers can comb large databases of consumer behavior to get more precise information on buying habits. And improvements in facial recognition are likely to make surveillance technology cheaper and more commonplace.

Artificial neural networks, an idea going back to the 1950s, seek to mimic the way the brain absorbs information and learns from it. In recent decades, Dr. Hinton, 64 (a great-great-grandson of the 19th-century mathematician George Boole, whose work in logic is the foundation for modern digital computers), has pioneered powerful new techniques for helping the artificial networks recognize patterns.

Modern artificial neural networks are composed of an array of software components, divided into inputs, hidden layers and outputs. The arrays can be "trained" by repeated exposures to recognize patterns like images or sounds.

These techniques, aided by the growing speed and power of modern computers, have led to rapid improvements in speech recognition, drug discovery and computer vision.

Deep-learning systems have recently outperformed humans in certain limited recognition tests.

Last year, for example, a program created by scientists at the Swiss A. I. Lab at the University of Lugano won a pattern recognition contest by outperforming both competing software systems and a human expert in identifying images in a database of German traffic signs.

The winning program accurately identified 99.46 percent of the images in a set of 50,000; the top score in a group of 32 human participants was 99.22 percent, and the average for the humans was 98.84 percent.

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Gulf of Mexico Dolphin Killings Inquiry Escalates

ATLANTA — An investigation into the mysterious killing of dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico is gaining momentum, with a federal agent now in charge of the case and a $30,000 reward for catching the killer or killers.

Reuters

This bottlenose dolphin, found fatally shot in the water off the Mississippi coast earlier this month, is one of six that have washed ashore in the area, mutilated or with bullet or stab wounds.

Since the summer, six dead dolphins have washed ashore with bullet wounds, severed fins and jaws, and stab wounds. The latest was a dolphin found off the coast of Mississippi with its lower jaw missing.

Whether the deaths were caused by the same group or person is not known, but federal investigators are turning to the public for help.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has called on fishermen and beachgoers to report any dead or injured dolphins. Forensic experts at the agency are testing the slugs removed from the animals to see if they come from the same gun.

More than 700 dolphins have been found dead of various causes in the gulf since February 2010. But scientists say that deliberate, violent deaths are rare.

"These are senseless, repugnant acts," said Moby Solangi, the executive director of the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport, Miss. "These dolphins are mutilated in a way that no animal is in the wild."

Rewards for clues that lead to an arrest have been offered by the marine institute, the California-based Animal Legal Defense Fund and Paul Watson, an early member of Greenpeace and an Animal Planet host.

"I regard the killing of a dolphin as murder, and what we appear to have on the Gulf Coast is a dolphin serial killer," Mr. Watson said. "I want this sadistic killer stopped."

Much attention has focused on the role of fishermen. Dolphins often swim behind boats, eating shrimp from nets and waiting for unwanted fish to be thrown overboard. Fishermen say they become frustrated by dolphins' stealing bait or destroying nets.

Louis Skrmetta, a ferryboat captain for Ship Island Excursions in Gulfport, said he had heard of fishermen firing guns at dolphins to keep them away. "When the dolphins show up, some of these guys get frustrated and consider them nuisances," he said.

The deaths have been spread across the coast. In June, a dolphin was found stabbed with a screwdriver in Alabama. The others have been shot in Louisiana and Mississippi over the past few months, the authorities say. Under the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, killing a dolphin is punishable by a fine of up to $100,000 and a year in jail.

Investigators say finding the responsible person or group will be difficult, with the crimes spread across three states and no known witnesses. NOAA has received numerous tips but none that have led to a suspect.

"We've had everything from anonymous faxes to anonymous telephone calls," said Jeff Radonski, the agency's acting deputy special agent in charge of law enforcement in the Southeast. "We've had spouses that are mad at their husbands spout off. It's the regular gamut that a normal police officer deals with."

Much of the business of wildlife sleuthing is similar to routine police work, he said. It is just harder. With strong tides in the gulf, a dolphin could be swept miles before washing ashore or could have been mutilated after reaching the beach.

