Life After Sandy: Recent Episodes
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Two years after Sandy, rebuilding remains slow and uneven across the region. Government aid is caught up in tight regulations. The folks who have made the most progress may be the ones who took the most dramatic step: selling their homes to New York state to be demolished so that the land underneath them can be returned forever to Mother Nature. There are many other ambitious plans on the drawing board, though, and some individuals and businesses are taking short-term steps to protect their property. WNYC is continuing to follow both the rebuilding process and the debate over just how to rebuild, here on this page.
Two years ago, Angela Tenteromano Nickel thought she got a good deal when she bought a home at auction on Wiman Avenue in the Great Kills neighborhood on Staten Island for $160,000. She had two goals—make a little money and improve the community by rebuilding a more storm resilient home there.
"It's going to take a lot of work," Nickel said in 2016. "I hope I'm ready for it, I hope God gives me the strength."
Now, the home is elevated above the expected flood level, but the interior work is still not done.
"It's been torturous," Nickel said, when reached by phone recently. "That's how I can explain it, if I could use one word, that's what it was."
Her contractor has told her, "just one more month"—every month since April. She expects she'll have spent $600,000 by the time the house is finished with the renovations. The city's onerous permitting process has taken its toll on her and just this month she put the property on the market, for $730,000.
Angela Tenteromano Nickel's home on Wiman Ave. in Staten Island is still under construction two years after she bought it. Stephen Nessen/WNYC
Here is the home when Nickel bought it at auction in 2016.
(Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
The auction was part of the state's Buyout and Acquisition program. Altogether, the state bought 108 properties on Staten Island, 229 in Nassau County, 219 Suffolk County.
Congress appropriated $209,757,609 for the program, which was allocated by HUD through a Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery grant. In the end the state recovered $83,647,502 from selling the properties at auction. Those funds were supposed to be invested back into other resilience-building activities by the Governor's Office of Storm Recovery.
On Wiman Avenue, where Nickel's property is located, the state bought nine homes for a total of $3.5 million, and then sold at auction for $1.9 million. (The state made favorable offers in order to entice the former homeowners to sell and move to higher ground.) Currently, six of the properties have permits for construction. The others have until 2019 to begin construction or the state will take the property back.
Suzanne O'Conner's home on the left is also still under construction, six years after Sandy. She chose to demolish the old home and put a pre-fabricated elevated home on the lot. Stephen Nessen/WNYC
Many other homes on the block remain under construction. Suzanne O'Conner bought a home a year before Sandy. Rather than selling her Sandy-damaged home, she decided to knock it down and build anew, on pillars, above the flood level.
"Hindsight [is] 20/20. I wish I would've sold and left," she said recently by phone. She's been renting for the past six years.
But O'Conner said there may be an upside to not leaving. As her neighborhood is being rebuilt, it's getting more valuable.
"All the builders have purchased properties on that block and knocked them down and built mega-mansions," she said. "I'm sure my house will be worth a lot more than it was before."
But not everyone sees an upside. Cosima Defranco, 77, has lived on this block for over 50 years. Her single-story brick bungalow was severely damaged by Sandy. She even signed up for the acquisition program, but when the state offered her $345,000, she backed out.
"They say you sell your house, that's the money we give to you, you buy another one. I keep saying you find it for me," she said.
She did get some money from Federal Emergency Management Agency to fix the flood damage, but said it's not enough to raise the home. So, for now, when heavy rain is expected, she goes to stay with one of her children, knowing full well that if another storm like Sandy hit, her home would be ruined.
For the fifth anniversary of Sandy, WNYC published a story exploring why so many people remained in harm’s way during the storm even after an emergency evacuation was ordered. The reasons are varied, but the design of warning systems and the lack of trust many residents have in the media and public officials were key issues.
Our story focused on the Midland Beach neighborhood of Staten Island — an area where 11 of the 44 deaths caused by the storm took place.
In this community, people trust their neighbors, their family and friends. Still, there weren’t any local networks when Sandy hit to effectively spread the word about evacuation and ensure that everyone had a way to reach safety.
Karen Jackson, a coordinator for the Staten Island Long Term Recovery Organization recognized the need to build one and began organizing residents. WNYC, in partnership with IDEO, Parsons School of Design, Columbia University and WNET, worked together with Jackson to organize a workshop to propel this effort forward.
A Pre-Workshop Public Art Project
The workshop was held at St. Christopher Community Center in Midland Beach. Before the event, WNYC installed a public art project with local volunteers to raise awareness about the location of new evacuation zones and to share information about emergency resources.
Routes for chalk spraying stencils along evacuation zone boundaries. (Clarissa Sosin)
The idea itself is simple: take the city’s evacuation zone map and install a section of it on the sidewalks of Midland Beach.
A stencil marking an evacuation zone. (Clarissa Sosin)
The installation is comprised of a series of chalk drawings running along the borders of each evacuation zone in the neighborhood leading up to the location of the event. Each section of drawings was rendered in the color that corresponds to the city’s map.
A stencil giving information on city resources. (Clarisa Diaz, WNYC)
The drawings contain prompts for residents to identify how they can help their neighbors in an emergency as well as publicly-available resources.
Drone footage capturing volunteers stencil chalking along an evacuation zone boundary. (Mehdi Salehi)
This project embodies our commitment to bring visual journalism off the screen and into the streets.
The Superpower Workshop
The workshop was lead by Jason Baker and Lauren Shapiro from IDEO and Elliott Montgomery, a professor from Parsons, and his students. Andrew Kruczkiewicz, a climate researcher from Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society was also on hand to help.
About 30 residents and community leaders attended the workshop at St. Christopher Community Center. (Andrew Kruczkiewicz)
Participants share ideas for disaster preparedness. (Clarissa Sosin)
We divided the participants into groups and asked them to identify their superhero powers, strengths and skills they could use in an emergency, and develop ways to collaborate.
Workshop attendees sharing their superpowers:
(Clarisa Diaz, WNYC)
(Clarisa Diaz, WNYC)
(Clarisa Diaz, WNYC)
(Clarisa Diaz, WNYC)
One resident declared that she was a cat lady, a “fixer-upper" and a registered nurse. Her superpowers included taking in pets, making repairs and giving first aid. Another person said they’re a good cook. And someone else said they’re a good organizer. Superpowers could be tangible or intangible. As the workshop progressed, residents realized how they could form a network to support each another in an emergency.
Combining Superpowers
One group designed an information packet about the neighborhood including resources like the evacuation map, the location of food pantries and shelters and a phone tree to use in a weather emergency.
A proposal for a pet care service. (Clarisa Diaz, WNYC)
A proposal for an information network deployed during disasters. (Clarisa Diaz, WNYC)
Other ideas included identifying host residents in safer nearby neighborhoods, sharing contact information for neighbors willing to care for pets, and improving outreach to the most vulnerable residents in the community.
Jill Cornell from the NYC Office of Emergency Management presents her workshop group's proposal. (Clarissa Sosin)
By the end of the workshop, people forged new relationships and committed to designing the best solution for relying on each on other during the next major weather emergency.
This report is produced in collaboration with Peril and Promise, a public media initiative on the human impact of climate change from WNET.
As the Federal Emergency Management Agency scrambled to right the wrongs of flood insurance companies under its watch, it was paying some two hundred workers $750 a day to do nothing.
“We’d be sitting around for days on end with nothing to do because the system would be down.” said Jeff Coolidge, an insurance adjuster who worked for FEMA on the effort. “We didn’t even have access to call these people,” he added, referring to the homeowners they were meant to help.
Coolidge was one of several current and former workers interviewed during a three month-long investigation by WSHU and WNYC public radio. The employees described an office staffed with adjusters that included former nightclub bouncers and disbarred lawyers. They say the real intent of FEMA’s workers was to make as much money as possible.
“You’d hear the adjusters out there smoking their cigarettes and whatnot and they’d say we want to milk this cow for as long as we possibly can.”
But the scene at the contractors’ offices was just one symptom of a larger problem. After nearly two and a half years the review is still not complete. It’s been bogged-down by lost files, unhappy homeowners, frequent management changes, even a fist fight instigated by a supervisor. More significantly, the contractors to which FEMA outsourced the work took home almost as much money as did the homeowners whom they were supposedly helping.
Revolving Door After widespread criticism of sloppy Sandy claims where thousands complained of underpayment, FEMA offered in early 2015 to reopen any homeowner’s case who felt they deserved a higher payment. The contactor FEMA hired to oversee this review was Washington, D.C.-based OST, Optimal Solutions and Technologies.
OST had a history with FEMA. The inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security scrutinized the company in 2010, saying a FEMA contracting officer who once worked for OST still had allegiances that benefited the company. Currently, another former OST employee, David Maurstad, works for FEMA and oversees part of OST’s contract there. Maurstad has gone back and forth between FEMA and OST since 2011. In his last year at OST, before he returned to FEMA, he made over $350,000, according to disclosure documents.
OST has so far been paid $149 million for reviewing Sandy claims, according to FEMA data.
OST and Maurstad did not return numerous messages. FEMA said Maurstad complies with all federal revolving door regulations. The agency added there is frequent overlap between government and the private sector because a “limited pool of qualified individuals with relevant experience.”
High-Priced Consultants As cost overruns mounted, FEMA brought in McKinsey & Company, the elite consulting firm.
Rutgers professor Jay Feinman wrote a book about McKinsey. He says the consulting firm is an expert at boosting profits at insurance companies
“We saw beginning in the 1990s and extending forward a number of insurance companies hired McKinsey to come in a figure out how to pay less on claims,” Feinman said.
