rockaways: Recent Episodes
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Over the past few months, On the Media has been working on a project called Blow the Whistle, in which we were trying to find out which Senator was behind a secret hold that killed a bill called The Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act.
We asked our listeners to call their Senators and ask them to confirm that they were not responsible for the hold that killed the bill. Hundreds of listeners participated, and at the end of the project we narrowed the list of possible Senators to just two (Jon Kyl of Arizona and Jeff Sessions of Alabama), both of whom have repeatedly refused to comment on the hold.
This was our first long-form investigation into the machinations of the Senate. To adhere to the classic adage “write what you know,” I thought I would talk about what I learned from this project as a member of the media. Below are just a few of the many eye-opening things I learned from this process.
1. Senate Rules are complex. Very complex. There are the 44 rules that make up the “standing rules of the Senate” and to an outsider, the application of these rules might not make a lick of sense. Just as one example, did you know that a legislative “day” can actually last weeks or months? For example, the first legislative day of the current Senatorial session started on January 5 and ended on January 25. Additionally, a solid understanding of the Senate requires a decent understanding of Senate vocabulary. Sure, you may have heard of a filibuster and a lame-duck session, but have you ever heard of a “Christmas tree” Bill?
To make things even more complex, there is a rule called unanimous consent that is paramount in understanding the way the Senate works. Unanimous consent allows the Senate to make end runs around some of the standing rules in order to fast track certain bills and nominations to a vote as long as all the members of the Senate agree. Unanimous consent has its own set of rules that Senators must abide by. Unanimous Consent is used all the time in the Senate.
The secret hold is a function of unanimous consent. If a Senator objects to a unanimous consent vote or wants more time to study legislation, they can “hold” a bill. A secret hold is simply a way to do this without revealing the holder’s identity or their motivation behind doing so.
2. Doing a story about rules of the Senate is difficult due to their complexity.Since the rules and procedures of the Senate are so byzantine, they are incredibly hard to explain in the course of a story without turning the story itself into a referendum on the rules and procedures. Take for example our attempts to try and explain the secret hold. As of December 22nd, when the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act was killed, the secret hold allowed Senators to hold a bill for six days before their name was recorded in the congressional record. However, Senators could “tag team a bill” where one would place a hold on the bill, remove it on the fifth day, and then have another Senator do the same thing, bouncing the hold back and forth between the two of them for as long as they wanted.
In the case of the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, however, the hold was placed on the bill on the last day of the legislative session, allowing the bill to die without having to enter their name in the congressional record, since the record for that session ended at the end of that day. At the end of a legislative session, any bills that have not been passed have to be completely reintroduced in the following session, so the hold is no longer on the bill because the bill is dead.
Confused? You’re not alone. Trying to explain all of this with the 6 minutes of airtime we generally have for a story became an exercise in using the simplest, ost direct language possible to describe an incredibly arcane process. For the most part, I think we were successful, but there were times when I honestly wished I could go back into a recorded story and add some clarification and conditions.
3. Contrary to popular belief, the secret hold still exists
If you look up the secret hold on Wikipedia, it will tell you that on January 27th, a resolution introduced by Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) ended the secret hold. Many in the press parroted this notion – that the secret hold is now just a distant memory. Heck, the resolution that the Senate passed is even called “Eliminating Secret Senate Holds.” However, the secret hold is very much still with us.
Prior to this reform, a secret hold could be placed on a bill for six days, but that has been shortened to just 48 hours, at which point either the Senator that placed the hold has to come forward, or the hold will be attributed to party leadership. The logic behind this new rule is that it will discourage Senators from using secret holds because the party leader won’t be willing to accept responsibility for them. Senator Wyden said in a New York Times article about the hold (and again on our show) that hey thought they had “plugged the holes.”
But the devil is in the details. There is nothing in the resolution that specifically bars the use of the “tag teaming” technique, even though the 48 hour limit will make the process more difficult. Additionally, 48 hours gives Senators plenty of time to use the same technique that killed the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act: placing a hold hours before the session ends. Doing so will allow a Senator to kill a bill without the name of the holder ever entering the congressional record.
4. Elected Officials Don’t Necessarily Feel the Need to Answer QuestionsAs a show that doesn’t typically communicate with the offices of the Senate, we don’t have an established relationship with them. While most Senate press secretaries were happy to talk to us, there were some who essentially set up staff firewalls between us and the press secretaries of their offices.
Senator David Vitter’s office adopted the habit of simply forwarding us to the voicemail of their press secretary, who would never return our calls. When we called back to ask them why we weren’t getting calls back, they started hanging up on us, or not picking up when we called from our office phones. It was only through reporters Jonathan Tilove and Bruce Alpert of the New Orleans Times-Picayune that we were able to eventually get a confirmation.
With Jon Kyl’s office, they would again refer all our questions to their press office. When one of our listeners gave us a name of a Kyl staffer that she was over the phone, his office wouldn’t even confirm the spelling for us – they simply sent us along to their press secretary. Who never called back.
Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions’ staff was very evasive, with one of his staffers infamously telling us that he wouldn’t answer our requests for comment on the secret hold because he was “a very private person.” But even though his press office repeatedly refused to comment or even acknowledge our repeated requests, he appeared on CNBC’s The Kudlow Report, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl, The Glenn Beck show, several Fox News appearances as well as op-eds in The Washington Post and USA Today.
Unless there is a public mandate for information, it appears that there is no need for Senators to respond to requests for public comment. In the case of Senator Sharrod Brown, it was only because listener Susan Schibler, (who appear on the show to discuss) made his office aware of the Blow the Whistle website that it felt sufficient pressure to comment.
5. Citizens don’t trust their elected officials to tell them the truth.
I suppose this could be chalked up as naïveté, but one of the most surprising components of this story was the fact that so many people who contacted us about this project asked the same question again and again – “How to you know that they are telling the truth?”
Well, the simple answer is that we don’t. Since secret holds that are lifted before the grace period runs out (6 days from when the hold is placed prior to January 27th, 2 days thereafter) aren’t recorded anywhere, we are going simply on the word of the Senate offices recorded by our listeners.
It was this very reason why we asked participants to get the name of the person they spoke to within a Senator’s office. Now, this wasn’t always possible, and some Senators’ offices requested to speak to us on background, but if you look at the responses, they are overwhelmingly on-the-record.
Additionally, during this campaign we operated on the belief that Senators would rather tell the truth than to be exposed as lying should the truth later come out. The fact that there are a couple Senators remaining who refuse to comment seems to bear that assumption out.
On today's show:
- Susan Page, USA Today Washington bureau chief and the author of Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power (Twelve, 2021), talks about the latest in national politics.
- Jon Campbell, Albany reporter for WNYC and Gothamist, and Brigid Bergin, WNYC's senior political correspondent, talk about the new court-imposed congressional district maps and how they are affecting who is running in which districts.
- Bridget Read, senior writer at New York Magazine, discusses her recent feature in Curbed about New York City's rental market and how bidding wars have driven up the price of apartments.
- Jake Offenhartz, reporter at Gothamist, talks about the potential dangers in the upcoming temporary closure of Rockaway beach this summer for construction.
Transcripts are posted to each segment as soon as they are available.
Jake Offenhartz, reporter at Gothamist, and Janet Fash, Rockaway Beach lifeguard, talk about the potential dangers in the upcoming temporary closure of Rockaway beach this summer for construction.
"Rockaway lifeguards sound alarm on deadly potential of city's beach closure plan" (Gothamist, 5/19/22)
Piping Plovers are tiny endangered shorebirds who spend part of the spring and summer right here in the Rockaways. Chris Allieri, founder of the NYC Plover Project, talks about the work of the volunteers to protect the birds as they begin nesting on the beach -- and how to be a volunteer this season.
Memorial Day weekend marks the unofficial start of summer, and with the anticipation of barbeques and beaches and finally getting to see those friends and family in what feels like forever, there’s also a sense of cautious optimism among business owners who rely on seasonal income and are looking to the first summer with COVID-19 restrictions largely gone.
To get a sense of what people were thinking and feeling ahead of the summer, WNYC's Sean Carlson headed out to the Rockaway boardwalk.
For those arrested in the Rockaways, going through the justice system has always involved a long haul. The trip from Far Rockaway to the Queens criminal courthouse in Kew Gardens could take almost an hour and a half by bus and train even before extra logistical hurdles of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But this summer, young people arrested for misdemeanors on the peninsula will have an option much closer to home. A community court is scheduled to open through a partnership with the Queens District Attorney, two local police precincts, neighborhood leaders, and Queens Defenders.
Read more at Gothamist.
This summer, a former military base in the Rockaways is home to a site-specific installation from one of the biggest names in the art world. Yayoi Kusama’s “Narcissus Garden” made up of 1,500 stainless steel, mirrored spheres, a foot in diameter, are spread across the floor of a dilapidated building at Fort Tilden, part of the Gateway National Recreation Area.
Kusama first presented her “Garden” outside of the Venice Biennale in 1966 as an uninvited participant at the art fair (back then, the globes were made of plastic). Standing among the reflective spheres, barefoot and in a gold kimono, she sold them for $2 a piece with signs that said, “Your Narcissism for Sale.”
“I think her main thrust is that she wanted to talk about the art world and the fact that the art world was so enchanted with itself,” said Lynn Zelevansky, a freelance curator, and art historian. “The fact that most human beings on this planet could not afford the art that was being shown at the Venice Biennale and that’s why she sold the balls for $2 each.”
Italian authorities eventually shut her down, but the installation has continued with shows in places such as Central Park (2004), the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris (2010) and recently at the Glass House in Connecticut (2016).
Now, it’s part of “Rockaway!” a free public art show created in 2014 led by Klaus Biesenbach, director of MoMA PS1, and the artist Patti Smith, with the support of the Rockaway Artists Alliance, Jamaica Bay-Rockaway Parks Conservancy, National Park Service, and Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Biesenbach and Smith have homes in the Rockaways and saw first-hand the damage to the area from Sandy in 2012 (More recently, there’s been even more erosion, leading to the closure of popular beaches). Through the art series, they, along with the other participating organizations hope to bring attention to the need to rebuild and reinforce the region.
“I think it’s very important to not to think about ‘Rockaway!’ as a festival for art's sake,” said Biesenbach at the unveiling of Kusama’s work. “It really has a different meaning and I think it’s very important for us that it’s raising awareness for this very vulnerable area here.”
An artist like Kusama who draws large crowds (and lots of Instagram attention) might bring the kind of attention the “Rockaways!” is hoping for (as long as the visitors aren’t too narcissistic).
Check out Gothamist for more pictures and here for directions.
"Narcissus Garden" is open Friday through Sunday, 12-6 pm at Gateway National Recreation Area in Fort Tilden through September 3, 2018.
A month after Sandy, the cold of winter was setting in along the Rockaways and many people still didn't have heat. The streets were piled with storm debris. And the only shops open along Beach 116th Street were bodegas, hardware stores, and one lone hair salon called Beauty and Spa.
That was where WNYC first met hairdresser Richard Blanck. Like his wife, Blanck was born and raised in the area. And like many of his neighbors, the 72-year-old refused to evacuate during Sandy.
"It was mighty scary. It sounded like a jet plane was landing on your street," Blanck said. "I stayed on the porch. I was up to my ankles in water and the high voltage things on the poles started to spark. That's when I jumped back in the house."
Blanck's cellar filled up with eight feet of water. Four feet filled the garage. Lost were a basement of memories: family heirlooms, Christmas ornaments, a wedding dress. It would be two months before his heat and electricity were restored and another two years for him to repair the damage.
Richard Blanck, a hairdresser in Far Rockaway who came out of retirement after Sandy to earn home improvement money. (Jennifer Hsu/WNYC)
After that, it was all too easy to imagine another storm hitting.
