Business

NY Fed mum on gold’s storm fate

(Federal Reserve Bank of New York)

As New York City continues to dry out after Hurricane Sandy and the nor’easter, some are looking at just how smart it is to place critical pieces of infrastructure of the leading capital marketplace in a flood-prone area.

As Gov. Andrew Cuomo noted, it seems like “we have a 100-year flood every two years now.”

In other remarks, Cuomo added, “The construction of this city did not anticipate these kinds of situations. We are only a few feet above sea level.”

So while the New York Stock Exchange was able to open soon after the waters receded, Citigroup’s waterlogged building at 111 Wall St. will be unusable for several weeks, as well as two critical Verizon Communications facilities that suffered extensive flooding during the storm.

That’s not all. As The Post’s Steve Cuozzo reported last week, such vital Financial District addresses as 55 Water St. and 1 New York Plaza (whose tenants include Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo) were also sidelined due to flooding. In fact, Peter Riguardi, CEO of Jones Lang LaSalle, estimated that more than 10 percent of the Financial District’s office space was at least temporarily uninhabitable.

And while there are reports of extensive loss of stock certificates from the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. vaults, what became of the nearly 15 million pounds of gold bricks stored at the New York Fed?

They’re safe for now, in theory. The bullion is so heavy that its vault sits 80 feet below street level, and 50 feet below sea level, on the bedrock beneath downtown Manhattan at 33 Liberty St.

The New York Fed is tight-lipped about how it secures the planet’s largest concentration of gold. It said that it would not comment on the status of the vault after the storm.

However, its website claims that the vault is protected by an “airtight and watertight seal” created by lowering a 90-ton steel cylinder just three-eighths of an inch into a 140-ton steel-and-concrete frame — an effect “similar to pushing a cork down into a bottle.”

Ordinarily, you’d be able to eye the gold bars yourself. Some 25,000 visitors tour the bank’s vault each year. Those visits, the bank says, have been canceled indefinitely “due to the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.”

With Bloomberg