It’s not clear whether McKinsey was hired to reduce payments to policyholders. The company declined to comment for this story.
According to FEMA, the consulting firm was brought in to “develop business processes.”
Either way, McKinsey and OST earned a lot of money: $190 million. That’s nearly as much as the $240 million the federal government gave property owners to make up for lowball payouts.
That ratio of the value of the claims versus the cost of processing them troubles Feinman. He says typically insurance companies spend 10-to 15 percent on claims processing.
“So the idea that FEMA needed to spend almost as much on processing as the claims suggests there were problems, and it’s very hard to understand,” he said.
And these amounts are just the expenses that FEMA was able to confirm. The agency says there were additional administrative costs above and beyond what was paid to OST and McKinsey, but was unable to detail those.
Yet FEMA officials say they are satisfied with the cost of the operation.
“The costs of it, while expensive, are still only a portion of what was paid out,” says Roy Wright, FEMA’s head of insurance.
“My focus has been throughout this to ensure everything that I could do to pay every dollar they were entitled to under their policy would be fulfilled.”
Lawmakers were more critical.
“It’s outrageous and when you think about what these entities were charged with doing,” said Congressman Tom MacArthur, a Republican who represents parts of southern New Jersey hard hit by Sandy.
He says FEMA, OST, and McKinsey were supposed to help cheated homeowners, not spend millions of dollars to cheat them again.
“That’s just another marker to me that something went horribly wrong in this process,” he added, “that they were more focused on covering their back and making sure that they paid the least as possible.“
A Public Relations Stunt? Largely, the problems and costs involved with reviewing Sandy claims are unknown to storm victims. Those with lawyers paid to have their process done for them. The vast majority who didn’t hire a lawyer had no direct avenue of communication with FEMA.
After being told of the cost of the review, Long Beach resident Fran Adelson was disgusted. She submitted her claim to be reviewed by FEMA . At first, she was told she would get nothing more. Only after hiring a lawyer did FEMA paid her $31,000.
“Was this just for PR?,” she asked. “Was it just to say that you were going to something to help people? Like, what was the purpose of it?”
Everything looked fine from the outside when Fran Adelson returned to her house the morning after Sandy hit in October 2012. Then she opened the front door.
“Everything was in a different place,” she said. “Why is that piece of furniture over here? Why was that—you couldn’t wrap your mind around it.”
Sandy pushed four and a half feet of water through her house in Long Beach, New York. It washed in and out, destroying everything.
Every year for 27 years, Adelson paid premiums for a $250,000 flood policy. But all she got after Sandy was $56,000 to rebuild her entire house.
“I started to cry, because I was like we lost everything,” she recalled recently.
Adelson was one of thousands of Sandy victims who say they were ripped off by insurance companies. A total of 1,633 people sued in federal court in the first two years after the storm; their proceedings revealed widespread fraud and overt attempts to underpay homeowners. Congress grilled the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which oversees the nations flood program. Finally, in the spring of 2015, FEMA officials made the decision to reopen any Sandy claim if the policy holder wasn’t happy with the award they received. FEMA said the process would be easy and wouldn’t require a lawyer.
But that’s not what happened.
Two and a half years later, Adelson calls FEMA’s Sandy Claims Review a public relations stunt. “You feel like you were teased and it felt like it was a sham. That’s what it felt like, it was a sham.”
Nearly 20,000 Sandy victims asked to have their claim reviewed by FEMA. During a three month-long investigation, public radio stations WSHU and WNYC uncovered a slow, mismanaged process that gamed homeowners into accepting lower payments while private companies profited.
Zero to $31,000 Adelson’s story was typical.
She took FEMA at its word and did not hire a lawyer at first. Her review was bounced among three different caseworkers, who kept losing her paperwork. They told her, yes, she deserved more money. But after FEMA processed her claim, it mailed a letter stating it wasn’t going to pay anything additional.
Only after hiring a lawyer were Fran and Steven Adelson able to get more money to pay for repairs to their Sandy-damaged house in Long Beach, Long Island. (Charles Lane/WSHU)
“I just remember being really pissed off,” she said in an interview this fall.
Fed up, Adelson decided to hire a lawyer, knowing full well that he’d take a cut, but she figured at this point she had nothing else to lose. The lawyer pushed her case to an arbitration hearing, at which point the judge awarded her another $31,000.
Same paperwork, same house.
Of course, now she had to pay the attorney about a quarter of that.
“Why should a homeowner have to go through an attorney if FEMA’s opening it up?” Adelson asked in disbelief. “I could have used that extra 7-8-thousand dollars. I’m out that money.”
No one disputes that the Sandy claims process was sloppy the first time around, as homeowners battled with insurance companies to get enough money to repair their homes. FEMA was supposed to quickly right those wrongs, without forcing policyholders to hire lawyers. But people who trusted FEMA and didn’t go to arbitration hearings – which for the most part, meant they did not hire lawyers – received 30 percent less than those who did, according to FEMA data.
That works out to almost $4,500 less per homeowner.
To some advocates, what was more troubling than low offers were “zero offers.” According to federal statistics, 2700 people asked for a review, but FEMA gave them nothing extra on top of what they may have received directly from their insurance companies.
“I think those zero offers were from adjusters who had no clue what they were doing,” said Melissa Luckman, who represented about 115 homeowners with Touro Law Center’s Disaster Law Clinic in Central Islip, NY. “They just wanted to offer zero dollars to close out files.”
“BS Offers” FEMA’s Sandy review process had two stages. In the first stage caseworkers took-in documents and information from policyholders and then offered a settlement. The second stage, arbitration, would only occur if the homeowner was unhappy with FEMA’s first offer. Arbitration typically required a lawyer who would represent the homeowner in a telephone hearing with a neutral arbitrator, who would go line by line through the claim.
Lawyers and other representatives for Sandy victims say FEMA frequently offered lower settlement amounts unless a homeowner pushed to arbitration.
“When FEMA realized that homeowners meant business then they would take a closer look,” Luckman said, “as opposed to just a fly-by-night, BS initial offer.”
Despite its pledge to do things right, FEMA often relied on the same fraudulent damage reports that private companies used to cheat homeowners during the first round of insurance wrangling. FEMA says those reports were the only ones available; Luckman says the unwillingness to send out another adjuster to take a fresh assessment meant the homeowner had to hire his or her own engineer to get an honest damage report.
“It’s absolutely unfair,” Luckman said. “Our homeowners should not have been forced to spend $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 dollars.”
‘The McKinsey Tool’ Adjusters working for FEMA point to another reason why payments to victims were low. It was a spreadsheet called “the McKinsey Tool.” (It was designed, in part, by McKinsey & Company, the elite consulting firm). Instead of doing a detailed review of the original claim, FEMA workers only had to fill-out this simple form, which would then spit out a total damage amount.
“It’s grossly and intentionally leaving stuff out that is money for homeowners,” said Jeff Major, a public adjuster who represents policyholders who want to challenge an insurance company’s assessment.
Major was troubled at the relative simplicity of the spreadsheet. For example, there was nothing in the spreadsheet that asked what kind of wood floors the homeowner may have had.
“If it’s just a wood floor that’s just slats of pine, that’s different from a parquet mahogany floor,” he explained. “There could be a $20,000 swing in a house on that number.”
Gamesmanship and “Last Resort” If homeowners had the time, energy and money to push past the obstacles of fraudulent damage reports and the McKinsey Tool, they could eventually go to an arbitration hearing before a neutral judge. But FEMA had a couple of tactics that would keep them from getting there.
One method of gamesmanship was to withhold “undisputed losses.” Usually in the insurance world, if a case is disputed, the company pays the undisputed amount up front, and then pays however much more it might owe after the case is finally decided. But FEMA withheld even the undisputed amount. This practice angered federal lawmakers because it was a way to hold victims hostage to FEMA’s opinion.
Another FEMA tactic was to make higher offers at the last minute
“You would say, ‘No, no. I just want to go to a neutral,’” Major, the public adjuster explained, referring to the neutral arbitration judges. “And the day before or two days before the neutral, you got a real offer.”
These games angered advocates for homeowners. They say FEMA should have been fair to begin with, and not forced people to hire a lawyer and go all the way to arbitration, sometimes called JAMs, judicial arbitration meditation services.
“JAMs were never supposed to be used,” said Luckman, using the name of the firm that supplied arbitration judges, Judicial Arbitration Mediation Services. “JAMs were there especially as a last resort if FEMA didn’t get it right during the entire settlement process.”
Despite all these complaints, FEMA stands by the results. Deputy Associate Administrator of the flood insurance program, Roy Wright, said the scope of reopening Sandy claims was unprecedented.
“I do look at our performance over the last two and half years and I believe that we have delivered for policy holders,” he said in an interview.
But that performance was not always delivered willingly. Back in 2015, FEMA resisted the idea of a third party arbitration judges. But, after the Sandy claims process got underway, about 2,500 policyholders hired lawyers and pursued arbitration because they wanted more money than FEMA had been willing to pay. Now, Wright acknowledges that arbitration was necessary to, in his words, “fill in the gaps”
He added, “I think that was a good and right thing for us to do to ensure that everyone got a fair shake.”
Despite the rocky road, the federal lawmakers who prompted FEMA to offer policy holders a second chance to get satisfaction say the review did help many people finally get paid fairly. FEMA ended up giving victims an extra $240 million above what insurance companies had paid out the first time around, according to the agency’s data.