"I would not live near water, I'm too old to start to rebuild," he remarked in a telephone interview from his new home in Wake Forest, North Carolina, where he and his wife live now. They are more than a hundred miles from the ocean. Watching news about this fall's hurricanes brings him back to Sandy.
"My heart goes out to these people, especially the poor, the ones on the islands," he said. "There's no words to express the sadness you feel for them."
Blanck says he's happier now. He prefers the quieter, softer way of life outside of New York City. And he's glad to be nowhere near the ocean.
A San Francisco-based company called Spin was planning to deploy 150 bikes along the boardwalk in the Rockaways on Monday. But after the city sent them a cease-and-desist letter last Friday, the company called it off.
What the letter didn't include was the fact that the city has a "revenue contract" with Citibike, giving the company exclusivity for its first two phases (which include Manhattan, Brooklyn and parts of Queens — but not the Rockaways) and is in talks to expand to all five boroughs.
There currently are no Citibikes in the Rockaways.
On Monday, standing with Spin representatives at Rockaway Beach, Queens Councilman Eric Ulrich accused the city of depriving the area of bike sharing.
"You would think it's a no-brainer, it doesn't cost tax payers a dime," Ulrich said.
Leaders from Spin said they're still hoping to get permission to launch, legally.
Lorraine Quinn, who lives in the Rockaways, questioned Spin's business model of leaving bikes in strategic, public locations, including bike racks. Those who want to use Spin bikes use an app to unlock them.
"The bike lanes here are very small, it's already extremely crowded," Quinn said. "If you have a spot for 15 bikes and then people take bikes from other areas and bring back 30 bikes, where is that going? That's going to affect our whole area, and the look, and maybe our access to the beach."
A new bike share start-up is having a bumpy roll out.
Just three days before it planned to begin operations in the Rockaways, the company Spin received a cease-and-desist letter from city authorities.
"Please be advised that you do not have the authorization or permission, pursuant to a concession, franchise, permit, contract or otherwise, required for such operations," Michelle Craven, senior executive director of cityscape and franchises at the Department of Transportation, wrote in a letter to Spin CEO Derrick Ko.
The orange bikes debuted at Austin's South by Southwest festival this year. The company has since launched bike shares in Seattle and San Francisco.
Unlike Citibike, which uses docks to lock and store their bicycles, San Francisco-based Spin allows riders to unlock a bicycle using an app and QR-code. The company charges $1 for half-an-hour. (By comparison, Citibike charges a minimum $12 for a day, but customers cannot use the bike for more than 30 minutes at a stretch without incurring extra charges.)
Spin's bikes are equipped with GPS and are strategically placed, based on demand.
"Ultimately we just want bikes to be accessible and affordable for everyone," CEO Derrick Ko told WNYC in an interview in April.
Ko said he hopes to launch Spin in neighborhoods where Citibike doesn't have a presence, like Staten Island and Queens.
City Councilman Eric Ulrich, a Republican who had flirted with running for mayor, and who represents part of the Rockaway peninsula, supports Spin coming to his district.
"The mayor would rather protect a public monopoly like CitiBike — which barely exists outside of Manhattan — than expand sensible bike sharing in neighborhoods that need it most," he said in a statement. "New Yorkers are starving for transportation alternatives and Mayor de Blasio shamefully says, 'Let them eat cake!'"
Spin is holding a press conference Monday in the Rockaways. The company couldn't be reached for comment on the city's cease-and-desist letter. But in a statement, it said it plans to continue having conversations with the DOT.
"It reaffirms our commitment to working closely and collaboratively with governments to provide innovative transportation options to cities that are affordable, equitable and eco-friendly," the company said.
When Sandy hit four years ago, it exposed how susceptible public housing in the city was to coastal storms. More than 200 buildings were damaged and 60,000 residents were affected in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan. The developments suffered prolonged power outages and destroyed boilers. Residents felt there was a vacuum of information — evacuation orders were confusing and no one was sure when services would be restored.
Federal officials, recognizing that a large part of the issue was the steady disinvestment in public housing over the years, awarded the New York City Housing Authority a $3 billion grant for Sandy repairs. The funds were created to fix roofs, sidewalk and boilers at 33 developments damaged by the storm. And it's to be used for resiliency upgrades to prevent future storms from damaging the buildings. The grant is the largest in FEMA history.
You can see exactly what stage each development is in and what the money is being used for here.
This year, NYCHA finally began spending some of the grant for upgrades and resiliency. Construction has begun on three sites, with 23 others in the pre-construction phase.
At a building that's a model for other developments, Lower East Side Rehab V, construction is nearly complete.
The city has installed low-cost elements, like a flood wall next to a ramp that leads to the basement and the boilers.
The top of the stairs leading to the basement now have a 50-pound, removable storm gate that can be easily installed by housing staff if there's a storm surge warning.
This 50-pound panel at the Lower East Side Rehab V public housing development can be quickly installed at the top of the stairs in case of a flood warning. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
Since the boiler system can't be moved to another location, there's now a flood wall inside the boiler room. The doorway has a flood panel that can be easily installed. And the basement windows have metal frames on the outside to quickly affix 20-pound aluminum panels.
These flood logs at the Lower East Side Rehab V public housing development are made up of several 20-pound panels that can be quickly installed in case of a flood warning. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
Joy Sinderbrand, vice president for the office of Recovery and Resilience at NYCHA, says her office is designing each development on a case-by-case basis. "At each of the sites this looks different, and it has to do with the building height above sea level, the building orientation, whether there's landscaping that can be used, whether there are elements that can be designed into the building," she said.
New flood panels cover the basement windows at the Lower East Side Rehab V development. These were funded by a $3 billion FEMA grant. They can easily be taken on and off as needed. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
So far, NYCHA has spent $284 million of the FEMA grant on repairs across the city. It's spent an additional $144 million over the past two years on design for these projects, plus asbestos abatement and boiler demolition.
When Sandy hit, 64 boilers were damaged or destroyed. The city brought in mobile boilers, which cost $1 million a month and frequently broke down. After two years, the City Council held a NYCHA hearing in a NYCHA housing development to draw attention to the problem.
A mobile boiler at the Lower East Side Rehab V, which replaced the boiler that was destroyed during Sandy. This boiler is set to be decommissioned soon. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
Today, 16 developments are using 41 mobile boilers, which cost $500,000 a month total. These are newer boilers than the ones installed after Sandy; they are raised above the floodplain and are expected to be in place until 2018.
At the Carlton Manor Houses in the Rockaways, the mobile boilers are housed in two trailers and take up half a handball court. The tenant association president, Lawanda John-Gainey, lives on the 11th floor. It takes a while to get hot water up to her apartment, she said.
"You got to run the water in the tub, run the water in the sink, flush the toilet. And just wait," she said, adding it can take up to 30 minutes before the hot water is flowing.
A mobile boilers at Carlton Manor in the Rockaways. They were installed after Sandy, and while NYCHA said they're better than the ones they replaces, residents still have issues. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
NYCHA says it's also revamped how it updates residents on evacuation orders. The agency said if there is another evacuation, it will use a combination of robo-calls, social media and door-knocking to inform residents about what's coming and what their options are.
Gainey said she wasn't aware of NYCHA's evacuation plans. She said she'd be reluctant to evacuate to a city shelter after her experience during Sandy. "Last time they had people go to different shelters, but they had no way for those people to get back," she said. "No, that's no good, you don't just send me to West Bubble and I don't have no way to get back."
But one thing that's rarely mentioned by officials or residents is how the storm may have been a blessing in disguise. Many of these housing developments were short of funds for overdue repairs and upgrades that they will now be getting, thanks to the FEMA grant.
There will be several more years until construction is complete, though. Until then, many residents are still living in vulnerable developments.
On a peninsula in Queens, New York, Berlin-based artist Katharina Grosse painted an abandoned military building as part of an ongoing public art festival. Photo by Andi Wang/PBS NewsHour
Tucked among the sand dunes and sea grass of New York City’s outermost barrier reef, a splash of color dominates the landscape.
Its the latest addition to MoMA PS1’s Rockaway! public art festival: an installation by Berlin-based artist Katharina Grosse, who covered an abandoned building at Fort Tilden, a former military base turned waterfront park, in vivid shades of red.
The installation is located in the Rockaways, a neighborhood that has undergone a massive recovery effort in the four years since Hurricane Sandy brought significant damage to the oceanfront peninsula.
Artist Katharina Grosse appears next to her piece in the Rockaways in Queens, New York. Photo by Andi Wang/PBS NewsHour
Fort Tilden was established in 1917, the same year that the U.S. joined Britain, France and Russia to fight in World War I.
The military base was positioned to keep watch over New York Harbor and, if necessary, be the first line of defense by air or sea. But eventually, the military site became defunct, and in 1974 it was decommissioned and taken over by the National Parks Service.
The site is one of transition and occasional contradiction. It is part of a former military base that today defends nothing. It’s part of a group of man-made structures, which have been eroded by some of the city’s most unbridled nature. In the next year, it will likely be demolished to make way for more post-Sandy park restoration.
Grosse said this state of transformation drew her to the site. “I think that’s a fascinating moment where you’re in the present, but you experience it right now, all these possibilities of transformation,” she said.
Photo by Andi Wang/PBS NewsHour
First, a team prepared the building site and blocked off a surrounding perimeter — then, she painted her first strokes in white.
She followed it with three shades of red, which she alternated with white over the course of painting. In total, the painting process took a week.
The installation, a splash of color against the sand, stands in stark contrast to the surrounding environment. “It’s very alone, it’s very visible, it is fragile as well,” she said. “I like color to be artificial and somehow not at all related to certain tones that I see around myself.”
Photo by Andi Wang/PBS NewsHour
Klaus Biesenbach, curator at large for MoMA PS1, first encountered Katharina Grosse’s work at a building in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans.
The neighborhood, located on the precipice of a levee that broke during Hurricane Katrina in 2006, bore some of the greatest damage of the storm. Even as redevelopment efforts continue throughout the city, empty lots and abandoned buildings remain a common sight in the Lower Ninth Ward.
In 2008, Grosse painted one of those buildings with bright orange strokes for “Prospect.1,” a piece at the New Orleans Biennial.
As she painted, “you would literally see a mass of water” just beyond the levee, she said. “When I was there, you could feel it in your fingertips that this was a very dangerous spot,” she said.
After seeing that project, Biesenbach invited Grosse to develop the space in Fort Tilden, which was a former aquatics center on the military base.
Photo by Andi Wang/PBS NewsHour
Biesenbach said he wants the exhibition to foster dialogue about the surrounding environment and how to plan for future storms.
“I think what’s very important to acknowledge is that four years after Hurricane Sandy, we’re in recovery. The recovery needs to go gradually into preparation,” he said. “We know there’s going to be another storm. We know the sea level is rising.”
The piece will be on view at the Gateway National Recreation Area at Fort Tilden in Queens, New York, through Nov. 30.
The post This vivid installation splashes color across a long-abandoned military base appeared first on PBS NewsHour.
The final section of Rockaway Beach's boardwalk will be open for the July 4th weekend, marking the first time since Sandy that the entire 5.5 mile stretch is open to the public.
Construction workers were putting some finishing touches on the final section, between Beach 117th Street and Beach 126th Street early Friday, in preparation for an opening later in the evening.
Marge O'Brien and her friend, Rita Balfe, were sitting on a bench near Beach 117th Street, enjoying the boardwalk despite overcast skies. Both said the new concrete boardwalk is an improvement over the previous wooden one, which was heavily damaged during Sandy.
"Oh, the new boardwalk is 100 percent better," O'Brien said.
Balfe agreed.
"The wood didn't hold up every year, you know, so it always had to be replaced," she said. "I mean, it was a beautiful boardwalk, but nothing compared to what this is now."