"The biggest problem we have is we can't go to the dolphins and interview friends and build up a history," he said. "One of the key things in our investigation are witnesses, somebody coming forward, telling us what it is that happened."

Campbell Robertson contributed reporting from New Orleans.

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Sinkholes in Far Rockaway Caused by Storm-Damaged Pipes, City Says

Residents in Far Rockaway, Queens, have endured their share of hardships caused by Hurricane Sandy, with many still recovering from flooded basements and the loss of electricity.

But as the flooding receded, some said, they began noticing a problem they had not anticipated: sinkholes were appearing in areas that had seemed solid and stable before the storm.

"I'm worried that my house is going to sink," Eleanor Alexandre said recently, surveying one of the holes, which was several feet behind her home on Beach 67th Street. "That hole looks like it has gotten bigger."

For more than a week, the origin of the sinkholes was a mystery. But on Thursday, New York City officials said it had been solved: they were caused by damage to water and sewer lines.

Some of the sinkholes, like the one behind Ms. Alexandre's house, appeared in grassy backyards, while others are in paved areas. At least three were cavernous, extending several feet into the ground. One formed at the corner of a house on Beach 69th Street and appeared to have eroded the earth beneath a section of the foundation.

The holes range up to nearly 3 feet in diameter, and some are 10 feet deep, said Steve Major, a former construction manager from Arizona who was in Brooklyn helping deliver aid after the storm and was among the first to notice the holes.

Mr. Major said he identified a dozen sinkholes in mid-November between Beach 67th and Beach 68th Streets in an area bordered by Bayfield Avenue to the north and Almeda Avenue to the south.

A spokesman for the city's Environmental Protection Department said workers had determined that the sinkholes had been caused by damage to private water and sewer lines that run beneath backyards. The agency has begun informing homeowners of the problem so they could arrange for repairs.

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Chilling Effect: Air-Conditioner Repairs Undermine Coolant Restrictions

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

A repair technician in New Jersey removed an air-conditioning unit that uses HCFC-22, which is banned for use in new units, to install a new one that uses a different coolant, R-410A.

When Mark Spector's central air-conditioning system stopped cooling his Trumbull, Conn., home this summer, he sent an S O S to his repairman. What happened next illustrates the myriad challenges the United States faces as it tries to phase out the popular but environmentally devastating cooling gas that was in Mr. Spector's unit.

Articles in this series describe the impact of the rising demand for coolant gases, a growing contributor to global warming.

The Environmental Protection Agency has tried to reduce use of this gas, HCFC-22, which depletes the ozone layer and contributes to global warming, by imposing strict quotas on its production. Since 2010, it has also banned the sale of new air-conditioning units containing the compound, and has promoted recycling of the gas from old machines so it will not be released.

But what followed at Mr. Spector's home circumvented all the agency's rules and good intentions: Instead of finding and repairing the hole in his aging unit, a complicated task, a serviceman pumped in more coolant, which leaked out by the next day. When Mr. Spector called around for another solution, a salesman offered to swap in a new condenser unit, but one that still used HCFC-22 — meaning one more American home would continue relying on an environmentally damaging coolant for years.

HCFC-22 is being phased out of air conditioners worldwide under an international treaty called the Montreal Protocol, and the United States has aggressively pressed poor countries to pick up the pace. But the United States has yet to put its own house in order. And, with 140 million central air units still running on HCFC-22 in this country, it is a major offender.

Leaks abound in working equipment. Coolant seeps out of discarded equipment in landfills. Regulatory loopholes allow manufacturers to sell parts that rely on HCFC-22, so systems using the old gas can be refurbished rather than replaced. There is almost no reclamation of the gas from old machines for recycling. The E.P.A. is behind schedule in imposing rules to ratchet down domestic production, and smuggling is rarely detected. Even where there are regulations — for example, repair technicians are legally bound to collect old gas rather than vent it — there is little enforcement.

And, as Mr. Spector discovered, many of the environmental crimes and misdeeds that keep the country dependent on HCFC-22 happen on your property, most likely without your knowledge.

