NYC Superstorm Sandy Task Force To Examine Recovery, 5 Years Later

NEW YORK CITY — The City Council voted Monday to create a committee to study New York City's recovery from Superstorm Sandy in the five years since it devastated the area. Within the next year, a 15-member "recovery task force" will evaluate the city's efforts to rebuild and make recommendations for how it could do better in the future.

“The task force this legislation would create will develop a holistic understanding of the recovery process and a blue print that we and other communities across the nation can use to be better prepared and more resilient the next time we face an extreme weather event," Councilman Mark Treyger (D-Bensonhurst), chairman of the Committee on Recovery and Resiliency, said in a statement.

The panel will have seven members appointed by the City Council and six appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, according to the bill creating it. The heads of the mayor's housing recovery operations and the Office of Recovery and Resiliency will also get seats.

The task force will have a year to submit a report on how the city handled its response to the storm, including communication efforts, policy changes and efforts to rebuild homes, the bill says. That report will include recommendations for how the city could improve responses to future disasters.

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The Council passed the bill two weeks before the fifth anniversary of Superstorm Sandy's landfall in New York Oct. 29, 2012. The storm killed more than 40 people, left nearly two million without power and caused $19 billion in damage, according to a city report.

The City Council created the Committee on Resiliency and Recovery Committee in 2014 to track the billions of dollars in aid the city received after the storm, the New York Daily News reported at the time.

The city has pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to shoring up beaches and other vulnerable areas, and developed new plans to improve future storm responses. But the sometimes slow-moving Build It Back program, aimed at helping New Yorkers rebuild their destroyed homes, has faced criticism. Construction was finished on 74 percent of homes in the program as of this June, the city said. But the city has spent far more on some homes than they're worth, NY1 reported this summer.

The Sandy task force will review recovery efforts beyond Build It Back, the bill says.

(Lead image by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)