Even with cloudy skies, several cyclists were riding up and down. Ben Foley said the new boardwalk makes for a much smoother ride, and he hopes the opening of the new stretch will help local businesses, too. "I think they rely on the boardwalk," he said.
Other residents said while they were excited it was finally ready, there are some downsides, including obstructed views of the beach. Protective dunes were built up post-Sandy.
"Now we can't see the ocean," said Timothy Curtain. "But, you know, we don't want no water coming back again, that was a disaster."
He said he's confident the new boardwalk was built to last.
"This will never move...not in our lifetime, anyway," he said. "Cement and steel, I guess, is the way to go."
This fall, the city will continue construction between Beach 19th Street and Beach 39th Street, which is currently open, with all new construction since Sandy slated for completion by next Memorial Day.
Think of things that are about 400 years old: the Île Saint-Louis in Paris (created in 1614); the King James Bible (finished in 1611); Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa (painted 1517); Harvard College (established 1636).
Add to that list, one other: the Rockaway Peninsula in southeastern Queens.
A 1781 map showing an elongated Rockaway Peninsula, Barren Island (now Floyd Bennett Field), but no interior islands. (Library of Congress/Wildlife Conservation Society)
At least that's what Eric Sanderson argues in a new research paper published in the latest issue of Northeastern Naturalist. Sanderson, a senior conservation ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society (which runs New York City's zoos) and author of the best-selling Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, looked at 100 charts and maps dating back to 1502 to arrive at his conclusion, which puts the peninsula's age at far younger than previously thought.
A map produced 21 years later, in 1802, showing that marsh islands inside Jamaica Bay had begun to form. (Library of Congress/Wildlife Conservation Society)
The peninsula grew, Sanderson believes, as a result of ocean currents pushing sand further and further west, forming first just a spit, then a ridge, and finally a piece of land substantial enough on which to build houses, roads and a subway line. The Rockaways formed a protective barrier that in turn allowed the marsh islands inside Jamaica Bay to form — although in the 20th century, their very existence has been threatened by pollution and sea level rise.
A 2015 satellite photo shows that in the previous two centuries, the peninsula stretched to enclose the bay and more than a dozen islands have formed. (Landsat 8/USGS /NASA)
Given how Sandy entirely submerged the Rockaways and the marsh islands when it hit in 2012, Sanderson's research has profound implications for how the region plans how, or whether, to make the area more resilient in the future.
Unexpected flooding hit the Rockaways and other low-lying coastal areas on Monday, and parts of the city are under a coastal flood advisory though Tuesday night. The extent of the inundation was a surprise even to scientists who study the weather. But unusually high tides will become more common as sea levels rise, said Philip Orton, an assistant professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology.
Orton said the flooding, which was the "worst flood event for the New York City region" since Sandy, was caused by Monday's snowstorm. The storm seemed mild because it hit far off shore, but it still drove waters up onto the roads with the high tide.
Orton studies storm surges and he said sea level rise will make flooding more common. "It's not something dramatic," he said. "But it is accelerating and every decade it's gonna be worse."
John Cori, a resident and co-president of Friends of Rockaway Beach, said the area isn't getting the help it needs from the city. "On 84th Street, these people are walking in plastic bags back and forth to their houses," he said. "In Broad Channel, they're underwater. On 120th Street, they're underwater."
Cori said residents are still waiting for protective measures like rock jetties and bulkheads.
A spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city has added sand to the beaches and built dunes, and has upgraded bulkheads on Beach Channel Drive.
But that didn't reassure the residents who witnessed the flooding. Many took to social media to share photos and videos of their neighborhoods Tuesday.
Okay. This #Rockaway flooding situation is downright ridiculous now. 😑😑😑 cc: @TheWaveNews @Rockawaytimes pic.twitter.com/n5ZzHim8LH
— Bennett D. Bennett (@TheAcecapade) February 9, 2016
Click here to see the Stevens Institute’s real-time map of flood conditions in the northeast.
Philip Orton spoke to WNYC's Jami Floyd.
Cecil Lloyd-Bei lives in the Arverne section of the Rockaways in a two-story home that hasn’t had running water in the bathroom since Sandy struck.
“It’s like I'm living in a third world country," Lloyd-Bei, 55, said last week. "I have to literally fill buckets up in the kitchen and lug 'em up the stairs.”
His home sits on the Jamaica Bay side of the peninsula, four houses down from the water. Black mold creeps across the ceiling in the living room. On the night of Oct. 29, 2012, seven feet of water filled a basement that housed a spare bedroom and his father’s large collection of vinyl records.
Now, all that’s left is mud. There’s a copper pipe jutting out of the wall that drips water into a toilet that sits in the middle of the room. The wood overhead is soft with mildew.
For many people in this predominantly African-American neighborhood, Sandy recovery has been an agonizingly slow frustrating process. In the early days after Sandy, the city’s Rapid Repairs program moved swiftly and got Lloyd-Bei’s electricity back on and installed a new boiler. But he needed more help.
“I felt like an imbecile," he said. "I know a lot of people could do this work themselves: go to Home Depot, buy the supplies. But I really don't know how to do it.”
More than 20,000 New Yorkers applied to the city’s Build it Back program for major repairs or even reconstruction that was not covered under Rapid Repairs or their flood insurance policies. But more than half of those people dropped out, after facing the complex maze of paperwork and requirements or determining they did not need help after all. Lloyd-Bei was one of them. The city claimed he couldn't prove that he owned the home. He admits that he is still transferring ownership from his father, who died five years ago, but says that he provided the program with every document he was asked for.
While demoralized by his experience with the city, he remained tenacious in looking for help and reached out to the non-profit group Friends of Rockaway.
“As soon as I called them it was immediate response, it was very refreshing to finally feel like it's gonna happen,” he said.
Mold on the ceiling of Cecil Lloyd-Bei's living room in the Arverne section of the Rockaways. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
Of the people who remain in the program, about 60 percent have either received reimbursement checks or seen repairs begin or both, according to city officials. But in Arverne, Build it Back has so far only started repairs on only 25 homes, leaving many people there feeling disenfranchised. They vent their frustrations at a bi-weekly community meeting at the Battalion Pentecostal Church.
“I want to know why that almost three years later are were still, most of us, more or less are in the same position,” said one regular, attendee Irene Cooper.
Fielding complaints at the front of the room was the chairwoman of the community board, Sonia Moise. She fired back, saying that Arverne residents are not as involved as those who live in communities on the western end of the Rockaway Peninsula.
“Honestly, when you go to the west end and they have their meetings they come in droves, honestly, and they apply for all of these programs,” she said. “When you talk about the east end, we don’t come, we don’t fill out the applications, we don’t make enough noise.”
In Belle Harbor, one of those neighborhoods to the west, construction has begun on 17 percent of homes that are still in the Build it Back program, compared to 6 percent in Arverne. Moise suspects there might be economic or racial discrimination involved: According to Census data, the median income in Belle Harbor is twice as high as it is in Arverne; Belle Harbor is 98 percent white, while Arverne is predominantly black.
A spokesman for the city’s recovery program, Samuel Breidbart, said the reason is that Arverne has more homes that require complete reconstruction or elevation, which involve time-consuming design and engineering processes.
To pick up the slack, a coalition of non-profits that had been operating in Queens banded together to share resources. They included national leaders like the Salvation Army as well as deeply rooted New York City groups like CAMBA. Known as the Queens Recovery Council, they meet every week in Arverne to discuss matching individual cases with non-profits that can help.
The warehouse of the non-profit group Friends of Rockaway, which organized tools using a method taught by UPS. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
“It's like putting together a crazy, the most insansest puzzle you've ever put together,” said the group’s facilitator Hannah Arnett, who works for United Methodists Disaster Recovery. “It's a puzzle without box with the tiniest pieces.”
The group that's helping Lloyd-Bei, Friends of Rockaway, is one of the groups. It's an offshoot of the St. Bernard Project, which formed after Katrina in Louisiana. It has evolved from the early days right after Sandy when it did mostly "muck and gut jobs" — removing trash and moldy walls. Now, it runs a bustling operation out of a warehouse in Rockaway Beach.
Learning from their corporate donors, they've adopted UPS's inventory system for organizing tools and supplies. In its warehouse, there’s a massive white board with a black and white grid — a row for every house they're working on. Toyota’s managers swooped in and taught them how to use project management tools like Gantt charts to keep track of their projects.
“The idea here is for us to Gantt out, to visualize every stop of the process,” said Friends of Rockaway director Thomas Corley. “So that we can communicate to home owners, storm survivors, this is where you'll be two weeks from now this is where your home will be.”
The non-profit group Friends of Rockaway learned how to use a project management Gantt chart from Toyota, one of their corporate partners. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
The group is currently working on about a dozen homes and hope to add Lloyd-Bei's house to the chart soon.
Even the city recognizes the value of these non-profit groups, and is partnering with Friends of Rockaway to complete Build it Back jobs — as well as work with home owners who don't qualify but still need help.
Some residents of Breezy Point, a beach community at the outermost tip of Rockaway Peninsula, once feared that in order to qualify for federal money to help protect itself against future storms like Sandy, it would have to open up its private beaches to the public.
That was the suggestion laid out in former Mayor Michael Bloomberg's citywide resiliency plan issued last June. The agency that normally builds beach dunes, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, does typically require public accessibility as a prerequisite for its construction projects.
But it turns out there is another pot of money that could pay for the project without forcing Breezy's beaches to go public: the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced Thursday that he supported using FEMA money for the dunes, a necessary step in the approval process.
Arthur Lighthall, the general manager of the Breezy Point Cooperative, said opening up its beaches would require parking spaces and bathrooms that the densely-settled area does not have space for. He also said FEMA funding has other advantages: it will likely come more quickly.
"We may never see the results of any study or work done from the Army Corps for years," Lighthall said.
What kind of boardwalk would you like to walk on? One with smooth concrete or or one that's rougher? Colorful or sparkly? The Parks Department is seeking input from the public before it finalizes plans to rebuild the Sandy-damaged boardwalk in the Rockaways.
The survey seeks suggestions for "special accents," like playgrounds and entrances, as well as whether "Tumbled Recycled" or "Glass Colored Stone" should be used for decorative finishes.
Jonathan Gaska, the district manager for Community Board 14 in the Rockaways, said the board has finally accepted that replacing the wooden planks with concrete is better suited for the long term.
"You kinda hold your nose and say okay, it just makes sense," he told WNYC. "It's much less expensive and it doesn't affect the environment as did the woods they were using from South America."
The Parks Department said in a message it hopes to begin pre-construction this winter. The survey will be online until Nov. 11. The city will look at both the survey results and community input when making its final decisions on the new boardwalk.
About half the boardwalk was destroyed during Sandy. The concrete sections survived mostly unscathed.
Life changed for thousands in our region almost a year ago when Sandy blew in. For Raul Romero, a resident of Rockaway Beach, that change is most evident every morning when he boards the Sea-Streak Ferry for his morning commute.
Romero, 61, drove to work before Sandy, but the storm destroyed his car. So he got a job in the city and became a commuter. "As far as water is concerned, the water is not a drama to me," he said. "I live in a little island that’s only 3 blocks wide so there’s water everywhere. I happen to love water. I’m a cancer."
As soon as Romero sits down he makes sure to send his wife a text message. "I let her know I’m on my yacht," he said. "She gets a kick out of that. It’d be nice if it was a real yacht."
To listen to Romero's story, click on the audio link.
The Seastreak ferry departs regularly from Rockaway Beach, Queens and makes stops in Brooklyn and Manhattan. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
Rockaway resident Raul Romero taking a ferry to work every morning from Rockaway Park, Queens to Lower Manhattan. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
View from Seastreak ferry under the Verrazao Narrows Bridge heading to Lower Manhattan. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)**
One year ago, Sandy took its toll on thousands of New Yorkers -- and dozens of New York City school buildings. Scholars' Academy in Rockaway Beach has been slowly rebuilding after the storm flooded the building's first floor.