"It's totally illegal to vent gas, but it's also totally inconspicuous," said Stephen O. Andersen, a former E.P.A. official who has campaigned for better controls on cooling gases. "I always watch like a hawk when they're in my yard," he said of technicians.

The concentration of HCFC-22 in the atmosphere is 218 parts per trillion, more than double the amount two decades ago, and it gets there in a number of ways. Low-quality or old equipment leaks, and detecting the colorless and odorless gas without pressure-testing devices is difficult. Sometimes the release is intentional, because it costs less. For example, installing a new part properly usually requires first siphoning a machine's coolant into a canister, for later replacement. But it is quicker, though illegal, just to cut the line. A technician saves half an hour on a job, and the customer gets a smaller bill.

Bobby Ring, who runs a servicing company in suburban New Jersey, said that makes it hard for him to compete. "There are contractors out there who refuse to make the investment in recovery equipment to reclaim or recover refrigerants, and no one is looking, so — phsssst — they let the refrigerant escape," he said.

Although large companies, which are required to report use of the gas, have been fined for large leaks, the E.P.A. has never prosecuted a residential service company for intentionally releasing HCFC-22.

Asked about the lack of backyard enforcement, David Bloomgren, a spokesman for the E.P.A., said it is "a challenge to locate or obtain evidence of illegal venting," so the agency focused on large polluters but encouraged homeowners to report possible backyard violations they observed to an E.P.A. tip site at epa.gov/tips/.

While it is hard to quantify exactly how much coolant is illegally released from America's residential air conditioners, the E.P.A. estimates that only 7 percent of used coolant is turned in for recycling.

"The vast majority of it hits the sky," illegally vented, said Kevin Zugibe, chief executive of Hudson Technologies Inc., a company set up to recycle HCFC-22. Under the Montreal Protocol, the United States has until 2015 to cut production and imports of newly made HCFC-22 to 10 percent of what it was a decade ago.

Without a much better supply of recycled HCFC-22, the United States will not be able to do that — or have enough to service all the older air conditioners, grocery store freezers and other refrigeration equipment.

In the European Union, only recycled or reclaimed HCFC-22 can be legally used to service equipment. In Australia and Japan, recovery of the gas from old appliances is mandatory, and technicians receive a fee for collection.

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U.S. and Mexico Sign Deal on Managing Colorado River

CORONADO, Calif. — The governments of the United States and Mexico signed an agreement on Tuesday to overhaul how the two countries share and manage water from the Colorado River, which provides water to more than 33 million people in seven states and Mexico.

Under the agreement, the two countries will share in both surpluses and water shortages. During drought years in the United States, less water will be sent to Mexico. In exchange, during years of plenty, Mexico will be allowed to store some of its water north of its border.

In addition, the countries will allocate some water to restore the ecological health of the river's delta in Mexico.

Speaking at the signing of the agreement here, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar called it the most important adjustment to rules on the Colorado River since the 1944 treaty between the two countries that set the terms for use of the river's water.

Mr. Salazar said he hoped the new agreement would be the end of "water wars," which in times of drought have pitted those who rely on the river against each other. The 1,450-mile river runs from the Rockies to the Gulf of California.

"The Colorado River, in so many ways, makes us one people, and together we face the risk of reduced supplies in years ahead," he said. "More than ever, we are working together in times of drought as well as in times of abundance. We will cooperate to share, store and conserve water as needed."

Until now, the United States has sent 1.5 million acre-feet of water from the Colorado to Mexico every year, regardless of rainfall. With more dry years recently, however, American officials wanted to reduce the amount it shares with Mexico when the river's level was low.

In return, Mexico, which had little storage capacity, will be allowed to store some of its surplus water in Lake Mead, which straddles Nevada and Arizona. That will keep the water level there more predictable. Lake Mead supplies water to the Las Vegas area.

In addition, the United States will help finance improvements to Mexico's water infrastructure, which was badly damaged by an earthquake in 2010.

Finally, the agreement will reconnect the Colorado River with the Gulf of California. Currently, it peters out about 60 miles short of the sea. That will help to restore the river delta, which experts said had become desertlike.