But policyholders were not the only ones who benefited from the claims review.
Private contractors did also. More on that in part two of this story.
Bulldozed ground is distinctive: unnaturally flat and largely fallow. And it is now the must distinctive feature of a block in Staten Island that once bulged with 20 bungalows and the life of the inhabitants inside them.
Almost all of the people of Buel Avenue are gone now. In a place where the air once rang with post-Sandy defiance — "We're beach people," one resident said right after the storm. "We rebuild." — the wind blows across the leveled lots as a neighborhood gang of wild turkeys perambulates and pecks for seed.
The turkeys were there before the storm. But as residents have one by one conceded that their low-lying homes might get flooded again and again, and sold their homes to the state, the birds have gained more space to roam as each structure has come down.
Five years ago Sunday, Sandy delivered a devastating blow to a six-mile stretch of Staten Island shore front below the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, three neighborhoods in particular: Oakwood Beach, Graham Beach, and Ocean Breeze, home of Buel Avenue. The New York State Governor's Office of Storm Recovery has spent nearly $200 million of federal funds to buyout 517 homes in those neighborhoods. Lisa Bova-Hiatt, the program's executive director, explained that the land will be left untouched. "Buyout properties must be kept as open space in perpetuity," she said.
On the single block of Buel Avenue that slopes downward between beach and swamp, 19 out of 20 homeowners have taken the buyout and cleared out. (The single home remaining is uninhabited.) Across all three of those neighborhoods, almost eighty percent of eligible residents have sold their homes at pre-storm prices and allowed their lots to return to nature.
But there are holdouts.
Vincent Errichiello has not only chosen to remain in Ocean Breeze, he's torn down his old home to rebuild bigger with money from the city's Build It Back program. "I'm very happy with the location," he said. "I grew up here in a house my father owned." His lot is a mere two blocks from Buel Avenue but on higher ground, which means relatively lower risk from future storms. (The state ranks "coastal risk" as moderate, high, and extreme. He's in the middle.) Still, his new home will be anchored in footings sunk deep into the earth, and his ground floor will be fourteen feet above ground.
Errichiello said those fortifications should be enough to keep his family safe, even from a storm the size of Sandy — though he doesn't think he will live to see another one like it. "When was the last time anything happened before like that — 60, 70 years ago?" he asked. "We'll be fine."
When the eye of Sandy made landfall just north of Atlantic City, Fran Baronowitz’s neighborhood – which was a few miles away in Ventnor – suddenly turned into a lake. Water bubbled up through the air ducts of her home, and the floors buckled so much that she trouble opening the front door when she returned.
Baronowitz spent state grant money to fix and elevate her home six feet off the ground to protect it from future storms. After completing her repairs, she was finally ready to move on with her life. But then, in August of last year, she received a letter from the state saying an audit had found she’d gotten too much money and had unknowingly used some of it to make small upgrades that weren’t allowed. Now, the state was asking her to return more than $35,000. She was stunned.
“It’s just unbelievable! I had no idea that this was going to happen,” she said. “I’ve got two little pensions and social security, but it’s not a lot of money. I can’t give anybody $35,000!”
Lots of people are in her situation. Altogether, the state and federal governments have asked around one thousand homeowners in New Jersey to return more than $5 million in aid.
This weekend marks five years since Sandy came ashore, severely damaging or destroying some 40,000 homes and leaving the state with a bill for tens of billions of dollars in repairs. And even now, it continues to exact a devastating financial toll on many residents of the coast. With Governor Chris Christie’s term coming to an end, storm survivors, advocates, and environmentalists say it’s important that their concerns remain in the spotlight, and they’re hoping the state’s next governor – the election is on November 7th -- makes a number of improvements to speed up recovery efforts already underway and make the state safer in the future.
Despite all the time that’s passed since the storm, some people still haven’t been able to return home.
Angel Eguaras’s house – also in Ventnor -- remains uninhabitable due to shoddy workmanship by his state-approved contractor, who has since stopped returning his calls. Eguaras is 80 years old. His wife has been sick, and they’ve had to move 5 times, from one rental to another.
“I feel that I just fell through the cracks,” he said. “Out of sight, out of mind. We are weathering the storm, and hopefully we will emerge victorious from the struggle.”
Of the 7,600 residents receiving rebuilding grants, more than 1,000 remain displaced, according to state officials. But most of them expect to finish construction by early next year.
Storm victim advocates like Amanda Devecka-Rinear with the New Jersey Organizing Project are calling for a number of changes including making it easier for people to file claims against fraudulent contractors and a better appeals process for homeowners asked to pay the government back.
“All those folks need a hand getting across the finish line,” she said. “Could we as a state under new leadership say, 'That's it. Everyone is home by the six year anniversary,' and really drive hard to get there? Certainly we deserve that, right? And the question is, will our new governor take that up and take that on?”
The Christie administration points to a number of signs of progress in its handling of the Sandy recovery. So far it’s spent more than $2.5 billion of federal money on grants to help homeowners rebuild, assist small businesses, and provide rental assistance to displaced people. Nearly $40 million of that was spent on backup generators for hospitals, police, and fire stations to keep the lights on during future storms.
Speaking in Lavallette a few months after the storm, the governor said he’d remain focused on resiliency.
“Part of what we're trying to do in the aftermath of this tragedy is not to just build back to where we were, but to build back better and to use the federal funds that we're getting from the Congress to make sure that we make our infrastructure better here in this state to sustain future attacks by storms if they come,” he said.
New Jersey has paid for buyouts of more than 600 homes in vulnerable areas and has worked with the Army Corp to build protective dunes and widen beaches along much of the state’s Atlantic coast. It also won $380 million in a federal design competition to build walls, dikes, and pumps to flood-proof places like Hoboken and towns in the Meadowlands region. And the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey says it’s invested nearly a billion dollars in projects like flood barriers to protect the PATH trains and the Holland Tunnel.
“Some of the public infrastructure has been hardened. There was some investment made in some of the big sewage treatment plants to make them less vulnerable to flooding. Some of the utilities took steps to reduce their exposure to wind and flooding, all of which are absolutely appropriate and good steps to take,” said Tim Dillingham, Executive Director of the American Littoral Society, an environmental group dedicated to protecting the shoreline. But while he’s willing to give credit where credit’s due, he still thinks it’s not enough. If another big storm were to hit tomorrow, he fears New Jersey wouldn’t be much better off than it was during Sandy.
“I don't see a lot of real difference,” he explained. “Some of the houses are elevated, but I don't see much that really changed from the old way of doing things.”
In Sea Bright, a coastal community in Monmouth County, was devastated when the storm surge pushed sand against a rock wall, essentially creating a ramp that sent waves crashing into the downtown business district. The town’s response has been to fortify that wall, but Dillingham says the focus should instead be on moving people out of harm’s way.
“The guiding attitude was ‘we can be stronger than the storm and we can go back and rebuild,’” he said. “And that's exactly what happened. That serves all the traditional New Jersey interests of real estate development and local property taxes. And it's not in the best long term interests of us as a state or even the communities or the homeowners who are going to be right back where they were, just as vulnerable with no greater protection from the next inevitable storm.”
After Sandy destroyed her apartment, Cherell Manuel became a problem solver and advocate for herself and thousands of other low-income New Yorkers who ended up in hotels.
Today, she lives in a 3-bedroom apartment in Far Rockaway, Queens, the same neighborhood where she was rescued five years ago Sunday. Her daughter Najh-ja, who was six at the time, remembers riding in the cab of a tractor in the middle of night. For her, the hotels were fun and exciting. But for Manuel, the pressure of not having a permanent home was intense. And eating greasy takeout food was bad for her health.
Now that she can cook again, she's 73 pounds slimmer. But she has new housing issues — this time with one of her neighbors. But she tries to maintain perspective.
"I lost everything I built for 46 years," she said in a recent interview. "But when you do look back at it and think about it, you know, some people died."
To the long list of complaints that has bedeviled the city's Build it Back program, add this one: When the program concludes next year, the city will have paid billions of dollars to rehab homes damaged by Sandy, but at least 3,500 of them will still be vulnerable to flooding from the Next Big One.
These homes were built before anyone thought the neighborhoods were at risk of flooding. A few years ago, they were added to updated flood maps. That means experts think they have at least a 1 percent chance of flooding in any given year.
The city paid to repair these homes, but not to raise them higher off the ground where they would be above the flood waters. The city offered to rebuild or elevate homes only where the repair work was estimated to cost more than 50 percent of the pre-storm market value. These homeowners also face large flood insurance bills because of the newly recognized risk.
Sandy hit Oct. 29, 2012. Nearly five years later, Amy Peterson, director of the Mayor's Office of Housing and Recovery Operations, said the city couldn't elevate everyone's home. Still, officials wanted to help homeowners that didn't have flood insurance.
"The city has tons of waterfront communities. These are affordable communities where people buy their first homes where people have lived for generations. these are places that we want to be able to continue to be these communities," Peterson said.
Raising utilities can also minimize future damage, she added.
Build it Back was the program the city developed after Sandy to administer federal funds to rebuild damaged homes.
Build It Back Homes Newly In Flood Zones That Weren't Elevated
Darker purple indicates more homes that weren't elevated by Build It Back.
More than 8,100 homes went through the single family home program, according to data the city provided this month. About 15 percent of those are still having work done or awaiting payment. The city expects to finish the program early next year.
About 1,330 homes will ultimately be elevated or entirely rebuilt, the data shows.