The school required extensive repairs and needed replacements for everything from furniture to books to musical instruments for the school band.
Around 4:00 p.m. each day, just after school, Principal Brian O'Connell thinks about how student life is creeping back to normal. It's this time that he hears the sweet sound of student athletes at work, on the school's new gym floor, preparing to host home games again this year. It's just one reminder of how far the school community has come since the storm shut the school building for months last year.
Brian O'Connell, principal of Scholars' Academy. (Yasmeen Khan)
"It was a huge struggle to assess everything, to replace everything, and to put the pieces of Scholars Academy back together," said O'Connell.
To hear more from Brian O'Connell, click on the audio player.
O'Connell insisted that the school has come back stronger, despite being displaced until January. Many of the school's students and staff, including O'Connell himself, were forced out of their homes as well.
“During Sandy – that time – I would say for, like, three months, we moved four times,” said Anniesa Baldeo, a senior. “We first went to New Jersey with my aunt and then we came back here, started with my uncle, then went to my aunt and then we stayed in my house without any heat or without any power. So, it was definitely an experience.”
Anniesa Baldeo and Barbara Lipowczan are seniors at Scholars' Academy. (Yasmeen Khan)
She said school felt like a second home so being displaced with her family in addition to being displaced from school was especially challenging.
Barbara Lipowczan, also a senior, said things certainly have returned back to normal, as much as they can. School life is back up and running to a Scholars’ Academy pace – hectic and often 10 minutes behind schedule. She also takes the same bus home after school even though she and her mom had to relocate to a new apartment.
“Definitely it feels normal. But if it actually is normal – I don’t know,” she said. “There’s still, like, one piece missing that you can't put your finger on.”
Lipowczan said that just after the storm, her mother taught her to knit. Now knitting is a way to keep her hands busy when she gets anxious about something, like an upcoming test, she said. She said she has knit several scarves at this point, which she gives away to friends.
Sandy hit one year ago today. WNYC's Matthew Schuerman and Janet Babin talk about lessons learned and stories unfolding a year into the recovery. Plus: Jon Meacham discusses his book about Thomas Jefferson and the current state of Washington politics; a focus on the future of New York City taxis; a new exhibit at the Guggenheim about the future of urban innovation; and a close look at neighborhood organizing in the Rockaways.
It was a year ago this week that Super Storm Sandy hit the beaches of New York and New Jersey. In just a few hours heavy winds, rising waters, and heavy rain produced a region that was forever changed.
For New Yorkers, it was no longer about which borough you were from, it was now about your evacuation zone. Zone A meant mandatory evacuation, while people in Zone B and C were far more safe.
But each neighborhood hit by Sandy has a story.
Today we take you to the Rockaways in Queens, a neighborhood near John F. Kennedy International Airport that sits on a narrow sliver of land surrounded by water on two sides. The Rockaways is a place called home for photographer Susannah Ray and Takeaway Senior Producer Jen Poyant. In the aftermath of the storm, they interviewed residents and followed their recoveries. Audio and photos from those interviews will be featured at the Museum of the City of New York beginning tomorrow.
And as our Senior Producer Jen Poyant explains, in the Rockaways the story of Sandy has become in many ways a story of waiting—waiting for financial assistance, waiting for the permits to rebuild, and waiting for friends and neighbors to come home for good.
Check out our photo slideshow of some of the interview subjects chronicled by Jen and Susannah.
A hundred Sandy survivors gathered at The West End Temple in The Rockaways on Sunday to hear about, and from, a Biblical character who famously faced calamity. Four actors read a portion of the Book of Job in a flood-damaged sanctuary still undergoing repairs.
Actor Eric Bogosian played Job, who is wont, in the midst of his suffering, to observe glumly that, "Life is a breath. Like a cloud fading in the sky, man dissolves into death."
Afterward, survivors of the storm used a wireless mic to take turns grappling with the meaning of what had befallen them. Said one, "We are all being tested every day of our lives for reasons unknown ... we just never give up."
To hear the full story, click on the audio player above.
Some of the MTA's hardest-hit subway lines will be free on October 29.
According to an email sent from Governor Andrew Cuomo: "From 12:01 Tuesday morning until 11:59 Tuesday evening, riders entering stations on the A line between Howard Beach and the Rockaway Peninsula and riders entering stations on the R line between Bay Ridge-95th Street and Court Street will not be charged a fare."
.@hglaser1 announces FREE @mta fares 4 A train riders in #Rockaways #HowardBeach & R riders in #BK TUES 10/29 #sandy pic.twitter.com/oQUte98TUD
— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) October 25, 2013
The email continues: "These free rides are a thank you to the MTA riders in the Rockaways in Queens and those who use the R train in Brooklyn for taking the hardships of the storm in stride and for their understanding in the months since."
The tube that carries the R train from Brooklyn to Manhattan was badly during the storm and is in the midst of a 14-month closure for repairs. The A was out of service in the Rockaways for seven months.
No word yet on how much in lost revenue this could cost the MTA -- nor how major transfer points (Atlantic Avenue-Barclays, for example) will be handled.
Life changed for thousands in our region almost a year ago when Sandy blew in. For John Cori, a resident of Rockaway Beach, that change is most evident when he steps out his front door every morning and heads towards a boardwalk that has yet to be re-built.
Cori said the boardwalk is especially important to him. "I already told my kid, this is where my ashes are going to go when I die, this is the palace. This is heaven to me. And the boardwalk is the key, it's the gateway to our community."
To listen to the whole piece about Cori, click on the audio link.
John Cori
Photos and interview by Stephen Nessen.
The relief group Doctors of the World, which operates in war torn nations like Syria, Mali and Somalia is opening its first U.S. clinic, in the Rockaways. The organization provided aid immediately following Sandy and decided to set up a brick and mortar medical clinic in Rockaway Beach, Queens.
When Sandy landed last October in the Rockaways, it brought hordes of volunteers and aid groups to the area that had never been to the peninsula before. One group was Doctors of the World, an international relief network based in France, started by co-founders of Doctors Without Borders, with a focus on staying after emergencies.
Noah Barth is the program coordinator for the charity and said while Doctors of the World usually operates in distressed parts of the world, it was clear that residents of the Rockaways had severe medical needs.
"We saw a lot of people with upper respiratory tract infections, a lot of people that went months without seeing a doctor that just needed routine stuff," he said, speaking in the newly-renovated, seven-room clinic on Beach 102nd Street. "Now you're starting to see the setting in of post-traumatic stress disorders, anxiety, depression," he said.
He's hoping the clinic will be ready to open before the one-year anniversary of Sandy in October. It will offer free medical services to the uninsured, (an estimated 21 percent of Rockaway residents have no insurance) as well as undocumented residents and will run on donations. Barth (photo below) said it expects to serve 100 people a week in the beginning.
The Rockaways stretches for 11-and-a-half miles, but there are few medical facilities. There's St. John’s Episcopal Hospital at Beach 19th Street and Joesph Addabbo Family Health Center on 62nd that serve a large elderly and vulnerable population.
Fifty-year-old Moraima Perez, a resident of the Rockaways, said she'd take advantage of the free health care. She's uninsured, suffers from seizures and has carpal tunnel syndrome.
"There’s a lot of people like myself — I don’t have no health insurance, I lost everything in Sandy; now I’m having hard time getting Medicaid," she said, on a recent afternoon while walking her German Shepard. "So I think it’s great."
Another resident who's glad to hear about a new clinic opening near his home is John Ray. The 58-year-old said he recently stopped by St. John's Episcopal for a painful hernia operation.
"You go to the emergency room because it's the only hospital here," he said, before boarding a bus to Rego Park, Queens, where he's going to deal with a malpractice claim related to the surgery.
While those affected from Sandy continue to rebuild, there's new help for volunteers.
The non-profit Citizens Committee of New York will be awarding micro-grants of up to $2,000 to support volunteer-led groups, rather than individuals.
The group's CEO, Peter Kostmayer, says while getting affected individuals back into their homes is the most important task, too little attention has been paid to community spaces. And he thinks green spaces may have practical implications for the NEXT storm.
"Gardens absorb water. Sidewalks don't," says Kostmayer. "So the more gardens we have, the more parks we have, the more open space we have in New York City when another storm strikes as it inevitably will, the more water we're going to be able to absorb which is not going to go into people's basements!"
The filing deadline for grant applications is August 1st.
Brian James, better known as BJ, is lounging in a beach chair at Beach 90th Street in Far Rockaway his feet firmly planted in the sand soaking in the sun on a recent weekend.
James, who calls himself the “Nautical Negro,” is taking a break from the waves.
"Surfers, for the most part, don’t care what you are, as long as you’re not gong to be in the way," he said.
James is far from the iconic, Fast Times at Ridgemont High surfer: a bronzed beach bum with shaggy blonde hair with a laid-back California lilt. The bald 48-year-old from Port Chester is one of the recent pioneers, part of the growing black surf scene in the Rockaways.
Rockaway Beach, was once known as the Irish Riviera because of its large working-class Irish population, but the name no longer reflects the diversity that now stretches across nine neighborhoods, from Breezy Point to Far Rockaway. Thirty-five percent of the Rockaways are non-white.
Member of local surf scene in Rockaways, BJ (center-right). (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
Locals say James was one of the first black surfers on the scene when he began catching waves here in 1997. And even though the shores are thousands of miles away from the once-exclusively white beaches of California, where the sport was popularized in the U.S., James said he faced racism here too.
"It was tough in the beginning,” he said. “Lot of racial epithets hurled out in water. Lot of arguing. But me personally, I let them know I wasn't going for it. They got a problem we can settle it on the beach."
Sauntering down the crowded beach on a recent Saturday with the top half of his wet suit hanging down, is another staple of the local surf scene: Louis Harris. The 41-year-old personal trainer from Long Island said it was James who inspired him to try surfing.
"I was like, ‘Wow, people surf out here.’ I then I saw BJ and I was like, ‘Wow black guy surfing?’” Harris said. “And they were all crowding around him like he was freaking Mick Jagger or something."
But Harris said when he walks with a surfboard, he still gets chastised.
"It’s the black people that say ‘Black people don’t surf. Yo man, what you doing with a surf board man? Black people don’t surf.' I’m like, ‘Dude, are you kidding?’ Harris said.
Louis Harris, a surfer who now lives in the Rockaways and surfs all year. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
At Boarders Surf Shop on Beach 92nd Street, Frank Cullen, head of the New York Surf School, said there's been an overall uptick in the number of surfers in the Rockaways, including blacks. Weekend warriors from gentrified Brooklyn are a big part of the Rockaway surf scene now.
"A lot of it has to do with demographics and it seems to be more of a middle class type of thing,” he said. “African Americans... they’re just coming out and just doing their thing,"
But there's also a large black population in the Rockaways. James said that unlike other sports that have long broken the race barrier, surfing remains out of reach for many black youth. He says his parents taught him to swim at a young age.
"It’s the opportunity. That’s one of the only things that separates us from our peers a lot of times is the opportunity," he said. "When people like Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters, their parents gave them the opportunity."
Harris said his goal is to change those stereotypes, one kid at a time. He teaches surfing on the weekends.
"You get all lot of these black kids who never surfed before who get on the board and they just rip like, that. And those are the kids, that’s my mission this summer is to get a lot of African American kids a lot of Puerto Rican kids who think, oh that’s a white sport. It’s not a white sport," he said.
(Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
It's been a challenging and disorienting year for students at the Scholars' Academy. The selective secondary school in Rockaway Park was flooded by the storm waters of Sandy, and then forced to relocate for four months to another school, P.S. 13 Roberto Clemente, in Brooklyn. Through it all, a team of sixth graders kept their cameras rolling and has just finished a documentary about the year that was.
"Dear World, A Letter from the Rockaways," was screened at the school on Thursday. You can see the whole 17-minute production below.
DEAR WORLD: A Letter from the Rockaways from Magic Box Productions on Vimeo.
The documentary was created with the help of Magic Box Productions, a media arts organization that has been partnering with the school for several years.
"When we knew Hurricane Sandy had impacted them so much, we reached out to them right away," said Executive Director Nelle Stokes.
Stokes said about 60 sixth graders took part in the project, which began soon after the storm, and 40 of them stuck it out through the documentary's completion. They researched, shot footage and interviewed their teachers and fellow students, and also gave their classmates an online questionnaire.
The resulting documentary includes footage of the storm and its aftermath, culled from television reports and videos and photos from local residents, as well as the students' own creative touch: a clip from an old Godzilla movie.
"They really blew us away," said Stokes. "They were funny, smart and the video is so much theirs."
The documentary was shown to the whole sixth grade of about 250 students.
"It was really nerve-wracking knowing that everybody was watching something that I had put together for almost four months," said 11-year-old Billy Gibleski. "Everybody was applauding."
"A lot of people didn't think that it was sixth graders who made this because it was so professional and amazing," said Anika Kalra, 12. "The teaching artists put it together really well, and edited it so it really flowed through."
Anika created the online survey to see how students were affected by Sandy. She was a little disappointed that only 30-40 students filled it out, but she said she used their responses to pick different locations from which to interview a broad range of students about their experiences after the storm.
With the help of the teaching artists, the students spent a lot of time editing down 20 hours of interviews at computer terminals. There were technical problems. The students sometimes forgot to turn on the microphone during an interview, requiring a little cleanup during post-production. But Stokes said that experience was a big part of the process.
And working on the documentary provided another service for the students.
"It took my mind off the bad parts of Hurricane Sandy and it started to feel like a good experience because I was with my friends doing something that without Hurricane Sandy we wouldn't be doing," said Billy.
He said he enjoyed learning how to edit because he's always been interested in computers. "I'm a little bit of a geek. A lot of a geek," he acknowledged, adding that he's even more interested in technology now.
Stokes said the project was funded by the school's PTA and a small grant from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. The total budget was under $10,000.
The documentary doesn't dwell much on the hardships faced by the students, teachers and their principal -- many of whom were forced out of their homes. Stokes said the kids seemed more drawn to a slogan the school developed after Sandy: Scholar Strong, Rockaway Resilient.
What would the FEMA flood zones released this week look like flooded with water? Now you can see.
The investigative website ProPublica built a 3-D viewer using data from past and proposed FEMA zones, along with Sandy flooding data.
View the interactive map below (best in a newer browser), and read the story at ProPublica.
The posters are being hung in the subways, so we know it's official: seven months after being knocked out by Sandy, the A train will once again run to the furthest reaches of eastern Queens.
Service to the Rockaways is scheduled to begin Thursday at noon. New York's MTA says resurrecting the washed-out subway line cost about $75 million, which is only part of the $650 million it ill take to upgrade and harden the line against future storms. That would make it one of the agency's most expensive Sandy recovery projects.
To commemorate the resumption of service, the first train will consist of vintage R1/R9 subway cars first put into service in the 1930’s.
(photo courtesy NY MTA)
To protect the restored A train line from future storms, the MTA installed a two-mile long wall along the tracks. The wall, which is made of thick steel, rises two feet higher than Sandy's storm surge -- about seven feet total -- and plunges 30 feet underground.
While work on repairing the Rockaways beachfront continues, restoration of A train service means surfers, swimmers and sunbathers alike will once again have direct access to the beach in time for summer.
A test train on the North Channel Bridge (photo courtesy NY MTA)
To see more photos of how the MTA restored service to the Rockaways, check out their web page here.
A hurricane rolls up the Atlantic Coast and causes widespread death and destruction. Congress then appropriates money to investigate ways to protect the coast. People talk about the need to build levees, sea walls and hurricane gates.
Sound familiar?
It started in 1954, when a series of damaging storms caused more than $750 million dollars in damage and killed more than 150 people in the U.S. The Army Corps of Engineers started a series of studies for New York City’s shoreline. Then, in 1960, Hurricane Donna hit the region as a Category 3 storm, and gave a sense of urgency to the endeavor.
But very little of the outlined plans came to fruition, although some of their features may resurface when the Army Corps releases a new set of studies over the next year and a half.
“We just put the mops away and people went back to normal,” said Dan Mundy, Sr., a resident of Broad Channel, Queens, who was 22 at the time. In the mid-1960s, after the study for the Rockaways was finally released, Mundy got a copy of it and pored over it.
The proposal, drawn up by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, was quite extensive. It recommended making the beach deeper and higher, and then building a flood wall 18-feet above sea level. The wall would rise up a bit above the boardwalk’s surface, like a solid fence that people could lean on and look out over, towards the ocean.
At the time, Mundy thought the plan was fanciful and doubted it would go anywhere.
“I looked at it and said, ‘Wow, this is some dream here,’” he said in an interview earlier this month on Rockaway Beach, which was seriously damaged in Sandy. “But what if that plan had been put in effect? We might not be standing here looking at this 24-7 operation that’s going on here, trying to get this beach ready.”
Mundy ended up founding an environmental organization that has helped restore the salt marsh in Jamaica Bay. He held on to the Army Corps study for decades until Sandy came, flooded the lower level of his house, and swept the report out to sea.
Protections against Sandy-style surges Looking back on the Army Corps studies, they seem eerily to presage just such a storm as Sandy:
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The Rockaway study proposed a hurricane gate across the mouth of Jamaica Bay. The gate would have been kept open in good weather, but would have been closed before storms to protect neighborhoods on the inside of the bay, like Broad Channel and Canarsie, which in fact suffered seriously flooding from Sandy.
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A 1964 Army Corps study for Staten Island’s South Shore suggested a thick reinforced levee, 15-feet above sea level, to wrap around neighborhoods like Oakwood Beach and Midland Beach, where more than a dozen people drowned from flash flooding.
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In 1972, the Corps proposed a flood wall on Coney Island’s beach, according to a New York Times article at the time, as well as hurricane gates for Coney Island Creek and Sheepshead Bay—areas which also suffered fatalaties, extensive damage and lengthy power and heat outages during Sandy.
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The Corps took another look at Staten Island in 1976 and proposed extending the barrier it had earlier recommended all the way north to Fort Wadsworth, in the shadow of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
The structures would have been higher than Sandy’s storm tide, which topped out at 14 feet above sea level. It is hard to predict just how these barriers would have behaved during Sandy—some levees in New Orleans failed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But John Boulé, a former commander of the Army Corps’ New York District, said they likely would have helped prevent damage.
“Certainly, the city and New York area remain vulnerable,” Boulé said in an interview, “and projects on the coast would reduce risks to the facilities and the structures behind them.”
Lack of interest, and money, doomed the plans. At the time, the Corps estimated the three plans would have cost about $100 million, more than $700 million in today’s dollars. The city, which was then entering its fiscal crisis, would have had to have contributed a portion of the money. Local officials said the Coney Island sea wall would have cut the city off from the water. And there were plenty of other engineering projects around the country that powerful congressmen wanted to get done instead.
The Downside of Levees Environmentalists also have long been wary heavy engineering solutions, and raised questions about certain aspects of the plans at the time. The hurricane gates, they said, would hinder water flow in and out of Jamaica Bay, which was polluted from sewage treatment plants.
As for levees and seawalls, Orrin Pilkey, a professor emeritus of Earth and Ocean Sciences at Duke University, said they only encourage development in areas that people should instead move away from.
“The plans that the Corps made, I just simply would not trust,” said Pilkey, the co-author of a book, The Corps and the Shore, that is critical of the government agency.
Several years ago, the Army Corps began new studies for how to protect Staten Island and the Rockaways from erosion and storm damage. The federal Sandy bill allocated about $4 billion dollars to help finish those and other studies and potentially to build some of the projects that they will recommend. Suddenly, these old studies from the 1960s are relevant once again.
A recent report on the current Staten Island study, for example, indicated that a levee and seawall between 13 and 15 feet above sea level was being contemplated for part of the South Shore.
The project manager for the current Rockaways study, Dan Falt, said sea walls and hurricane gates are under consideration for that segment of the coast.
“We are going to much take a good look at this project with its flood wall approach,” Falt said, “because that may be the way to go.”
A train service over Jamaica Bay will resume seven months after Sandy washed away the tracks.
The restoration of service is happening a month ahead of estimates. Earlier this year the MTA said service could not be restored until late June.
After Sandy washed away the rails over Jamaica Bay, Rockaway passengers have been using a combination of shuttle buses to get on and off the peninsula -- and the resurrected H train once they were on it.
To protect against future storms, the MTA has installed a steel wall 30 feet into the soil.
The MTA says the effort entailed rebuilding 1,500 feet of washed-out tracks, replacing miles of signal, power and communications wires, and rehabilitating two stations that were completely flooded.
The federal government has approved New York City’s plan to spend the first $1.77 billion in federal aid for Sandy recovery, after New Jersey and New York got their plans accepted last month.
Of the funds, $648 million will be put aside for programs to rebuild homes and make them more storm-resistant. Some $293 million will go to loans, grants and other programs for businesses. The remainder of the funds will go to reimburse city agencies for overtime and other emergency costs and be put aside for future infrastructure projects.
The money falls far short of what the city outlined in its application as unmet needs. The housing assistance, for example, represents just one-sixth of the $4.4 billion the city said it still needed for publicly and privately owned housing, even after insurance and other sources of aid are considered.
But U.S Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan said the first allotment represents about one-third of what the city should eventually receive for Community Development Block grants.
“You should not think of today’s announcement as the only funding that should be available, and in fact it is not even the majority of funding that’s available,” he said.
Donovan added the state is working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to develop a plan for tapping into what is called the “Hazard Mitigation Grant Program,” which pays for measures such as raising private homes above flood plains to reduce the risk of future flooding.
Michael Murr, who lives in hard-hit Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn, said he received FEMA funds, but found that loan requirements were too onerous. He is restoring his home out-of-pocket. Now, he is concerned about what this latest round of funds can be used for.
"Are there going to be strings attached?” he asked. “They're going to want us to use this money towards the raising of our house, which is an impossible thing for a lot of people."
Homeowners will be able to apply for the funds starting in early June. They they'll meet with housing recovery specialists who'll go through the different options and pots of money available to help them rebuild or even elevate their homes. Businesses can start applying on May 20.
Listen above to WNYC's Richard Hake conversation with Matthew Schuerman about the Sandy Aid.
After a cataclysmic storm, each home that goes on the market is a test: Do people really want to live in a neighborhood vulnerable to storms? Knowing the dangers, will a buyer give the seller their asking price?
The home that’s on sale on Beach 145th Street is testing the high end of that market. It’s in Neponsit – an affluent neighborhood of large homes on large lots, all a short walk from the shore.
The house has three bedrooms, two subzero refrigerators, custom-made porcelain tiles (with radiant heat flooring) and a swimming pool. Asking price: $1.25 million.
As people arrived for an open house on a recent Sunday afternoon, they were offered mimosas and chocolate-covered strawberries, and then taken on a tour. Invariably, this tour included a visit below ground.
(Photo: Repaired electrical room in the basement. Ilya Marritz/WNYC)
“Just about everyone in Rockaway got water in their basement,” said Barbara Ferguson, an associate broker with Rockaway Properties. “So this house did get water also in the basement. It was immediately cleaned. Treatment was done for mold remediation. And a new boiler installed, new hot water heater. New electric.”