The United States and Mexican governments will each supply 5,000 acre-feet of water a year to the delta, as will a coalition of environmental organizations. Native plants from the delta will also be restored, which will provide a habitat for migratory birds.

"This agreement is a model for how we need to be doing water management in the future," said Taylor Hawes, the director of the Colorado River Program for the Nature Conservancy, one of the nongovernmental organizations that will help supply water to the delta. "This is our hope for how we can manage rivers in a way that works for multiple parties and multiple interests in the future."

The agreement runs for five years, after which, officials on both sides said, they hoped to reach a new agreement that would extend its principles.

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Jane Holtz Kay, Predictor of Climate Change, Dies at 74

Jane Holtz Kay calculated in her 1997 book, "Asphalt Nation," that in less time than it takes you to read this sentence, Americans riding around in cars and trucks will dump another 180,000 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — and thereby accelerate global warming and hasten the advent of catastrophic flooding in coastal cities like New York.

Ms. Kay, an architecture critic who died in Boston on Nov. 5 at 74, based her prediction on government statistics and well-established scientific evidence. Her book, subtitled "How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back," proposed ways to reverse the environmental damage caused by suburban sprawl: by returning to the city, using public transit, living one's daily life, as much as possible, within walking distance.

But, like so many other messengers, Ms. Kay said she felt like a voice crying in the wilderness. People either believed they were "powerless to do things" about the looming disaster, she told an interviewer, or were angry at her for being such a Cassandra-like scold. " 'This is kind of old stuff,' " she quoted them as saying. "So — 'So what?' "

Ellen Goodman, Ms. Kay's sister and a former columnist for The Boston Globe, said Ms. Kay had grown up and raised her own children in the suburbs but decided to give up her car and move to an apartment in Boston when she began writing "Asphalt Nation" in 1991. Ms. Goodman said her sister was one to act on her ideas: "She was a big believer in doing things."

She died of complications of Alzheimer's disease, Ms. Goodman said.

Ms. Kay wrote three books on conservation of natural resources and urban environments. "Lost Boston" (1980) was a love letter to the many architectural treasures demolished in her native city in the rush to build roads, malls and parking spaces, and an appeal to make future changes with the human biped in mind. With Pauline Chase Harrell, she made a similar appeal in "Preserving New England" (1986).

"Asphalt Nation," considered her most ambitious book, offered a unified vision for saving the cities and the planet and achieving social harmony by overthrowing the cultural dominance of the internal combustion engine. "Here at the so-called top of the food chain," she wrote, "the water we drink, the food we eat, the entire way we live, is corrupted by a toxic artifact. The car, its pollutants, its highways, its trips."

The revered urbanist Jane Jacobs, the author of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," said Ms. Kay's book had "given us a profound way of seeing the automobile's ruinous impact on American life."

Jane Holtz was born in Boston on July 7, 1938, the elder of two children of Jackson and Edith Holtz. In the 1950s her father, a lawyer, twice came close to winning election as a Democrat in what was then the Republican-held 10th Congressional District in Boston. (The seat has been held since 1981 by the Democrat Barney Frank, who is retiring and will be replaced in January by Joseph Kennedy III.) Ms. Holtz graduated from Radcliffe in 1960, began her career in journalism at The Quincy (Mass.) Patriot Ledger, and worked for many years as an architecture critic, first for The Boston Globe and later for The Nation.

In addition to her sister, survivors include two daughters, Julie Kay and Jacqueline Cessou, and four grandchildren.

Until three years ago, when illness kept her from working, Ms. Kay was working a follow-up to "Asphalt Nation," called "Last Chance Landscape." Its subject was global warming, and how it was likely to change our lives sooner rather than later.

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New H.I.V. Cases Falling in Some Poor Nations, but Treatment Still Lags

By Mac William Bishop, Channon Hodge, Pedro Rafael Rosado and Erica Berenstein

The Complicated AIDS Battle: The Times's Donald G. McNeil Jr. reports on some (qualified) good news in the fight against H.I.V. infections around the world.

