Hurricane Sandy and NYC Disaster Relief
Hurricane Sandy had done a tremendous amount of damage to NYC four years ago and left many starkly aware of the devastation a natural disaster can leave in its wake. I remember walking down belt parkway towards Brighton beach noting the increasing destruction as I got closer to the shore. Trees were knocked over, windows were broken, even the pavement had marks from a colliding trashcan that got untethered during the storm. Nearby a car parked on the curb offered a clue as to where the trashcan ended up.
I’m reminded of the medical clinic where I used to work by the article by Patrick McGeehan. The article had described many examples of NYC business owners who were struggling to recover from the damage done to their storefronts and assets. The slow restoration of phone and internet communication in particular was a huge problem for that medical clinic which was situated just two blocks from the Brighton shoreline. Its entire basement was flooded and most of the medical records were destroyed; during the recovery act, communication played a large role in the loss of even more medical records as files were displaced and mishandled. It was a bad situation made worse by the damaged power lines, as the article describes.
Other parts of Brighton were affected similarly to the medical clinic as described in the Eric Lipton article. I know a friend who lived in a community building near the water front which had a large elderly population. The article’s description of the conditions found in the high-rise apartments on Surf Avenue are not too different from what was found in the gated community on Brighton Beach. Many elderly residents who refused to leave the building got trapped inside having to rely on aid from NGOs and family members to bring them necessities. In the days that followed the storm, some of the elderly who were more mobile had to live in public schools and government buildings who made temporary shelters for them and others displaced by the storm.
As for Jillian Jorgenson’s account of storm preparedness after Sandy, I would say that Sandy certainly accelerated the growth of storm countermeasure spending, but as she argues, not enough to prepare us for another storm like Sandy. As she notes, politicians claim to be making progress in storm preparedness, however looking at the Brighton coastline now, I’d be hard-pressed to find differences with how it was before Sandy.
5 Comments
naomicameron
April 5, 2016Your discussion of the elderly community members that refused to leave their apartments made me wonder how any evacuation/ storm preparedness plan that the city drafts can be effective if people are unwilling to obey their guidelines. How can the city ensure that everyone is onboard for an evacuation strategy if a faction of the population hopes to just wait the storm out for the sake of comfort?
The truth is that there is no way to ensure that people evacuate as they should in an emergency. Though it is intensely unfortunate, it must be said that the destruction that most of the city experienced as a result of Sandy may be the very thing that encourages people to obey governmental authority on these matters.
When you speak of the devastation that is still overrunning Brighton Beach, I cannot help but think of Jorgensen’s article on New York’s lack of storm prep. How are citizens supposed to take the next storm seriously if they can clearly point to devastated areas and see that city officials are still dragging their feet for emergency preparations?
Lucius Seo
April 5, 2016To make it even worse, when we state that we are “prepared” for a storm, it means that we should be prepared for something WORSE than Sandy. Many people’s reaction to Sandy was to prepare for a storm of similar size as Sandy, but if we take into account climate changes, rising sea levels, and whatever other things the scientists say (to which I lack professional knowledge), it is only logical if we prepare expecting a storm even more super than Sandy.
To play on the potentials, New York is not prepared for many natural disasters. We aren’t supposed to have tornadoes and earthquakes–or that was what I was taught in middle school. Yet, these informations don’t agree with what happened within past few years.
The problem is: since we cannot prepare ourselves for all possible perils of nature’s wrath, we are limited to work on things that seem immediate and visible, while quite often, the dangers are greater when they are unnoticed and unseen.
Tamarah Nagel
April 7, 2016Regarding your comment on needing to prepare for a storm even greater than Sandy: It is quite difficult to adequately prepare for something of a larger magnitude than what you have previously experienced. And sometimes the cost of being that prepared is higher than the cost of scrambling post-storm to return to normalcy. Additionally, one of the most powerful effects of a storm is the community and grassroots leadership that crops up in its aftermath.
Revital
April 6, 2016I think you brought up a great point about the level of preparation needed for such a massive storm. With regards to Hurricane Sandy, a large number of people believed it was a false alarm, similarly to the Hurricane Irene warning the year before that. Since so many people were stubborn about leaving and even preparing for the storm, they were completely devastated by the result of Sandy. Many people had no supplies, no power, heat, or other amenities. This made clean up very difficult. The government, on the other hand, claimed to have prepared but they were not working well in the aftermath of the storm.
I think our culture about storm preparation needs to change. Everyone shouldn’t shrug their shoulders and say “It won’t happen” and instead say “Thank goodness it didn’t wreck our house.”
Looking at the Jorgensen article, she mentioned the long term preparation for upcoming potential storm. She writes about the sand barriers put up on the beach to serve as protection from the ocean. I have seen them first hand, and I cannot see them offering even the slightest form of protection once a storm hits. It makes me question how much the government is really doing to prepare us for another storm? And is it best if over the next few decades we try to avoid building new homes in flood zones?
Alasdair McLean
April 12, 2016Michael I think you and the other commenters really brought up a very interesting point of discussion- What happens to these crucial facilities that are hit during catastrophic storms like this? What are we even to do to prepare? As was mentioned before, how do we even know when spending thousands of dollars in moving important medical records and people themselves is legitimately warranted? It’s hard to say when a storm as fast moving as Sandy is approaching. One counter cold front, and perhaps it will deflect away from the coast only to dissipate into the Atlantic. Then again, the cost of the losses of those records and equipment is immense, not to mention the cost of the responders bringing food and necessary supplies to those trapped. Furthermore, even if we did know the full severity of the storm, the logistics of evacuation is a nightmare. Who’s to say that the school buildings themselves won’t be hit? How do you move hundreds, if not thousands of patients and elderly people who cannot move on their own? It is simply unreasonable to expect them to be able to get to where they need to go on their own. However, there are also only so many responding transports. Given the deficiency of manpower, can we really afford to make people live in these schools for days or more while the remainder of the communities are evacuated? What if, as before, the storm DOES happen to dissipate? It is a hard pill to swallow after wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars or more on evacuations, and having to close down these medical clinics and even schools due to a possible storm. It’s a tricky topic, and one that I don’t think has a good solution at the moment. Hopefully advances in meteorology or oceanography will help to make all of these nightmare scenarios far less likely.