Today, the walls are brilliant white, and there’s no trace of the chest-high floodwaters.
“It's proven that mankind wants to be around the ocean, it’s a draw,” said Jim Moriarty, who swung by the open house because he’s thinking of trading up. Moriarty owns a smaller house and is looking for more space.
But there’s a problem: “We had a good offer before Sandy hit. But now we’re now trying to sell, offers come in about $100 thousand less,” Moriarty said. “So the houses we want, the prices seem to be going higher. But the houses in the midscale are coming down.”
Jed Kolko, an economist with Trulia, said there’s not yet enough data to make generalizations about home values in the Rockaways. Perception, Kolko said, is key.
“In areas where people have now greater realization of the risk of another hurricane and flooding, we could see a permanent decline in home values,” Kolko said. “But if people’s perception of that risk doesn’t change, we might actually see home prices rise because of the loss of housing stock.”
As the open house was winding down, Nia Casilla, a broker associate got an email for a bid on a wrecked home on a 40x100-foot lot. She squealed with delight.
“It is a short sale. It is a distressed property, you’re paying pretty much for the lot,” Casilla said.
As for the house on 145th street, with the pool and two refrigerators. It hasn’t sold yet, but there’s an offer. And the reason it’s for sale isn’t that the owners are leaving town: they’re doubling down on Rockaway, and building a bigger house nearby.
Six months after Sandy struck much of the eastern Seaboard, a group of ‘hactktivists” are working out ways digital technology can improve the response to future disasters.
Dozens of people from the Rockaways and beyond gathered in a large domed tent on Sunday to discuss websites, apps and other ways local communities and service providers can collaborate better. Todd Miner, from Friends of Rockaway, wants to streamline the interaction between private service providers, government agencies and property owners, using a special network of databases.
"If this is in place before the next disaster, then the space between the day of the disaster and when I’m up to speed, with databases, which has been about four months, goes to one day, three days, four days, five days," Miner said. "You can actually make a difference."
Miner was speaking with Atul Varma, a designer from from the software and search engine firm Mozilla, and Jessica Roff, an attorney-turned-activist.
"If I had a dollar for every hour I have spent in a meeting discussing how you properly share information without privacy concerns and without undermining organizations’ restrictions, I could fund a lot of this rebuild," Roff said.
Sunday's two-hour workshop was in advance of a much larger event planned for Saturday, June 1st, that organizers hope will draw a big crowd of community members to contribute ideas.
The goal for that all-day “hackathon” in the Rockaways will be to take all the notes on Sunday’s worksheets, posters and post-its, and build them into rudimentary software programs that contributors can try out and respond to on the spot.
The city is selling a dilapidated courthouse in the Rockaways to a private developer and a group of physicians who pledge to transform it into a new healthcare facility. Officials say the new clinic will help the community, following the closure Peninsula Hospital last year
The city owns the 80-year-old courthouse, which was abandoned in the mid 1970s. It’s being purchased by The Harmony Group, a Long Island-based company that has developed office, apartment and storage buildings, but no healthcare facilities, according to its website.
The new clinic will be operated by Rockaway ASC Development LLC, which the city's press release described as "a local consortium of ten physicians."
Elected officials say the new facility “will help improve access” to medical care following the closure of Peninsula Hospital in 2012. But it will be much smaller than 170-bed Peninsula and will offer a fraction of the services.
One of the casualties from Sandy was a wardrobe of costumes and props from the drama program at the Scholars’ Academy in Rockaway Beach, Queens collected over the past seven years. The combined middle school and high school was one of the last in the city to re-open after Sandy. And now the drama department is rushing to prepare for a performance of Stephen Sondheim’s "Into the Woods" before the school year ends.
Taylor Lombardino, 13, is modest when it comes to her role in the musical.
“I play Cinderella, so, it’s kind of a good part, I guess,” she said during a recent rehearsal. “It’s just really good to see everybody working together and get this play back when we started it.”
The school sits on the bayside of the peninsula. The theatre took on nearly five feet of water, destroying expensive audio equipment and turning the stage into a warped muddy mess, according to Leslie Kohn, the theatre and arts director at Scholars’ Academy.
“Basically we lost our costumes our props which were housed backstage right,” she said. “The water damage was so bad we didn't even want to clean the costumes, we didn't want to possibly endanger our students so we just threw them out, they were pretty damaged.”
Since Sandy, the stage has been replaced. The Roundabout Theatre Company has donated some costumes for "Into the Woods," and donated other costumes as well. But the drama program still needs microphones, movable set pieces and a fully stocked wardrobe.
The theater at the Scholars' Academy after Sandy (Courtesy of Scholars' Academy)
But the kids are making do with what they’ve got for now. A performance of 12 Angry Jurors was delayed by Sandy, but recently went ahead on a bare bone stage with a few wireless microphones, folding tables and a painted wood panel for a city skyline.
And everyone is buzzing about an online contest to win a $3,000 dollar gift card to Lowes hardware store that will be given away by the show Smash to five needy theater programs across the country.
Most of the schools in the online contest posted photos of colorful theater productions, or smiling students with text asking for much needed upgrades. The Scholars’ Academy has a blurry photo of their post-Sandy stage with a simple plea: “We lost our theatre, gym and were displaced for over two months. We need your help!"
No surprise, they’re front runners with thousands of clicks of support.
Tamia Laptiste, 12, is playing a witch in "Into the Woods," and is also playing her role in the contest.
“Everyday when I go home I make sure I vote and I make sure I get all my parent’s friends to vote for me,” she said.
Laptiste said her basement took on seven feet of water during Sandy and stayed with relatives for two months.
She and her classmates say theatre is where they go to escape after a grueling math class, and where they’ve been releasing some post-Sandy stress. The school even came up with a slogan to help rally the students: “We’re not down, we’re going to come back. We’re Rockaway resilient and Scholars’ strong,” Lapiste recites.
On a recent afternoon, one group of seventh and eighth graders practice the closing song from "Into the Woods." Behind them is a freshly cleaned curtain, which had been salvaged from the storm.
This area of the Rockaways is still struggling to figure out how to protect the area from future floods. And the closing song has a message that should resonate with parents and city planners: actions have consequences, especially for future generations.
The Sondheim song goes, “Children will look to you for which way to turn, to learn what to be, careful before you say listen to me, children will listen.”
Into the Woods is scheduled to open June 7.
While a few local politicians have been caught in bribery scandals this week, others are looking for an alternative way of doing city business.
Eight city council districts have their last day of voting on Sunday on how to spend US$ 1 million on projects their own residents devised. One of them is in the Rockaways, Queens.
Local resident John Corie says the so-called participatory budgeting has brought people together, even as they're rebuilding their own homes.
"It's great that it's even going," he said. "It's like almost like a flower blooming--like a tree starting to grow out of a forest fire."
New York residents can find out whether their districts are using participatory budgeting here.
Pile driver installs a section of steel wall between A train tracks in the foreground and Jamaica Bay behind. (photo by Jim O'Grady)
(New York, NY - WNYC) New York is Holland now: the NY Metropolitan Transportation Authority is building a wall to keep out the sea along a two-mile stretch of the A subway line on its way to the Rockaway peninsula in Queens. The wall is made of thick steel and runs along the eastern side the tracks on the island of Broad Channel, in the middle of Jamaica Bay.
The $38 million project is the MTA's first big step since Sandy to prevent flooding from future storm surges.
To make sure the wall is strong enough to hold off another flood, workers are pounding each section about 30 feet into the ground. In the end, the wall will rise only seven feet above the rails, two feet above Sandy's height. The MTA thinks that's high enough.
On a recent windy afternoon, Contractor Mitch Levine was watching workers pile drive and weld each section into place. He said the wall is designed to withstand salt water. "This steel is special steel," he said. "It's marine steel, which will stop it from eroding over the course of 100 years."
Keeping the hungry waves at bay
NY MTA program manager Raymond Wong said the wall is supposed to prevent future storm surges from doing what Sandy did in this area, which was rip the embankment right out from under 400 feet of track.
"The tracks were hanging in the air," he said.
For three weeks after Sandy, each tide took another bite from a larger section of the embankment--until the NY MTA rebuilt the shore by dumping tons of stone and concrete next to the tracks. But this stretch of the A train across Jamaica Bay is still not in service. Thousands of riders now cram into crowded shuttle buses and face rush hour commutes that can end after midnight.
The wall will also serve a second purpose: keeping debris off the line. Forty-eight boats came to rest on the tracks after Sandy, along with jet skis, docks and fuel tanks. The clean up alone took three months.
Why a wall?
NY MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz said engineers chose a steel wall to protect the A train because, "It could meet strength requirements as well as timing requirements--we wanted to make sure the wall would be in place by May 1." The line is scheduled to return to full service by summer.
Although Jamaica Bay is part of Gateway National Park, Ortiz said the wall didn't need to go through "any type of approval process" because it's within the right-of-way of the tracks, which is controlled by NYC Transit. Ortiz said the NY MTA did consult with the National Park Service and Army Corps of Engineers about the plan.
At the Broad Channel station replacing signals and thousands of feet of cable and other components. (Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Kevin Ortiz)
Bringing the power back
The MTA is taking a much more short term approach to repairing the A train's damaged electrical system. A mile away from Broad Channel, a control house sits in the railyard at the end of the line in Rockaway Park. Inside, Wong showed off rooms stuffed with equipment that looked modern in the 1950s, when it was installed. One panel has thousands of fuses, each with its own hand-lettered tag. Sandy turned these rooms into temporary aquariums.
"Everything was just coated in salt water that undermined the copper," Wong said. "When we came here, this whole thing was a big block of rust."
Electricity is vital to the subway. It powers signals that keep the trains apart, and switches that move those trains down the right track. There's also lighting at stations, public address systems, and power to the third rail to move the trains--the list goes on.
So what is the MTA doing to protect the electrical equipment at low-lying sites from future storms? "We're just trying to get up and running over here," Wong said. "There's really not much you can do."
Wong said, ideally, the MTA will lift the control house 10 feet in the air, rip out the old components and computerize the system. But that's millions of dollars and years away. His goal right now is to get the A train back by summer, however he can.
Click here for more photos of restoration work on the A line.
It's official: New York is Holland now. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is building a wall to keep out the sea along a two-mile stretch of the A line on its way to the Rockaways. The wall is made of thick steel and is rising seven feet above the tracks on the island of Broad Channel, in the middle of Jamaica Bay. The $38 million project is the MTA's first big step since Sandy to prevent flooding from future storm surges.
Almost five months after Sandy, there's still no dial tone for hundreds of people living in the Rockaways. The city councilman representing the area is warning the phone outage is a dangerous situation that must be fixed quickly.
More than four thousand people live in the Ocean Bay Apartments, and most of them have had no land line phone service, according to councilman Donovan Richards.
Richards said one elderly resident of the public housing complex waits for her niece to visit, so she can use the niece's cell phone to make important calls.
“So imagine this elderly lady has an emergency one day. Who can she call? How can she call?” Richards said.
Verizon is asking for patience, and says it will begin restoring service to much of the area by the end of the month. High-speed fiber optic cable will replace copper lines damaged by flooding.
Phone outages are not confined to the Rockaways. Sandy's floodwaters corroded copper cables in lower Manhattan, and many people there still have no service.
WNYC's outage map is crowdsourced and cannot be considered authoritative. WNYC reconfirms all outages weekly. To report a phone or internet outage to WNYC, email newsroom@wnyc.org, and put "outage" in the subject line.
View from the A Train window as it crosses Jamaica Bay. (Photo by roboppy)
(New York, WNYC) Before Sandy, every A train trip between the Rockaway peninsula and the rest of New York City began and ended with a crossing of Jamaica Bay. The train moved along a piece of land so thin that, from inside the train, it appears to skim atop the water. But for months, that 3.6 mile railroad bridge has been out, doubling commutes for Rockaways residents and further adding to the sense of deprivation brought on by Sandy.