New infections with H.I.V. have dropped by half in the past decade in 25 poor and middle-income countries, many of them in Africa, the continent hardest hit by AIDS, the United Nations said Tuesday.

The greatest success has been in preventing mothers from infecting their babies, but focusing testing and treatment on high-risk groups like gay men, prostitutes and drug addicts has also paid dividends, said Michel Sidibé, the executive director of the agency U.N.AIDS.

"We are moving from despair to hope," he said.

Despite the good news from those countries, the agency's annual report showed that globally, progress is steady but slow. By the usual measure of whether the fight against AIDS is being won, it is still being lost: 2.5 million people became infected last year, while only 1.4 million received lifesaving treatment for the first time.

"There has been tremendous progress over the last decade, but we're still not at the tipping point," said Mitchell Warren, the executive director of AVAC, an advocacy group for AIDS prevention. "And the big issue, sadly, is money."

Some regions, like Southern Africa and the Caribbean, are doing particularly well, while others, like Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East, are not. Globally, new infections are down 22 percent from 2001, when there were 3.2 million. Among newborns, they fell 40 percent, to 330,000 from 550,000.

The two most important financial forces in the fight, the multinational Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the domestic President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, were both created in the early 2000s and last year provided most of the $16.8 billion spent on the disease. But the need will soon be $24 billion a year, the groups said.

"Where is that money going to come from?" Mr. Warren asked.

The number of people living with H.I.V. rose to a new high of 34 million in 2011, while the number of deaths from AIDS was 1.7 million, down from a peak of 2.3 million in 2005. As more people get life-sustaining antiretroviral treatment, the number of people living with H.I.V. grows.

Globally, the number of people on antiretroviral drugs reached 8 million, up from 6.6 million in 2010. However, an additional 7 million are sick enough to need them. The situation is worse for children; 72 percent of those needing pediatric antiretrovirals do not get them.

New infections fell most drastically since 2001 in Southern Africa — by 71 percent in Botswana, 58 percent in Zambia and 41 percent in South Africa, which has the world's biggest epidemic.

But countries with drops greater than 50 percent were as geographically diverse as Barbados, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, India and Papua New Guinea.

The most important factor, Mr. Sidibé said, was not nationwide billboard campaigns to get people to use condoms or abstain from sex. Nor was it male circumcision, a practice becoming more common in Africa.

Rather, it was focusing treatment on high-risk groups. While saving babies is always politically popular, saving gay men, drug addicts and prostitutes is not, so presidents and religious leaders often had to be persuaded to help them. Much of Mr. Sidibé's nearly four years in his post has been spent doing just that.

Many leaders are now taking "a more targeted, pragmatic approach," he said, and are "not blocking people from services because of their status."

Fast-growing epidemics are often found in countries that criminalize behavior. For example, homosexuality is illegal in many Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa, so gay and bisexual men, who get many of the new infections, cannot admit being at risk. The epidemics in Eastern Europe and Central Asia are driven by heroin, and in those countries, methadone treatment is sometimes illegal.

Getting people on antiretroviral drugs makes them 96 percent less likely to infect others, studies have found, so treating growing numbers of people with AIDS has also helped prevent new infections.

Ethiopia's recruitment of 35,000 community health workers, who teach young people how to protect themselves, has also aided in prevention.

Mr. Sidibé acknowledged that persuading rich countries to keep donating money was a struggle. The Global Fund is just now emerging from a year of turbulence with a new executive director, and the American program has come under budget pressures. Also, he noted, many countries like South Africa and China are relying less on donors and are paying their own costs. The number of people on treatment in China jumped 50 percent in a single year.

Mr. Warren's organization said in a report on Tuesday that the arsenal of prevention methods had expanded greatly since the days when the choice was abstain from sex, be faithful or use condoms. Male circumcision, which cuts infection risk by about 60 percent, a daily prophylactic pill for the uninfected and vaginal microbicides for women are in use or on the horizon, and countries need to use the ones suited to their epidemics, the report concluded.