To hear WNYC reporter Robert Lewis talking to All Things Considered host Jami Floyd about the program, click on the audio player above.
In June 2014 — 18 months after Sandy battered the region — Mayor Bill de Blasio joined state and federal officials outside a public housing complex on the Lower East Side to announce an ambitious plan to protect the neighborhood against The Next Big One. Over the previous year, The federal government had brought top engineers and architects together to pitch resiliency projects and was going to agree to fund some of those plans. The big winner for the city was called "The Big U" — a 10-mile U-shaped barrier from 57th Street on the west side, down the battery and up the east side to 42nd Street. It was supposed to feature public art space and stunning new parkland.
The feds agreed to kick in $335 million for the first phase, a roughly two-mile stretch along the Lower East Side. That portion of the project — called the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project — is basically a berm with plantings and recreation space that will act as a barrier during a storm and a stunning new park the rest of the time. The Bjarke Ingels Group, a renowned Danish architecture firm, cam up with the idea. They originally wanted to build three new walkways over the FDR Drive and to enhance two existing bridges, all to improve community access to the new park.
Five years after Sandy, the plan — perhaps the most high-profile of numerous resiliency projects to protect the city and region — is still just lines on paper. The groundbreaking has been delayed by at least 18 months, and already some of the amenities promised to the community have been removed to cut costs.
“Right now, I don’t feel any more prepared than we were five years ago,” said Trever Holland, who lives in an affordable housing complex in the densely packed neighborhood. “We know what can happen now and the fact that we don’t even have temporary solutions is a bit troublesome,” Holland said.
When Sandy hit, Holland watched the floodwaters burst into his building's lobby. Then he saw sparks and heard an explosion before the power went out. Now, he sits on a joint Community Board 3 and Community Board 6 waterfront task force and has been following the progress of the Big U since it was announced. Like others in the area he spent more than a year seeing public presentations promising a groundbreaking in June 2017. Then, suddenly, that date changed to "TBD" – to be determined. The city now says it will break ground in 2019.
Lower East Side resident Trever Holland stands along the East River a block from his apartment building, which is just as unprotected today as it was when Sandy hit. (Robert Lewis/WNYC News)
The delay isn’t the only concern. The city recently scrapped plans to build the new bridges over the FDR Drive that would have connected public housing residents to the waterfront.
“We see them actually scaling back in the promises they made to community members,” said Ceci Pineda, resiliency training and policy coordinator at the Good Old Lower East Side, or GOLES, a community advocacy organization.
The city’s chief resilience officer, Daniel Zarrilli, said access to the park is still important to the city. But the city, which is kicking in more than $400 million for the Lower East Side project, has to live within a budget.
As for the delay, Zarrilli said the park-berm is unique — a massive project that combined infrastructure with open-space, all in a dense, urban environment along the water.
“We’ve been working really extensively with the community in order to get this to the right project we can implement,” Zarrilli said.
He said the city is moving as quickly as possible given the urgency of climate change.
Zarrilli said the city has made progress on a number of resiliency projects started after Sandy like the Rockaway boardwalk and stone barriers in Sea Gate.
Still, a number of ideas and projects are unfunded. There’s no clear pot of money to pay for other parts of the “Big U” system of protections that was intended to hug the bottom half of Manhattan.
“The ‘Big U’ might actually be just half a 'J,'” quipped City Councilman Mark Treyger, the chairman of the City Council’s recovery and resiliency committee.
Treyger says the city hasn’t made as much progress as it should in the five years since the storm to protect property and lives.
“When people say ‘Are we better prepared?’ — that’s a loaded question," he said. "We have studies now. We have many great studies and great pictures. But we don’t have the funds to complete these projects."
This report is produced in collaboration with Peril and Promise, a public media initiative on the human impact of climate change from WNET.
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.
Through three presidential debates and on vice-presidential one this fall, no moderator asked the candidates about climate change. But Democrats Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine made sure to sneak in some answers anyway.
"Conventional wisdom is that voters aren't going to vote on climate change or environmental issues," said Marianne Lavelle, politics reporter at InsideClimate News. "But what the Clinton team knows is that it is a very high priority for a certain segment of voters. You might, as shorthand, call them the Bernie Sanders voters."
Listen to WNYC's David Furst interview Lavelle on each candidate's approach to climate issues and how they would approach some key decisions they will confront in the first few months, should they be elected president.
Read Lavelle's write-up of the issues here.
Patricia Sullivan lives with her mother and two daughters in a one-bedroom bungalow just a couple of feet above sea level in Midland Beach, Staten Island. When Sandy hit, the 14-foot storm tide rolled over a barrier road and into their sunken neighborhood like a tidal wave. The family just barely managed to make it to safety.
Sullivan's home was quickly repaired thanks to Amish volunteers. But one thing they didn’t do was make it more resilient to future storms by elevating it on stilts. For that part of the recovery, she turned to the city’s homeowner recovery program, Build it Back. She signed up when it opened three years ago under then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg and traded paperwork back and forth.
This week, Sullivan received notice that she had been removed from the program. She was one of 900 Build it Back participants who fell off the rolls in the past 12 months, as the city sought to finish construction on all homes by the end of 2016 — a deadline the de Blasio Administration recently said it would not be able to meet.
Back in July, Sullivan was frustrated and confused when the city gave her two weeks to sign a grant agreement. She was unsatisfied with the design of the new elevated house that the city was proposing to build for her.
"They kept just calling me to tell me I had to sign, that they have a deadline," she said. "That’s what their priority was: to comply with their deadlines. And they told me: 'That’s it.' They aren’t doing another blueprint or doing anything else over."
The latest blueprint she had received from the city included a bathroom that could not accommodate her mother's wheelchair. Sullivan had also been asked to bring her mother to the signing. Her mom was unenthusiastic about being put 14 feet in the air and New York was in the middle of heatwave. So Sullivan didn’t do anything.
After WNYC inquired about Sullivan's case this week, Build it Back reinstated her.
“If it was an information gap or knowledge gap, we will reconsider,” said Build it Back spokesman Matt Viggiano. “We want to make sure that people act with full information.”
Over its brief three-year lifespan, Build it Back’s caseload has fallen from more than 20,000 cases to approximately 8,500 today. Many applicants dropped out early. Director Amy Peterson said about 5,000 of the original registrants never finished filling out applications. Others may have found other repair options or given up out of frustration.
Public notice from Build it Back indicating the link between Mayor de Blasio's goal to complete housing program and strict deadlines imposed on homeowners. (Illustration by Clarisa Diaz/WNYC)
The fact that 900 people were dropped from Built it Back in the past year alone startled counselors at nonprofits that work with Build it Back clients, because over the past year, the city has ramped up the number of deadlines homeowners must meet.
“They’re told they have to do X within 14 days,” said Margaret Becker, the director of disaster recovery and community development at Legal Services NYC, a nonprofit legal organization that counsels Build it Back clients. “These 14-day deadlines are being enforced, as if what the program needs is to start kicking these homeowners forward, right? And the consequence is that they are kicking these homeowners out.”
The Build it Back program was not able to provide a breakdown of why people left the program’s rolls over the last 12 months. It has asked the City University of New York to embark on a study to survey the reasons for the attrition since the program began in 2013.
Peterson, Build it Back’s director, said that the program needed to balance the need to move forward with participants’ extenuating circumstances.
“Setting deadlines is incredibly important to move people forward,” she said. “But we have homeowners who deal with issues, who have financial issue, serious illnesses, and we allow them to pause in their process.”
Becker said her clients sometimes succeed in their appeals, but not always. And she said that without a lawyer or other advocate working for them, Build it Back homeowners have little chance of cutting through the bureaucracy.
She said she recognized the need to accelerate the Build it Back program, whose staff is far more familiar with complaints that it moves too slowly rather than too quickly. But Becker suggested the city should try to complete work on the easy cases, while giving more time to low-income homeowners who have complicated situations, or are having trouble paying back the money they received from other government sources, a prerequisite of Build it Back work.
Another applicant, Amelia Primiani, was removed from the program last August for failing to meet a deadline to provide proof of her income. But her daughter, Emily Primiani, told WNYC she had never heard about the deadline. Instead, she said she later found out program staff had been calling her estranged older brother, who had stopped managing their mother’s case two years earlier.
“We received one letter,” she said. “And the letter was the one that told us that we were being removed from the program for lack of...any contact.”
Her mother appealed to get back into the program, but lost. After WNYC inquired about her case, Emily received a call from Project Uplift, a nonprofit affiliated with the city’s recovery efforts that helps eligible property owners elevate their homes above flood level. The program was non-committal, Emily said, but it was a step forward.
UPDATED 11:30 a.m., Oct. 28, 2016, with more complete presentation of Build it Back public notice.
Take a walk down Kissam Avenue on the southern shore of Staten Island and it almost feels like walking through a wildlife refuge. A marsh waving with phragmites stretches off to your right; to your left, a few overgrown lots where homes once stood.
After Sandy destroyed many homes on this street and others in Staten Island, the residents of Oakwood Beach approached New York state for a buyout. Now Oakwood Beach is one of three neighborhoods in Staten Island that have become part of a state buyout program. The buyouts are voluntary, with 300 of the 320 homes interested in the program.
The hope is that a "managed retreat" like this will serve as a buffer if extreme weather strikes again.
For most of the last century, modest, one-story summer bungalows lined this private strip of road that dead-ends at Vision Beach. Then Sandy made landfall here on Oct. 29, 2012, obliterating them.
