Superstorm Sandy: NYC Still Has Work To Do 5 Years Later

NEW YORK CITY — New Yorkers thought Hurricane Irene would be an apocalyptic storm as it came barreling toward the city in 2011. It turned out to be not so bad, so when Sandy neared a year later, warnings from the city went largely unheeded.

When that storm hit on Oct. 29, 2012, it killed 43 people in the city, devastated hundreds of buildings and caused billions of dollars in damage.

“I think more people will listen next time,” Emergency Management Commissioner Joe Esposito told Patch in an interview this month. “I think Superstorm Sandy’s still in their mind.”

In the five years since, the city has learned plenty of lessons. Its emergency preparedness and response schemes are now more robust and billions of dollars worth of infrastructure projects have been completed or are in the works, officials said.

But there’s still work to be done. Some large projects have yet to get underway and officials still have to untangle the bureaucratic web that has hampered its Build It Back program, which aims to help New Yorkers rebuild their Sandy-damaged homes.

City officials say their plans for the future are accounting for the impacts of climate change, which has made big storms like Sandy more frequent and will cause the city’s sea levels to rise.

“These are not five year issues. These are generational issues,” Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, deputy director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, told Patch. “The kinds of mitigation that need to be put in place, the kinds of infrastructure, these aren’t things that you’re going to see on the anniversary of a storm.”

Looking Back On The Damage

Sandy was a storm unlike any other New York City had ever seen. It made landfall on the evening of Oct. 29, 2012 at 1,000 miles wide.

It had lost its hurricane strength but hit New York at high tide, causing storm-surge waves at least 12 feet high.

The storm killed 43 people, including a two-year-old boy and two 90-year-old adults, according to a report on the storm then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration issued in 2013. Nearly two million people were without power. Some 70,000 houses and apartments were damaged, and about 800 buildings were marked destroyed by December 2012, the Bloomberg report says.

“It was the worst natural disaster we’ve ever faced,” Daniel Zarrilli, the city’s chief resilience officer under Mayor Bill de Blasio, told the City Council’s Committee on Recovery and Resiliency at a hearing Thursday.

Coney Island, the Rockaways, Lower Manhattan and the east and west shores of Staten Island were hit the hardest. More than 10 feet of water flooded some areas.

The storm left $19 billion of damage in its wake, but picking up the pieces will ultimately cost even more. The city developed a $20 billion plan, funded by federal grants and city money, to rebuild and protect many of the city’s 520 miles of coastline from future threats.

Planning, Building And Rebuilding

The city has spent $6.4 billion of the more than $14 billion in federal grants it received after the storm, John Grathwol of the city’s Office of Management and Budget said at Thursday’s hearing. Most money came from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

About $1.6 billion went to emergency recovery efforts in Sandy’s immediate aftermath, while the rest has gone to long-term recovery and rebuilding projects.

Finished work includes a new Coney Island boardwalk with built-in coastal protections, Zarrilli said Thursday. It’s made of concrete recycled plastic lumber, which holds up better than regular wood during storms, according to the Parks Department.

On Staten Island’s east and south shores, the city has created “bluebelts” by fortifying 16 watersheds to help them channel and drain storm water more effectively. This prevents flooding and preserves natural environments.

Public beaches have gotten new sand and the city’s sewer infrastructure has been fortified to ensure “vital public services” remain functional after another catastrophic storm, Zarrilli said at the hearing.

"Our city is safer and more resilient than it was before Hurricane Sandy and we have much more to do before we’ll be satisfied," Zarrilli said.

WATCH: Is NYC Ready For The Next Superstorm?

Officials have also taken steps to prepare more effectively for the next Sandy.

The city’s evacuation maps were redrawn and now have six zones reflecting the increasing dangers of flooding, rather than just three.

The Office of Emergency Management now has a plan to canvass neighborhoods in evacuation zones to get as many people out as possible, and then go back after a storm to see how many people stayed, Commissioner Esposito said.

That will make it easier to find people who stay and get stranded, he said, as many New Yorkers did after Sandy — especially people with disabilities.

“During the storm we’re in life-saving mode, but after the storm, within a day or so, we’ll be knocking on doors,” Esposito told Patch.

Emergency management officials are encouraging New Yorkers to know their evacuation zones and heed officials’ warnings in emergencies, Esposito said.

Big Projects Still Planned

Several bigger projects that are crucial to protecting New York’s shorelines have yet to get underway. There’s $1 billion in federal funding for them, but some have uncertain timelines, the Associated Press reported.

One, known as the “Big U,” would build flood walls and other anti-flood structures around 10 miles of lower Manhattan.

Construction on one section stretching from East 25th Street to Montgomery Street is set to start in 2019. Funded by a $335 million federal grant, the so-called East Side Coastal Resiliency Project will protect 110,000 vulnerable residents and 2.2 miles of shoreline, the city says.

There’s federal money another piece stretching to the Brooklyn Bridge, but the city is still seeking funding to extend the project to Battery Park City, Zarrilli said.

Another project would build partially submerged breakwaters on Staten Island’s South Shore that would double as an oyster bed, preventing erosion and supporting the ecosystem there. But there's currently no start date for the nearly $74 million project.

Additionally, confusion and rising costs have plagued the city’s Build It Back program, as news reports have documented.

More than 25,600 homeowners asked for help rebuilding after the storm, according to a 2014 de Blasio administration report. Some 20,300 got signed up with the program when applications closed in October 2013, but more than 11,000 dropped out over time, DNAinfo New York reported last year. There are only 8,300 currently in the program, according to a progress report the city published last week

Nearly all those homeowners have been helped in some way, and the city says 87 percent of the projects are complete. But Schlegelmilch, the Columbia University expert, said the city should rework Build It Back to improve it for future disasters.

“I would hope that there’s been a lot of learning into the bureaucracy of how people recover so their lives aren’t on hold while the rest of the city and the rest of the world are moving forward,” Schelgelmilch told Patch.

While New York City has taken strong initiative on resiliency work — especially in the context of climate change — Schlegelmilch said turning that initiative into action is a puzzle the entire country is still trying to solve.

“You can never do enough to protect this whole city, but we’re in the process of doing it,” Esposito told Patch.

(Lead image: Dennis Kane and Sheila Scandole stand above the charred remains of Kane's destroyed home in Breezy Point, Queens on Dec. 7, 2012. Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)