pitch/cold_open.md

# Riprap — pitch cold-open (locked 2026-05-03)

## Locked phrasing

> October 29, 2012. Hurricane Sandy floods seven subway tunnels and
> dozens of station entrances across Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.
> The MTA's Sandy recovery program is documented in their published
> reports. Today, if you ask any flood-mapping tool which subway
> entrances near you would flood again, it cannot answer.
>
> **Riprap can.**

## Why this and not the alternative

The earlier draft invoked a "$4.5 billion" Sandy-recovery figure. That
is approximately right for the MTA's *total* Sandy-recovery program
across a decade (per their published reports), but it's not the figure
for the South Ferry-Whitehall complex specifically and not for any
single repair. Engineering judges who know the Sandy recovery history
(Ramakanta Samal, the AMD solution architects, ASCE-NY engineers in
the room next week) will silently downgrade an inflated or imprecise
number.

The seven-tunnels framing:
- Is verifiable. MTA's "Storm Sandy: Two Years Later" report and the
  2014 NTSB-style post-mortems both reference the seven flooded
  tunnels.
- Doesn't depend on a contested dollar figure.
- Sets up the "MTA documented this — but no flood tool can tell you
  which entrances near *you* are at risk" gap that Riprap fills.
- Lands in a single sentence, not a paragraph.

## Sources for fact-check

- MTA, "Hurricane Sandy: Three Years Later" (Nov 2015) — counts the
  flooded tunnels and lists the affected stations.
- USGS Open File Report 2014-1175 — Sandy-period stage-gauge data.
- NYC OEM, Sandy Inundation Zone (NYC OD 5xsi-dfpx, dataset published
  2013) — the empirical extent that drives Riprap's `[sandy]` doc.

## Discipline

Do not drift back to the dollar figure during the week's iteration. If
a different statistic gets cited in the demo or in social posts, it
must come from one of the three sources above (or another verifiable
public-record source) and must be cross-checked before publication.