Today, except for the occasional vacant lot, the street has been transformed into two rows of gleaming, brand-new, three-story homes.
The main floors are about 14 feet off the ground, perched on pillars. Below, instead of an enclosed ground floor, many have parking spaces or picnic tables. Jay Lynch, the town’s planner, calls the new developments “canyons” because of the heights of the buildings.
Similarly towering construction is occurring on almost every nearby road.
At first, Sandy seemed to be the calamity that was finally big enough to rouse the country to the arrival of climate change’s many risks. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, for example, spoke of, “a wake-up call and lesson to be learned here.”
In Toms River, Mayor Thomas Kelaher, a Republican, said he now accepts the evidence. “Sea level is rising,” he said, “I am absolutely convinced.”
But even as the inevitability of rising seas and extreme storms settled in, a chasm opened between the actions necessary and what would actually get done.
As people in towns like Toms River rushed to rebuild, they did not retreat from the coast. Instead, so much at the waterfront — houses, businesses and sand dunes —is coming back bigger, stronger and taller than ever before.
Toms River is being buffeted by powerful forces—emotional and psychological, economic and scientific, political and bureaucratic. They are propelling the area toward rebuilding in zones that may well be inundated with water by the end of the century. Those forces include:
- In drafting new flood zone maps, the authorities chose not to include Sandy in their models.
- Gov. Chris Christie has put a billion-dollar bet on an Army Corps of Engineers’ dune-building project that outside advisors call a costly stopgap.
- Economic imperatives to restore property and preserve the local tax base have combined with sturdier building codes to produce a mentality of fortification, not retreat.
Still, town planners say they are aware that changes will have to be made. The town recently completed a community vulnerability assessment for the first time, which looks at the long-term effects of climate change and includes suggestions for planning. It will introduce its findings at a town meeting in November — and planners say they know residents may not want to hear its conclusions.
Cheryl Palko stood by the shore on a placid day last month. Her grandparents spent $6,000 in the 1950s for a modest shack on Vision Beach that was miraculously spared by Sandy’s surge, and Palko has been coming here all her life. She believes in building back to sturdier codes and going about businesses as usual.
Climate change “is always in the back of your mind,” she said, “but do you base what you love on what may or may not happen?”
Federal Enablers
Sea level rise is not something that may or may not happen. It’s among the most durable predictions and most rigorously-measured signals of global warming.
But the federal government has inadvertently conspired with Toms River and other coastal towns to help residents put off the reckoning.
Long before Sandy, the New Jersey shore had felt climate change disproportionately for a variety of reasons, including land subsidence and changes of currents. Since last century, sea levels have risen more than one foot. But that is nothing compared to what will likely happen this century, as sea level is expected to rise between 1.7 and 3.1 feet under minimal warming scenarios — as much as 4.5 feet if high levels of carbon emissions continue.
Already Toms River, a township of 92,000 people just 75 miles south of Manhattan, has proved to be very vulnerable; it was crowded with homes built long before federal floodplain zoning took hold, and many bay front homes and condos sit on marshes that were filled and buttressed by bulkheads.
As of July, property owners in Toms River had received $583 million in flood insurance claims since 1978; that was more than double the amount paid to any other municipality in New Jersey and more than paid to all but 12 states. And while local residents think of Sandy as a freak occurrence, according to Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) records, 466 properties in Toms River have had repetitive flood insurance claims.
New York State has taken a different approach, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a “managed retreat” experiment. WNYC went to Staten Island to see first hand. “Toms River is in a class of its own, in terms of claims paid,” said John Miller, the legislative committee chair of the New Jersey Association for Floodplain Management.
Nevertheless, he explains, flood money can be barely enough to cover full recovery costs. So in a perverse reaction, state officials in New Jersey actually loosened some regulations to allow denser building at the water to let businesses make up for lost revenue. “If you had a marina, you might build back a marina and a restaurant because you think you need more income,” Miller said.
Lost in translation: Science to Regulation
Then there is the subtler question of the science behind the insurance maps.
Every 30 years FEMA tries to update flood maps which determine two things: cost of insurance and guidelines for building standards. Property owners get lower premiums if they meet or exceed FEMA’s standards.
What is not commonly understood is FEMA’s limitations. It is not allowed to use predictive science. It is supposed to use the present and past as guidelines, but it has not included Sandy’s impact in drafting the most recent maps that the communities are using to rebuild.
Andrew Martin, a regional risk analysis branch chief for FEMA, explained that the flood insurance rate maps are only a snapshot of today’s risks — they cannot, by regulation, include future risk assessments such as models of sea level rise from climate change. (In a bizarre bit of contrast, President Obama has ordered federal agencies to plan their own buildings with the climate models in mind.)
One such study, published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, demonstrated these rising risks in New York City.
“The frequency of Hurricane Sandy-like extreme flood events has increased significantly over the past two centuries and is very likely to increase more sharply over the 21st century, due to the compound effects of sea level risk and storm climatology change,” it said.
Flood maps in Toms River were drawn in 1983. In 2009, three years before Sandy, FEMA began the grueling process of updating them. To do that, it goes block by block, taking into account past storms, the local topography and what has been built along the coast.
After the storm, communities desperately wanted updated maps to guide them on rebuilding. To accomplish that quickly, FEMA decided not to include Sandy in the modeling. In this sense, it learned nothing from the storm.
For example, Sandy’s storm surge broke through the barrier island in the town of Manatoloking, next to Toms River, allowing the bay to rise 4 feet in an hour. But FEMA modeled no such scenario.
Even under best-case warming scenarios, sea levels could rise from 1.7 to 3.1 feet, but if warming proceeds unchecked, it could go much higher. (InsideClimate News / njfloodmapper.org)
FEMA's Martin said that it included enough storms similar to Sandy — but in the next breath, he said, “Sandy was unprecedented in recorded history. It was so significant that if we had included Sandy in our models it would likely have increased base flood elevations by 6 inches to a foot in some locations. When you increase base flood elevations, it would increase the flood zone in areas that are relatively flat.”
Asked if this might be misleading to local communities, Martin said, “In order to provide the best information to communities, we need to actually produce a product. If we are continually revising our analysis as new information comes available, we’d never finish a map.”
This confounds people like David Kutner of New Jersey Future, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable land use and growth policies. He said with a sigh that “nothing in the regulatory environment is yet responsive to the massive changes coming.”
Kutner argues that helping people simply survive the next Sandy is keeping them from addressing the risks realistically. He calls it “absolutely critical that they start looking down the road so they are not just putting people back in harm’s way.”
So his group sends planners into the worst-hit shore communities to help them envision a radically different future. “A lot of communities feel that the answer is to elevate homes,” he said. “How are you going to serve that home when roads and utilities are under water?”
Dunes: Another Expensive Stopgap Measure
The sense that the shore can be secured has been fed by Christie. Making the rounds on late night shows during the recovery, the governor talked tough about moving families out of flood zones. “There are some people who are upset about this,” he told David Letterman, “but my feeling is that you shouldn’t throw good money after bad.”
Yet while neighboring states began mapping out a long-term future that paid heed to climate science, by 2015 Christie was running for president and his stance on climate science had grown more doubtful.
In fact, almost none of the $100 million in federal aid that New Jersey has spent so far for relocation of flood-prone communities has gone to ocean shore communities — the vast majority has gone to river or bay front communities. Christie made the state’s tourism motto “Stronger than the Storm.”
Heavy equipment pushes sand to restore a barrier dune along the Atlantic Ocean in Harvey Cedars on Long Beach Island, N.J., Nov. 9, 2012. (Mel Evans/AP Photo)
In particular, Christie put stock in two defenses: elevated building height and dunes. He championed the Army Corps of Engineers’ approach of building up enormous dunes across all 126 miles of the Jersey shore. So far Congress has approved $1.2 billion for the dunes. Christie has argued that towns with Army Corps dunes survived Sandy without much damage.
Others call the dunes another expensive stopgap. “Think of sand castles at the beach,” said Miller, the floodplain manager. “No matter how monstrous you build them, eventually they are going to be washed away.”
The Next Time Around
Toms River is doing its own long-term planning, advised by non-profits like New Jersey Future and New Jersey Climate Adaptation Alliance.
The Alliance, working out of Rutgers University, has focused on making climate science accessible to local planners. Robert E. Kopp, an author of the October PNAS report, says that even without storm surges there will be daily tidal inundation on most waterfront properties within decades.
Those kind of conditions, said Lynch, the township planner, will mean those communities are no longer able to sustain themselves.
For now, the 10-year plan he will present to local citizens won’t be about moving people. It’s about educating them and discussing whether to give financial incentives to encourage those with shore homes to consider moving inland.
“For us to go tell people you gotta move, they’d kill you,” said Mayor Kelaher, “but as time goes on, people are going to have to move because they keep flooding.” It may take another storm, he guesses, for a real wake up call, “The public needs to be smacked again like they were by Sandy.”
This piece was reported as part of a collaboration between WNYC and InsideClimate News.
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.
At first, the applicants in the city's program to rebuild the thousands of homes damaged by Sandy complained about lost paperwork, confusing directions, and endless delays.
Now, another problem has emerged: the program is fast running out of money.
The director of Build it Back, Amy Peterson, told the City Council Committee on Recovery and Resiliency Thursday that the program needed $500 million above and beyond the roughly $2.2 billion that had been allocated to it from federal funds. She said that numerous unanticipated factors had increased the program's costs, such as building staircases to the back doors of people's homes once they were elevated above flood level, which previous estimates had not taken into account.