On October 29, Sandy's storm surge overwhelmed that thread of connection. When the waters receded, the A train's foundation was gone, removing a major transit link from the peninsula's 130,000 residents.
One of those residents is senior producer of The Takeaway, Jen Poyant. She moved to the Rockaways a few years ago for a relatively affordable beach home -- far from Manhattan, but still, a direct shot on the A train. Water filled Poyant's basement, and came within a foot of flooding her first floor. For a month, she and her family couldn't return home. When she finally got back, she was overjoyed, but the daily trip to work can feel overwhelming -- like a little bit of work squeezed between commutes.
The direct train ride has become an odyssey from a slow-moving crowded bus to the train miles into the mainland. Sometimes, fellow commuters told Poyant, it takes all night to get home from Manhattan.
The MTA says its aware of the frustrating commute, but can't promise relief until summer.
MTA executive director Tom Prendergast described the result to New York's City Council: "An entire bridge and critical subway line serving the Rockaways was destroyed."
With the A train out, the MTA put subway cars on a truck, drove them to the peninsula and lifted them by crane onto tracks that serve six stops at the end of the line. The H train now runs for free from mid-peninsula at Beach 90th Street to the eastern end of the Rockaways. Bus service has also been increased.
But these are temporary measures. The list of needed repairs to the A train is extensive, and the going is slow. "We had to build out the shoulders on the east and west sides of the track, where you saw the washouts occur," Prendergast said. "We've had to replace damaged and missing third rail protection boards and insulators. We've had to replace signal power and communications equipment, which is ongoing." And damage to the Broad Channel subway station has not yet been fully repaired.
The MTA has patched and reinforced the land bridge where Sandy took large bites from it. But crews are still laboriously laying track and rebuilding the signal system from scratch — both on the railbed crossing Jamaica Bay and on the west end of the peninsula.
In the meantime, the MTA says it'll keep increasing service on the Q53 line, using old buses that have been held back from retirement. Those buses are jammed with riders every weekday rush hour as they make their way over the Cross Bay Bridge. More buses are coming in April.
The A train is expected back no earlier than late June.
Before Sandy, every A train trip between the Rockaway peninsula and the rest of New York City began and ended with a crossing of Jamaica Bay. The train moved along a piece of land so thin that, from inside the train, it appears to skim atop the water. But for months, that 3.6 mile railroad bridge has been out, doubling commutes for Rockaways residents and further adding to the sense of deprivation brought on by Sandy.
On October 29, Sandy's storm surge overwhelmed that thread of connection. When the waters receded, the A train's foundation was gone, removing a major transit link from the peninsula's 130,000 residents.
One of those residents is Senior Producer of The Takeaway, Jen Poyant. She moved to the Rockaways a few years ago for a relatively affordable beach home -- far from Manhattan, but still, a direct shot on the A train. Water filled Poyant's basement, and came within a foot of flooding her first floor. For a month, she and her family couldn't return home. When she finally got back, she was overjoyed, but the daily trip to work can feel overwhelming -- like a little bit of work squeezed between commutes.
The direct train ride has become an odyssey from a slow-moving crowded bus to the train miles into the mainland. Sometimes, fellow commuters told Poyant, it takes all night to get home from Manhattan.
The MTA says its aware of the frustrating commute, but can't promise relief until summer.
MTA executive director Tom Prendergast described the result to the City Council: "An entire bridge and critical subway line serving the Rockaways was destroyed."
With the A train out, the MTA put subway cars on a truck, drove them to the peninsula and lifted them by crane onto tracks that serve six stops at the end of the line. The H train now runs for free from mid-peninsula at Beach 90th Street to the eastern end of the Rockaways. Bus service has also been increased.
But these are temporary measures. The list of needed repairs to the A train is extensive, and the going is slow. "We had to build out the shoulders on the east and west sides of the track, where you saw the washouts occur," Prendergast said. "We've had to replace damaged and missing third rail protection boards and insulators. We've had to replace signal power and communications equipment, which is ongoing." And damage to the Broad Channel subway station has not yet been fully repaired.
The MTA has patched and reinforced the land bridge where Sandy took large bites from it. But crews are still laboriously laying track and rebuilding the signal system from scratch — both on the railbed crossing Jamaica Bay and on the west end of the peninsula.
In the meantime, the MTA says it'll keep increasing service on the Q53 line, using old buses that have been held back from retirement. Those buses are jammed with riders every weekday rush hour as they make their way over the Cross Bay Bridge. More buses are coming in April.
The A train is expected back no earlier than late June.
For thousands of children worldwide, the toughest part of getting an education is getting to school.
Walking to school in Calcutta (photo by Alfred Yaghobzadeh/SIPA)
A new exhibit now on display at the United Nations chronicles those sojourns. Journeys to School follows the routes of children in 13 different countries take as they walk, ride donkeys, snowmobile, ride the subway, and even canoe to school. Many of them must navigate dangerous roadways -- an issue that was thrown into sharp relief in New York City last week, where a 6-year old boy was struck by a truck just blocks from his school. All the photos underscore the link between transportation and education. Getting to school in a safe -- not to mention timely -- fashion is as important as the condition of the classroom.
(Photo by Kate Hinds)
Children going to school via somlot, a motorcycle rickshaw in Mae Sot, Thailand. The driver is also the children's teacher. "If I can't get the kids only 50% would attend class," he said. (Photo by Nicolas Axelrod/SIPA)
According to UN statistics, 1,000 people under the age of 25 are killed in traffic crashes each day.
Six-year-old Elizabeth Atenio walks two hours every day to attend classes at the Kibera School for Girls in Nairobi. (Photo by Nichole Sobecki/SIPA)
While much of the exhibit was devoted to countries in the developing world, some children are in major cities -- including New York.
14-year-old Far Rockaway resident Santiago Munoz, who commutes over two hours each way to school in the Bronx (photo by Kate Hinds)
Santiago Munoz lives in Far Rockaway, Queens -- a New York City neighborhood devastated by Sandy. Before the storm, Santiago's commute to the Bronx High School of Science was already daunting.
"I used to walk six blocks to the nearest A train station," he said, "and from there I would ride it for around, I would say 50 minutes, then transfer to the 4 train for 40 minutes." Tack on a ten minute walk from the station to the school, and his commute -- on an average day -- was one hour and 40 minutes.
But then Sandy washed out a key segment of the A train, and he now takes two buses to get to the subway. "And now it takes me two hours and a half to get to Bronx Science." He says he uses his commute time to do homework or catch up on sleep.
Munoz said the exhibit gave him perspective. While he acknowledges his commute appears tough to the average New Yorker, "compared to these kids -- not at all. They're very inspiring."
Ruth McDowall, standing in front of her photographs of schoolchildren in Nigeria (photo by Kate Hinds)
Photographer Ruth McDowall talked about the average school day for children of the nomadic Fulani minority in Kulumin Jeji, Nigeria. "They have to wake up at 5:00 in the morning," said McDowall, "to do chores like collecting firewood, getting water -- sometimes it can take an hour or more in dry season." The kids start walking to school by 6:30 am. "They get to school by eight, do about three hours of school, and then do another hour and a half walk home." Because the walk is long and hot, many children become dehydrated on the way to school, where they often find it difficult to concentrate. When they get back home, the rest of the day is devoted to herding responsibilities.
(photo by Kate Hinds)
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon (photo by Kate Hinds)
The exhibit is on display in the United Nations Visitors Center until April 26, 2013. It's organized by UNESCO, public transportation company Veolia Transdev and photo agency SIPA Press.
WNYC has obtained renderings of how the city's parks department plans to rebuild beaches in the Rockaways post-Sandy.
They include a boardwalk made of reclaimed wood and walkways with broom finish concrete; new Pavilions with wrap around billboards; and new bathrooms and lifeguard stations that will stand 12-feet above the beaches, in compliance with FEMA's 500-year flood plan.
The slides were presented earlier this month to residents of the Rockaways and members of the community board. The presentation drew the ire of many residents who said they were angered that they hadn't been consulted before the final decisions were made. The Parks Department said it was moving forward with these plans. Below are a few of the renderings.
Residents of the Rockaways were particularly upset with the slide below of the proposed bathrooms and lifeguard stations. They said the 12-foot high structures would block views, and were designed without any input from residents. The Parks Department said it was moving forward with installing these in eight locations.
The Parks Department said it has three Request for Proposals for food, kayak and bicycle rental kiosks for the summer.
(All images courtesy of NYC Parks & Recreation)
Beach season is three months away and residents of the Rockaways have been eagerly anticipating news from the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation on whether the beaches, badly damaged by Sandy, will be ready for the summer. Thursday night at Beach Channel High School, they got their first taste of what the future of the Rockaways may look like.
Members of the department, including First Deputy Commissioner Liam Kavanagh and Queens Parks Commissioner Dorothy Lewandowski, said May 24 is the goal, and they expect to be ready to open the beaches to the public. However, parts of Jacob Riis Park and Fort Tilden may have some sections that remain closed.
Much of the infrastructure on the beach was destroyed in the storm: the boardwalks, restaurants, lifeguard towers and comfort stations. The Parks Department didn’t present any innovative new boardwalk suggestions, like many residents had been hoping for.
But one slide in the presentation drew a visceral reaction from residents. Slipped in, innocuously, between renderings of before and after images of Sandy were new bathrooms perched above the beach.
The 12-foot tall, pre-fabricated trailers look like they're on stilts. From the slide it was hard to discern exactly how large they are, and the Parks Department wouldn’t give the dimensions, except to say, they’re 12 feet tall, and meet the requirements for FEMA’s 500-year flood plan. The new bathrooms will be placed in about eight locations, some of which will be lifeguard stations.
But what really galled residents was the Parks Department saying it is moving forward with the plans, without having consulted any residents.
“I don’t know if you realize, on Beach 66th on Beach 73rd there are homes that are just across the street, you’re essentially building restrooms in people’s front yards, backyards,” said one Arverne neighborhood homeowner, during the question and answer session afterwards. “Please consider the whole ecosystem, not just revamping the beach, but everything that makes the Rockaways beautiful.”
The department also said it has three RFPs (request for proposals) out for food stands on the beach, as well as kayak and bike rentals. Again, residents were disappointed, because this is the first they’d heard about this.
“You’re putting a food court on 116th Street? Don’t you realize that all the local merchants on 116th Street are hurting for business?” another outraged residents said at the meeting.
This meeting comes less than two weeks after the Army Corps of Engineers presented plans for protecting the beach at a community board meeting. Engineers presented their plans for protecting the beach, which amounted to replacing the 1.5 million cubic yards of sand that was lost during Sandy and continuing to study what the best plan for the future would be.
That study may not even be completed for another year. In the meantime, the Parks Department says it is considering taking a few measures—like sand fencing, and dunes made of Christmas trees—to protect the beach.
None of this reassures a community still in recovery and about to face another hurricane season.
More than three months after Sandy forced them to evacuate, the residents of Belle Harbor Manor in the Rockaways returned to their home on Thursday. It's the last of 22 evacuated adult residences to get its occupants back home (though three other residences remain closed indefinitely, as do three nursing homes, according to the state Health Department). And while the Belle Harbor Manor residents appreciated the shiny new linoleum floors and freshly painted walls, they also found some unwelcome surprises.
After festive welcome-home dinner, the residents, who suffer from a variety of mental illnesses and physical disabilities but are generally independent, were allowed to go to their rooms. Complaints about missing possessions quickly began filtering into the hallways.
“I opened the door and I saw this lock is broken,” said resident Jagdesh Trivedi. “Shoes are gone -- two boxes of shoes -- sunglasses are missing, and my Green Card and Social Security card are missing.”