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Creating a Balloonlike Plug to Hold Back Floodwaters

By Fritzie Andrade

Protecting Tunnels Against Disaster: A look at an inflatable device that could save tunnels from flooding.

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — With a few dull thuds, the one-ton bag of high-strength fabric tumbled from the wall of the mock subway tunnel and onto the floor. Then it began to grow.

As air flowed into it through a hose, the bundle inflated until it was crammed tight inside the 16-foot-diameter tunnel, looking like the filling in a giant concrete-and-steel cannoli.

The three-minute procedure, conducted on a chilly morning this month in an airport hangar not far from West Virginia University, was the latest test of a device that may someday help guard real tunnels during disasters — whether a terrorist strike or a storm like Hurricane Sandy, whose wind-driven surge of water overwhelmed New York City's subway system, shutting it down for days.

"The goal is to provide flooding protection for transportation tunnels," said John Fortune, who is managing the project for the federal Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate.

The idea is a simple one: rather than retrofitting tunnels with metal floodgates or other expensive structures, the project aims to use a relatively cheap inflatable plug to hold back floodwaters.

In theory, it would be like blowing up a balloon inside a tube. But in practice, developing a plug that is strong, durable, quick to install and foolproof to deploy is a difficult engineering task, one made even more challenging because of the pliable, relatively lightweight materials required.

"Water is heavy, there's a lot of pressure," said Greg Holter, an engineer with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory who helps manage the project. "So it's not as simple as just inflating and filling the space. The plug has to be able to withstand the pressure of the water behind it."

The idea has been in development for more than five years — this test was the 21st — and Dr. Fortune says there are at least a few more years of testing and design work ahead. If the plugs are shown to be effective, they will be made available to transit systems around the country; at least initially, they are expected to cost about $400,000 each.

"We have frequent conversations with folks in mass transit agencies, the true experts in the field, on how this would be deployed," Dr. Fortune said, although he declined to name specific agencies, citing the antiterrorism aspect of the project.

Adam Lisberg, the chief spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs New York City's transit systems, said the damage caused by the storm "is certainly going to focus our attention" on ways to protect the subways. "But it's way too early to talk about any particular technology that's been proposed," he said.

In all, seven of the city's 14 under-river subway tunnels were flooded during the storm, as were several major highway tunnels. Dr. Fortune said that plugs might work for highway tunnels, too, but that the larger size of those tunnels created additional technical challenges that would have to be overcome.

Work on the plug began in 2007, after Ever J. Barbero, a West Virginia professor whose specialty is the use of advanced materials in engineering, was contacted by a Homeland Security official looking for outside-the-box ideas on ways to keep a subway system from flooding if an underwater tunnel were breached — by a terrorist bomb, for example.

"I didn't know anything about this," he said. "Then I found out what happened in Chicago."

Dr. Barbero was referring to a 1992 episode in which an abandoned freight tunnel under the Chicago River was breached by a crew sinking bridge pilings. That led to a flood that caused close to $2 billion in damage to downtown buildings as the water spread underground.

Dr. Barbero came up with an idea and shared it with Homeland Security officials. "I said, 'We'll put an air bag in a tunnel,' " he recalled. The department was intrigued — officials were familiar with European efforts to develop plugs to seal tunnels from gas and smoke after a series of deadly tunnel fires — and decided to finance the project. About $8 million has been spent so far.

Dr. Barbero realized that the forces exerted on the pressurized plug, and the need to rely on friction against the tunnel walls to keep it in place under the onslaught of floodwaters, meant that it had to be made from very tough materials. Experts from ILC Dover, a company in Delaware that makes high-strength soft structures like spacesuits and the force-absorbing air bags used for some of the Mars rover landings, suggested fabric made from Vectran, a strong but lightweight yarn spun from a liquid-crystal polymer.

But the first full-scale plug, made with a single layer of Vectran, failed during a pressure test in 2010. "It ripped right down the middle, from back to front," Dr. Fortune said.

So Dr. Barbero and ILC came up with a three-layer plug, with the outer layer consisting of woven Vectran belts. It is designed so that the tearing of one belt will not cause a catastrophic failure.

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