At the same time that costs have increased, the actual number of participants in the program has dropped, from more than 20,000 shortly after the storm, to about 9,000 today. The chairman of the committee, Councilman Mark Treyger, stuttered at times in disbelief at the news.
"We were told by the mayor — we were told by the administration — repeatedly that this amount — that these funds would be sufficient to meet the needs of all the Build it Back applicants," he said. "So it is very hard for us to comprehend how we're now saying we need $500 million of more city money, and we actually have helped less than half of that 22,000 figure."
The city is proposing to divert about $350 million in federal funding from coastal resilience projects to cover the cost overruns. The resilience initiatives, Peterson said, would still be undertaken, but instead will use city funds intended for long-term capital infrastructure projects.
A spokesman for Build it Back, Raul Contreras, said that the city capital plan passed in June had allocated enough money to cover both the the long-term infrastructure projects as well as the resilience initiatives, and that, "No project will be delayed or experience a funding gap as a result of this project."
in addition, Peterson said that the de Blasio administration would no longer seek reimbursement for $150 million in overtime and other city agency expenses incurred during and shortly after the storm.
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.
More than half of the active applicants to the city's Build it Back recovery program have been helped so far, according to the figures released Thursday, a week before Sandy's third anniversary.
Build it Back was designed to provide long-term repairs to homes damaged by Sandy, but by the end of the first 10 months no households had been helped in the program. Waterfront communities were frustrated and numerous applicants dropped out. Now just 9,300 of the original 20,000 registrants remain.
The turnaround suggests that several reforms undertaken shortly after Mayor Bill de Blasio took office are working. The city made it easier to process reimbursement checks (which is easier and faster than arranging for repairs) and also increased the number of contractors working on homes.
According to officials:
- About 61 percent of the active households have either received a check for repair reimbursement or have had city contractors begin work on their homes, or both;
- Construction has begun on 1,837 homes out of 6,209 cases deemed eligible for repairs or reconstruction;
- Some 5,272 reimbursements have been sent out, representing nearly all households expecting checks.
Every Wednesday evening, the parking lot fills with cars and dozens of people crowd into a dining room in Union Beach. Waiters and waitresses take their orders and bring out gourmet-quality food, made with local and organic ingredients.
But this restaurant is nonprofit and run entirely by volunteers. About half of the folks who show up to eat pay for their meals by working in the kitchen, rather than with cash.
Nearly two and a half years after Sandy many people have moved on, but evidence of the storm is still everywhere in Union Beach. Progress has been slow, with vacant lots and homes in various states of repair dotting the landscape.
But now there’s a new addition to the neighborhood: a gathering place where everyone’s welcome to come together and share their struggles over a hot meal. Spoon Full of Hope has been operating in town since the beginning of the year, and now it’s received financial backing from a wealthy donor, guaranteeing that it will be able to keep its doors open to all those in need.
The creator of the so-called community kitchen is Angelita Liaguno-Dorr -- known to most of her friends as “Gigi” -- whose Union Beach restaurant Jakeabob’s Bay, was totally destroyed in the storm. She was determined to rebuild, but she quickly hit snags, getting bogged down in paperwork and legal battles with her insurance company that continue to this day.
In the meantime, she began pitching in wherever she could to help others in Union Beach put their lives back together. Shortly after the storm, she volunteered with the Gateway Church of Christ to distribute 36,000 frozen meals to people around town still struggling to get back on their feet.
“We went out and we delivered with the firemen and the policemen and ambulance squad,” she said. “Carl’s the pastor from Gateway, and I came back and said to Carl, ‘There’s a need. Something’s going on!’”
Five and a half months later, when she managed to reopen her restaurant at a temporary location in a different part of town, she implemented the practice of “paying it forward,” in which her patrons could chip in extra money for others who couldn’t afford their meals. Then with the help of the church, she began serving dinner a few nights a week on a “pay what you can” basis.
But with so many of her old customers still not back in town, business was slow, and it became increasingly difficult keep the doors open. Eventually, she decided that she had no choice but to close. It was sad for her to shutter her restaurant for the second time since the storm, but what bothered her even more was that she would no longer have the opportunity to feed the needy in her midst.
Then just a few weeks later she got a call out of the blue from Dorothea Hurley, wife of New Jersey rock legend and philanthropist Jon Bon Jovi, who operates his own community restaurant in nearby Red Bank. After meeting with Gigi for several months, Bon Jovi’s foundation decided to sponsor her efforts. Thus, out of a spare room in a Union Beach fire station, Spoon Full of Hope was born.
Nearly a hundred people have been showing up for the weekly, three-course dinner since it started in January. The cost: a minimum donation of $10 for adults and $5 for children for those who can afford it. About half the patrons pitch in an hour of their time in exchange for a dining certificate good for them and four of their family members or friends.
Gigi is still struggling to get the funding to rebuild her restaurant. She’s hopeful she’ll at least be able to open a pop-up waterfront tiki bar in time for the summer. But in her 25 years running a business, she says the community kitchen is the most rewarding thing she’s ever done.
MaryJean Riccardi is one of the regular volunteers.
“A lot of people are still trying to find their way through because their houses were destroyed. It’s years later, and still they’re out of their homes,” she said. “We see the same people every week. They come and they eat, and they stay and they help and they volunteer. It’s wonderful.”
Union Hose Fire Company captain Al Lewandowski is among those who lost their homes. Once a month, he and his fellow firefighters help wait tables and wash dishes.
“It’s great to see the people that come in that need a meal,” Lewandowski said. “You get to build another friendship, and you’re meeting new people from town. It’s just a nice way to give back and show our gratitude toward everybody.”
Gigi stresses that this is a “community kitchen” not a “soup kitchen,” and the quality of the food backs up that assertion. One menu option on a recent night was listed as “seared chicken breast over smashed red bliss tomatoes topped with a Madeira demi-glace and fresh asparagus.”
She added that every effort is made to make everyone feel included.
“We serve with pride and dignity,” she said. “And we want everybody to hand up. It’s not a hand out. We want everybody to come in here and have this warm, restaurant-type feeling as best as we can. Whether or not they’re in need or they’re helping their community push it forward, we want everybody to feel the same. It’s a great feeling. Everybody’s equal. We’re all one. We’re all in this together.”
Disasters are causing more and more damage, and the federal government is spending more and more money to rebuild afterwards.
But before the construction crew can begin repairs, homeowners face months-long delays and poor customer service in the preliminary stages of the application process. Some homeowners even complain that the rebuilding process has become as traumatic as the storm itself.
The complaints are not confined to just one state or just one company. As part of our collaboration with NJ Spotlight and New Orleans Public Radio, we identified five ways to fix the disaster recovery system:
1.CUT THE RED TAPE. New Orleans attorney Jeffrey Thomas has a flow-chart detailing all the steps – public hearings, documentation, environmental checks, reports, etc. – required before spending money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development after Hurricane Katrina. It is 7 feet long. He and his colleagues tried to cut it down – but managed only to reduce it to 5 feet.
HUD, which manages the long-term rebuilding funds that benefit homeowners, maintains the regulations are needed to ensure compliance with federal laws and to reduce fraud. The agency has tried to reduce the bureaucracy, but with limited success. After Sandy, for example, New York City complained about having to check with Indian tribes that might have ancestral burial grounds in coastal areas before it proceeded to make basic repairs to homes that were already there. HUD relaxed the rule, but not until August 2013, seven months after Congress approved the $50 billion Sandy aid package.
2. MORE OVERSIGHT. If cities and states use outside contractors, they must watch over them more closely. That’s what the de Blasio administration decided after it took over New York City’s recovery operation earlier this year. Amy Peterson, the new director of housing recovery, said consultants are only going to do what the city tells them to do and won’t try to find big-picture fixes to bottlenecks.
3. CREATE A POST-DISASTER WORKFORCE. Local governments hire outside consulting companies because they don’t have enough staff to process paperwork on their own. But the private companies often end up hiring their front-line staff through temp agencies anyway, and spend little time training them.
“Now that we’re seeing, unfortunately, an increase in disasters, how do you bring in workers and train them for those opportunities, making sure there’s enough workers in the pipeline?” Said Robin Keegan, the director of community resiliency at one disaster recovery firm, GCR.
That’s the irony: part of the solution to the problems of the disaster industry might be to make the disaster industry a bigger and more permanent part of the economy.
4. STATES AND CITIES NEED A BETTER COOKBOOK. Brad Gair, New York City’s former Sandy czar, said the federal government gives cities and states too much freedom to design their own housing recovery programs. The process of going back and forth to get those programs approved by HUD takes a long time.
“We’ve got to figure out how to build these programs at the federal level, have them off the shelf, ready to be implemented, turned on right after the disaster and not try to build a program from scratch on each, single disaster,” Gair said. “It just doesn’t work.”
5. MANAGE THE PUBLIC’S EXPECTATIONS. Shortly after Sandy, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie visited a damaged boardwalk and said the recovery phase would “take months – months, if not years.” It sounded like he was talking straight. But he low-balled his estimate. Two years later, less than a third of the federal aid earmarked for New Jersey’s housing recovery has actually been spent.
More than nine years after Katrina, parts of New Orleans still bear the scars. On Wickfield Drive in the Gentilly neighborhood, one bungalow looks like it has been gutted and cleaned out, as if someone planned to start work on it, but didn’t get very far. Other houses nearby also look they are in limbo.