A spokesman for Belle Harbor, Jonathan Greenspun, from the Mercury public relations and lobbying firm, said that all allegations of theft will be investigated, and residents will be compensated if they can prove possessions or cash are actually missing. But he also said that looting was widely reported throughout the Rockaways after Sandy, and that the operators of the home had worked tirelessly to repair facilities, so they could bring the residents back.
To listen to the full story, click button above.
UPDATE: The audio version of this story states that the operator of the home where Belle Harbor residents had been staying temporarily, the Institute for Contemporary Living, did not respond to requests for comment. After deadline, the senior vice president for adult and mental health services, Maureen Italiano, told WNYC the Institute did everything possible to accommodate the residents of Belle Harbor Manor and was surprised to learn of complaints.
Beaches in the Rockaways may not be back to pre-Sandy conditions by the start of summer, according to an official at the Army Corps of Engineers who updated residents of the hard-hit neighborhood during a community board meeting Tuesday night.
Army Corps Project Manager Dan Falt said it plans to begin filling in 1.5 million cubic yards of sand at the start of the summer — but is still studying ways to prevent future flooding from storm surges.
“I certainly understand the concerns of citizens, they’ve taken a hard hit and it’s scary to wonder if it’s going to come back and get you,” Falt told WNYC. “But we’re working as fast as we can to get the sand on the beach, and it will provide a significant level of protection where I hope people can feel safe until we get to the next phase constructed.”
He said flood control and emergency coastal funding was used to “fill in the potholes caused by storms,” he said, but with changes put in place through the Sandy bill, the law now provides funding to “restore projects to their design level.”
“So, that means we’ll be able to restore the beach to original levels of the beach,” Falt said, which is in excess of 1.5 million cubic yards.
For scale, Falt says, the Empire State Building could hold 1 million cubic yards of sand, and a construction dumpster holds about 30 cubic yards of sand.
Barbara Kelly has lived in the Rockaways for 35 years and attended the community board meeting Tuesday night where the Army Corps outlined its plans. She said she’s not sure what the best solution is for protecting the Rockways, but she’s tired of the Army Corps saying it’s still developing its ideas.
“It feels like there's always a plan to make a plan to do a plan for study and then study the plan, and there's no action, and the action that they’re proposing is in the future, far off, temporary, and I feel like it’s a giant waste of the funds that are available,” Kelly said by phone Wednesday morning.
The project is expected to take between four and six months to complete and would require closing about 1,000 square feet of beach at a time.
In 2003, Falt said the Army Corps began a study of ways to protect the Rockaways from a storm surge, but only completed 75 percent of it before it completely lost funding. He said with the Sandy bill, the Army Corps will finally complete that study.
New York City officials say this weekend's snowstorm prompted 19 families, who had been toughing it out in their Sandy-damaged housing, to take the government up on its offer to provide hotel rooms. But non-profits groups say thousands more continue to make do in substandard housing.
On the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, close to 2,000 households still lack either heat, power or hot water, according to Jessica Roff, an organizer for Occupy Sandy. She says her organization's volunteers try to discourage people from turning to dangerous improvisations like using their ovens to keep their apartment warm.
"It is really difficult, though" she said, "when you walk in on somebody and tell them what they are doing isn't safe and they say, 'Yes, but it is the only thing I can do,' and they are willing to take the risk."
On Staten Island, the Rev. Terry Troia, executive director of the non-profit Project Hospitality, says that before the snowstorm volunteers distributed space heaters and blankets to 40 families without heat in South Beach and Oakwood Beach. She says uncertainty about the future is stalling the recovery work.
"Everybody is living in a gray area," Troia said. "There is a reticence of people to repair the houses and invest all your money if it comes out that these houses need to come down or need a much more substantial repair plan."
Relief groups and officials say that families opt to stay in storm-damaged housing for a variety of reasons, including anxiety over finding comparable affordable housing, the desire to keep kids in their regular school, proximity to a job and even easy access to a family doctor.
Seth Diamond, the New York City commissioner for Homeless Services, says that now the holiday season is over, the city has more flexibility over where it can put Sandy victims.
"We do have some ability to move families closer to where they were," he told WNYC in a telephone interview Sunday. "So a family from the Rockaways, for example, may have to have been placed in Manhattan initially because that was the only hotel room, but now we can get them closer to the airport in Queens."
Diamond says both the city and the Federal Emergency Management Agency have extended the hotel accommodations program for another two weeks. Officials say any household living without power or heat, or with a potential mold condition related to Sandy damage, should make use of the city program by dialing 311. Diamond says roughly 800 families are being put up by the city in hotels, and roughly the same number are being housed by FEMA.
So far, the Bloomberg administration says its Rapid Repairs program has restored heat, hot water and power to 17,000 families, with another 700 to go.
Twice as many homes and businesses in and near the city would be in flood zones under new maps that may force more property-owners to buy flood insurance, complicate post-Sandy rebuilding for some and confront others with the choice of building higher or paying considerably more for insurance.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency released the revised maps Monday. They're preliminary but will likely become a basis for changes to building laws and insurance requirements in coming years.
"What we're trying to do is provide the means, immediately, for people who want to move forward now to be able to do so," city Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway said. And for everyone else, he said, the information provides "time to think and plan what kind of changes they would want to make."
The maps represent one of the first concrete signals of how officials will carry out vows to rebuild smarter after Sandy and what that will mean for property owners.
Under the new maps, Jim Donovan's home in Brooklyn's Gerritsen Beach neighborhood needs to be 11 feet above sea level to avoid flooding in the so-called "100-year" storm - one so strong it's given a 1 percent chance of happening in any given year. Donovan, whose basement took on more than seven feet of water during Sandy, says he thinks his ground floor clears the 11-foot mark, but he's concerned for neighbors whose homes sit lower.
"Where are these people going to get the money from to raise their homes? And if they don't raise their homes, then how are they going to get insurance? And if they can't get insurance, what happens to their mortgage?" said Donovan, a construction manager. "It's complicated, to say the least."
Overall, the 100-year flood zone now covers 35,000 more homes and businesses, sweeping up more of the coastline and reaching farther inland. In Brooklyn, for example, the Seagate, Brighton Beach and Manhattan Beach neighborhoods are now included alongside already designated areas like Coney Island.
While the expansion is striking, after Sandy, "it's good to have a map like this, to be guided accordingly," said Borough President Marty Markowitz.
And the maps - available on FEMA's website - so far address only Brooklyn, Staten Island, Queens and suburban Westchester County. Maps for the rest of the city are expected next month. Long Island's maps were updated in 2009.
The current flood maps for the city date to the 1980s. A revision was already planned before Sandy, but the Oct. 29 storm "created an urgency for us to do it," said Michael Byrne, who's overseeing FEMA's Sandy response in New York state.
The storm devastated sections of Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens, swamped lower Manhattan and flooded some areas that had been expected to stay dry.
A roughly two-year review is expected before new maps become official. The impacts vary by property, depending on topography and the present height of a building's ground floor.
Some "might already be safe ... but there are going to be plenty of cases where people have to bring their homes up higher," said Jon Janowicz, a FEMA official working on the mapping project.
The costs aren't immediately clear and likely will vary depending on the type of building and other factors. Officials said they were working to determine what government help might be available. For many property owners, the difference between the old and new flood lines is three to six feet. That means new construction eventually will probably have to be set three to six feet higher than what is currently required, since the city is expected to revise building laws to reflect the new zones. That's not likely to happen for a couple of years, but city officials are working on a plan to allow and encourage Sandy-damaged property to be rebuilt at the new level, Holloway said.
Some new projects were already being revised in anticipation of the new maps. Developers of a massive Ferris wheel, outlet mall and hotel on Staten Island, for instance, began planning after Sandy to move the project up a few feet. But higher elevation requirements could be another hurdle for people struggling with whether to fix their properties, Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro said. Some of his constituents' mortgages were under water before their homes were; some have older homes that might not withstand being lifted, he said.
"It's not as simple as you might think: `OK, we'll get the house, we'll pick it up, we'll put four studs underneath, and you're in compliance,"' he said.
The new maps may have expensive effects even for properties that weren't inundated by Sandy. An expanded flood zone means more owners may have to buy flood insurance; it's generally required for properties with federally backed mortgages. And those who already have flood insurance could pay substantially more for it if their properties sit below the new flood levels.
Under changes to the federal flood insurance program last year, owners of a $250,000 home with a ground floor three feet below the flood level would pay $9,500 a year, compared with $1,410 for a house at the flood line, according to FEMA, which administers the flood program.
The increases are to be phased in over five years for existing buildings, after new maps are formally adopted.
As temperatures dip many residents of the Rockaways, an area hard hit by Sandy, are among the 8,200 still without power in the aftermath of the powerful storm that tore through the seaside community.
At a bodega on 90th Street in Rockaway Louis DeCarolis, 57, grabbed a coffee to warm his chapped hands on Wednesday during what was shaping up to be the coldest week of the season. His family lives in this dust-swept stretch of Queens and his son and grandkids are living without heat.
DeCarolis said his son Randy is practically living in his kitchen so he can be near the warmth provided by the oven.
“He’s piled everyone into the kitchen," DeCarolis said. "We put a sheet up over the kitchen door and we use the oven. That’s where the three dogs, my ex-wife, my son, my daughter in law and both my grandkids sleep."
“It's pretty rough since Sandy hit us,” he added.
Down the block is a dry cleaners, one of the few in this area. The owner, Xiao Mei Zhang, 37, and her 20-month-old son, Raymond, were bundled in quilted jackets on a recent morning. The thermometer above the door inside was stuck at 20 degrees. She could see her breath.
“It’s so cold,” she said. “Please, help us."
Zhang reopened the store after Christmas. Her husband buys $40 worth of gas from Flushing every morning to run a generator. And every week the landlord says power and heat will be back soon, Zhang said.
There's a CVS in a trailer nearby and a sign shop next door, and her dry cleaners remains open in what residents otherwise consider a ghost town. Many shops are shuttered.
“I don't want to stay, I want to close it, but customers they need clothes,” Zhang said. “Still I need to pay bills. It drives me crazy.”
Follow the white contractor vans down the street, which are fixing one house at a time, and you end up at Alex Ocasio's on 110th Street, another home without heat. Repairs aren't coming fast enough, he said. An agitated neighbor scurries out of Ocasio’s apartment.
“He's coming to see if I have any heat. Nobody has any heat,” Ocasio said.
Ocasio had been boiling pots of water since Sandy, but finally got electricity recently and can run several small heaters now.
The Long Island Power Authority said it can’t restore power, which for some means heat, until landlords make repairs and get proper electrical certificates. New boilers are also up to the landlord.
In late October, 2012, a storm barreled toward the East Coast. Superstorm Sandy caused unprecedented destruction in New York and New Jersey, flooding the subways, closing the bridges, decimating areas of Staten Island, the Rockaways and the Jersey Shore and causing an estimated $50 billion of damage. Here is an archive of video dispatches from hard-hit areas throughout the region.
Jamaica Bay, Brooklyn | January 2013
Ortley Beach, NJ | January 2013
Rockaway Beach, Queens | January 2013
Seaside Heights, NJ | January 2013
Rockaway Beach, Queens | December 2012
Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn | November 2012
Rockaway Beach, Queens | November 2012
Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn | November 2012
Bensonhurst, Brooklyn | November 2012
Prospect Park, Brooklyn | November 2012
Borough Park, Brooklyn | November 2012
Despite all the fund raising and promises of recovery, when it comes to getting small businesses in Queens up and running after Sandy, the federal government has approved 37 loans for the entire borough, while the city has given out only 28. In the Rockaways, where much of the area was without heat and power for weeks after the storm, it’s given 9 loans.