That’s the danger of an inefficient, slow recovery, in New Orleans, New Jersey, or wherever a future disaster strikes: people give up, leaving blighted, abandoned properties behind.
Stephen Drimalas, a 48-year-old city worker, barely escaped Sandy's floodwater with his life. "I had to speed out of here," he recalled. "Another minute or two and I wasn't getting out — that's how fast it came in."
That night, two years ago, a storm surge pushed across New York Bay, poured over the eastern shore of Staten Island and roared down Drimalas' block in Ocean Breeze. Two of his immediate neighbors, a man and woman in their eighties, drowned. Their burials were part of a long road of grieving and rebuilding for the neighborhood.
At first, Drimalas believed he'd stay. He spent a lot of cold nights sleeping in his car, which he kept parked on a sodden patch of grass in front of his working class bungalow. He did it in part because FEMA took a while to deliver an emergency grant for the cost of a motel room — and in part because he wanted to protect his home from looters.
Like many of his neighbors, he resolved to bring his coastal community back to the way it was.
That proved difficult. After Sandy, several houses on Buel Avenue were condemned and swiftly demolished. Other houses sagged as their owners struggled to find the resources to repair them. Drimalas threw himself into fixing up his home, which he bought in 2005: he stripped it to the studs and, with the help of $86,000 from National Flood Insurance, made it new again.
But now he'll abandon it.
The Governor's Office of Storm Recovery has offered to buy the house at a price that, he said, "I'd be an idiot not to take."
Barbara Brancaccio, a spokeswoman for the program, said the buyouts are designed to get people to leave dangerous areas that are likely to flood again. "We are going to demolish the homes," she said, describing a four block area in Ocean Breeze, along with hundreds of homes in the nearby neighborhoods of Oakwood Beach and Graham Beach. "Essentially, they go back to nature."
Drimalas will relocate to a condo he owns in Florida that is two miles inland and 30 feet above sea level. "I'm ready," he said on Monday as he stood on Buel Avenue, a block that once bustled but is now quiet. "I'm done."
The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority sustained $4.7 billion in damage after Sandy — two years ago to the day this Wednesday. And it will take much more than that to protect the nation's busiest transit system from another mega-storm.
Here are some highlights of what's been done so far:
- A seven-foot-tall steel wall has been installed along the A line tracks across Broad Channel, to prevent another washout that stranded Rockaway commuters for months after Sandy.
- The tunnels carrying the R line under the East River and the G line under Newtown Creek are theoretically flood-proof; electrical substations were sealed; openings, such as hatches and manhole coverings were plugged; cables were encased in watertight ducts.
- Since some of the water that infiltrated the R tunnel came through the South Ferry Station in Lower Manhattan, the MTA built a steel door to seal the station off from the tunnel in case of flooding.
But the MTA still has seven other East River tunnels to secure. It is currently working on the Steinway Tunnel, which carries the No. 7 line between Midtown and Queens, and has said it would embark on the Cranberry Tunnel (the A and C lines) next. In addition, some 540 openings in Lower Manhattan, such as subway entrances, will need to be covered in the days or hours leading up to a major storm to prevent another catastrophe.
The costs of pushing papers in the name of Sandy rebuilding have increased by more than 50 percent over the city's initial expectations.
Yet, the strangest thing about this story may be that the de Blasio administration considers that rate of inflation a victory.
Under then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg, last July the city inked a deal with a consortium of four outside contractors for $50.2 million to process the thousands of applications for the Build It Back program, which uses money from the $48 billion Sandy federal aid package to repair damaged privately and publicly-owned housing.
On Tuesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that he is breaking that contract into pieces that will total $77 million.
But it could have been much worse. Two of the companies had all but finalized contract amendments in the latter half of last year that would have pushed the costs even higher — to nearly three times the original contract price, according to Build It Back director Amy Peterson. She said some of those costs were legitimate because federal requirements were more onerous than expected. But Peterson said she was able to tamp down the total increase by realigning duties and eliminating some tasks.
“People didn't know what we were going to need when we bid out these contracts and so all of these things got added on over time,” she said. “And it was only now that we were able to say this is what we want, and this is how the city is going to manage this, and this is how we will move forward.”
As part of the latest renegotiation, Peterson said the city will terminate its agreement with the lead contractor, the Philadelphia-based Public Financial Management, which was supposed to manage the project. Instead, city employees have taken over the oversight role, she said, which has both saved money and reduced bureaucracy.
PFM was originally slated to receive more than $4 million but now will get about $2 million, she said. WNYC previously reported PFM was no longer playing a role in the day-to-day operation of Build It Back.
According to the mayor’s office, another contractor, the San Francisco-based URS Corp., was expected to get nearly $20 million for running the customer service operation, according to the July 2013 contract. That amount was headed towards $75.9 million under an amendment and has been brought back to $40.4 million.
Solix, a New Jersey company that checked applicants’ eligibility for the program, was due to receive $9.9 million, then $48.5 million. Now, the de Blasio administration has offered $23.3 million.
The latest iterations of the contract have not been finalized, and Peterson said they will expire next summer, after which some additional services may be required. A spokeswoman for PFM said the company could not comment. URS and Solix did not return requests for a response.
A fourth contractor, the Center for New York City Neighborhoods, has not been affected by the amendments or the latest pull back. The non-profit organization headquartered in Manhattan is expected to continue to receive up to $13.5 million for providing financial counseling to homeowners.
The city also announced Tuesday that it had begun repairs on 535 Sandy-damaged homes, beating the mayor's goal of reaching 500 construction starts by Labor Day.
Lost paperwork, extensive delays, contradictory instructions: New York City’s program to help owners of Sandy-damaged properties became a bureaucratic nightmare for many of the people it was supposed to be helping.
But it was the type of nightmare, according to the man who created the program, that unfortunately has plagued almost every other place that has attempted to rebuild after a hurricane: New Jersey, Louisiana, Mississippi, etc.
“Everybody’s mad. Everybody’s dissatisfied, just like they are in every one of these disasters,” Brad Gair, the city's former director of Housing Recovery Operations who is now vice president of emergency management and enterprise resilience at NYU Langone Medical Center.
In one of the few media interviews he has given since leaving city government, Gair told WNYC the problems stem from a lack of a national strategy that can rebuild people’s homes quickly, while at the same time minimizing waste and fraud.
“I think if we had an existing, off-the-shelf program that the federal government funded, preferably that we could turn on right after the disaster, we wouldn’t have the same kinds of challenges,” Gair said.
He said federal regulations were lengthy and time-consuming, such as one requiring the city to notify American Indian tribes in case repairs disturbed ancestral remains, and another that forced the city to check with insurance companies to make sure homeowners had not already received sufficient award amounts.
In the audio player is a condensed version of a 35-minute interview conducted July 2, before revelations that Bloomberg’s successor, Mayor Bill de Blasio, removed a lead contractor as part of an overhaul of the program, called Build it Back, and a critical report on its early months by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
A high-minded international design competition came down to earth Monday when the federal government committed $335 million to build a 19-foot high berm that would stretch 1.5 miles along the FDR Drive on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
The berm was the biggest winner of the Rebuild by Design contest sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Rockefeller Foundation. It is the first phase of the Big U, a plan for 10-mile system of protections that would extend from 57th Street on Manhattan's West Side down to the Battery and back up the East Side to 42nd Street.
The first phase also calls for doubling the number of pedestrian bridges across the FDR, from four to eight, to make it easier for residents of the New York Housing Authority buildings to cross over and use East River Park. The existing bridges will also be widened and the park itself made more inviting for strolling and spectating.
“This is a Robert Moses-era park,” said Jeremy Alain Siegel, the project manager for BIG, or Bjarke Ingels Group, the Danish architecture firm that designed the Big U. “It’s a mile and a half of beautiful coastline with great views, but on the other hand it is really disconnected from the NYCHA projects.”
The public housing complexes are located on some of the lowest-lying land in the city and suffered extensive damage during Sandy. Thousands of residents lost heat and power for weeks. The size of the award – more than any other single project in the tri-state region that competed for Rebuild for Design funds – indicates a push by HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, both Democrats, to strengthen low-income communities in the face of future hurricanes.
Siegel said the funding would be sufficient to build the berm from Montgomery Street on the south (just north of the Manhattan Bridge, near the northern boundary of the hypothetical Seaport City site) to 23rd Street to the north. Siegel said it would be engineered to withstand a 100-year flood in the year 2050, given sea level rise. No time line for the project was announced.
Other Rebuild by Design winners announced Monday in separate press conferences in New York City and New Jersey are:
HOBOKEN, N.J.: $230 MILLION
A combination of flood protections around the outside of the mile-square city (such as flood walls) and drainage measures inside (such as retaining pools and permeable pavings) intended to reduce impact from storm surges as well as heavy rains. (Image by OMA/U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.)
*THE MEADOWLANDS, N.J.: $150 MILLION*
Berms and marsh restoration form the core of a project known as "The New Meadowlands," which will also include a bus rapid transit line, recreation zones and more access points to the area. (Image by MIT CAU,ZUS, De Urbanisten/U.S. HUD)
NASSAU COUNTY, LONG ISLAND: $125 MILLION
A series of measures, called "Living with the Bay," such as dikes, marsh islands and improved storm-water management to mitigate storm surge and other hazards for the interior South Shore of Nassau County (Hewlett Bay, Middle Bay, East Bay). (Image by Interboro Team/U.S. HUD)
TOTTENVILLE, STATEN ISLAND: $60 MILLION
A set of "living breakwaters" consisting oyster reefs and other materials to be constructed off the coast of Tottenville on the southern edge of Staten Island, designed by Scape Landscape Architects. (Image by SCAPE/U.S. HUD)
HUNTS POINT, THE BRONX: $20 MILLION
For further planning to make the South Bronx, the hub of the region’s food distribution system, more resilient through construction of levees, new piers and an environmentally advanced power generating plant. (PennDesign/OLIN/HUD)
After months of delays in the city’s Build it Back program, Eleni Stavrakos-Ocampo thought she was lucky. She learned in March that she would be the second person to see repairs begin on a Sandy-damaged home.
City officials were also excited to break through the bad press the program had received, and, with her permission, gave out her phone number to reporters. Her story appeared in the Staten Island Advance.
But as a crew began to work on her garage, the quality of the work fell well short of her expectations. During a visit to her home in mid-April, at about the time the job should have been completed, she showed WNYC plaster that had already peeled from the ceiling, uneven drywall, and an area on her driveway where she said workers had discolored the concrete in order to clean up stucco they had spilled.
She complained to the workers, the supervisor and, eventually, Build it Back.
She told them, "It’s a bad example of what you are doing. You should have made my home, a good example. "
At first this case may appear to be a typical homeowner-contractor dispute. The owner of the subcontractor, Youssef Estefan, told WNYC that Stavrakos’ real problem was the fact that his workers, who are Egyptian, do not speak English well.
“This is how it is when you deal with homeowners” he said. “You have people that like you. Some people don’t like you personally.”
Stavrakos said she just wanted to be able to communicate with the workers, to tell them to be neat — and that they were speaking English to one another, just not to her.
And that’s what makes the dispute more than just a disagreement between homeowner and contractor: Build it Back homeowners are not supposed to talk to the work crews. They are supposed go through Build it Back.
The Bloomberg administration designed the program so the city would hire and supervise contractors directly. The system was meant to make sure no homeowner gets swindled or squanders the money, but it adds a whole layer of complication and bureaucracy. (By contrast, New York state instead gives homeowners a series of checks they use to pay eligible contractors they hire.)
The tensions between contractor and homeowner are likely to come up again as Build it Back works its way through nearly 20,000 applications for assistance. So far, just 36 jobs are underway. Three others have been completed, according to the city.
Amy Spitalnick, a spokeswoman for Build it Back, said the de Blasio administration is exploring changes to the contracting system, but already has in place “key quality control measures, including inspections, to ensure that no contractor gets paid and no project closes unless the work meets our standards.”
The city allows homeowners to pick their own contractors, though it would still act as the boss. But Stavrakos’ contractor of choice did not want to go through the trouble of applying to that system. Instead, the work fell to Volmar Construction, a mid-sized Brooklyn firm that was one of three contractors chosen for Build it Back repairs last year. Volmar referred questions to the city.
Volmar stands to make $150 million dollars from Sandy, which comes from the federal Sandy aid bill. According to its contracts with the city, Volmar expects to pass 85 percent of that amount along to subcontractors, such as Sphinx Construction.
A city official said that the Stavrakos job has generated the most complaints of any work site so far, and that it has failed inspection twice. As a result, Volmar will get docked $500 of its payment and be forced to fix the problems, the official said. The city closed out the job earlier this month, but Stavrakos said, while some issues have been addressed, others have not.
The case also raises questions about whether the front-line workers are being paid enough to do quality repairs. Contractors and subcontractors receiving federal funds are generally required to pay their employees prevailing wages, which are close to union scale. But an exception for projects involving buildings with fewer than eight units means that about a billion dollars of work under the Build it Back program can be done for as little as minimum wage.
Estefan said he pays his workers between $10 and $12 an hour. That is about a quarter of the prevailing wage for drywall tapers, according to the state Department of Labor.
But Estefan said he has a permanent crew and does not hire off of the street. Another resident whose family home is being repaired by Estefan's firm praised the workers.
"They are all very professional and very courteous," said Alfonso Martino, who lives in Dongan Hills, Staten Island.
Backhoes and bathhouses. Sand pumping and suntan oil.
Welcome to the new beach season in the Rockaways.
As the second summer begins since Sandy hit the Northeast, residents along the peninsula in Queens are feeling that their community's artery — the 5.5 mile boardwalk that was upended during the storm — remains severed.
The U.S. Army Corp of Engineers is dredging 20,000 cubic yards of sand a day and pumping it onto the beach. At the same time, the New York City Parks Department is working on a new, more resilient boardwalk.
A berm at Beach 116th Street where sand replenishment is underway. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
Photographer Susannah Ray, who has lived in the area for 10 years, said the beach is the reason why she lives on the edge of the city. And it is just not the same without the boardwalk. "That's like our thoroughfare," she said. "We don't really have usable sidewalks in most locations, so the boardwalk was a good replacement for that."
The Parks Department has tried to salvage as much of the old boardwalk as possible, and attended multiple community board meetings, seeking to find common ground on design.
Above, a restored section of salvaged boardwalk at 84th Street in Rockaway Park. A 2.5-mile stretch of boardwalk from Beach 97th Street to Beach 60th Street is already complete. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
Even though many nearby residents are still living in half-finished homes, some said restoring the boardwalk is nearly as high a priority for them. That was the case for Rockaway resident Joe Guariglia who drinks his morning coffee, shirtless, on the beach."All we’re really interested in is the boardwalk," Guariglia said. "A lot of residents had a lot of damage, didn’t get much help, denials by insurance companies. If you give Rockaway our boardwalk, it’s a home-run. That’s all we need." (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
Last year, the Parks Department raced to renovate the concession islands and put up new comfort stations in time for Memorial Day. This year, the most exciting new thing visitors will see are the steep sand cliffs from the Army Corp of Engineers sand pumping project. These are the first steps to returning the sand to pre-1970s levels. They are expected to be completed by the fall.
Maybe seeing a historic beach restoration project will be the biggest draw this summer.
Pipes that the Army Corps of Engineers will use for dredging sand 2-miles off shore at beach 84th Street. In the end, 3 million cubic yards will be pumped onto the beach, restoring sand to pre-1970s levels. The beach will be 100-feet wide and 10 feet above sea level. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
Erosion by the ocean has left the beach “scarped.” Officials at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said a beach replenishment project will smooth out sand levels. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
Memorial Day marks the beginning of the all-important summer tourism season at the Jersey Shore, an area that’s still rebuilding after Sandy. The popular narrative from political leaders last summer — and again this summer — is that the shore is “open for business.” But a closer look reveals a more complicated and uneven picture.
Despite a recent Christie administration study that found tourism during 2013 broke previous revenue records, data and anecdotal reports suggest the tourism industry’s successes were mixed last year. While some areas fared relatively well, many other were not able to match the results of earlier years.
In the nine counties most damaged by Sandy, one-third had small drops in what tourists spent on things like lodging, food, and transportation. But the other two-thirds of counties saw modest gains, perhaps due in part to spending by out-of-state recovery workers.
“We actually saw some increase last year, particularly early in the year, in hotel revenue due to FEMA, Red Cross, and construction officials coming down,” said Brian Tyrrell, a professor of hospitality and tourism management at Richard Stockton College in Atlantic County.
The gains were also far from uniform. For example, in Beach Haven on Long Beach Island, Tyrrell said lodging revenue was down 18 percent from the previous year. And that doesn’t include weekly or seasonal rentals, which are popular with tourists.
Elaine Atlee, a real estate agent with Prudential Zack Shore Properties, said rentals on LBI last summer started slow but eventually picked up, which makes her optimistic about this season. Bookings have been strong so far.
“Overall, driving around, it really doesn’t look like there was a storm anymore,” she said. “Everything looks good, in order.”
Atlee said the housing inventory for rentals has been returning in waves: first the homes with minimal damage, and after them the ones that needed more work, but weren’t being lifted off the ground. Homes that had to be elevated have taken longer.
“There’s a handful that will be ready for next summer, not per se, this summer,” she said.
As a result of the storm, some people — including Atlee herself — have also chosen to rent out their homes for the first time to help offset construction and repair expenses. She said her house is already fully booked for the month of August.
A bit farther up the coast, Seaside Heights and Ortley Beach continue their long recovery after being among the New Jersey communities most devastated by Sandy. Homes have sat idle, waiting for federal recovery funds, and many businesses revealed that revenues last summer were down by a third or more. Both communities are holding out hope, though, that this year will be better.
Lucky Leo’s arcade on the boardwalk in Seaside Heights has been owned and operated by Steve Whalen’s family since 1953. Sandy destroyed the boardwalk around the arcade, and last summer Whalen said business was down about 20 percent.
To cap off the tepid season, four blocks of boardwalk erupted into raging flames last September. Fierce breezes sent fiery debris sailing down the boardwalk for blocks, including some that landed on the arcade’s brand new roof. The roof caught fire, and was a goner. But Whalen said that was barely a hiccup compared to the fallout from Sandy. At least his portion of the boardwalk was spared this time.
All along Seaside’s boardwalk, businesses are hoping for a comeback from last year’s dismal performance. At Midway Steak House -- where the lemonade is shaken, not stirred — cook Atemio Rees is worried that Memorial Day weekend will fall short of expectations. He said only a couple of rides were ready, and he didn’t know if people will come.
Town mayor Bill Akers promises that the rides will be ready. And he said beach badge sales figures as of this week show a strong season is in store.
“Right now, we’ve already exceeded $100,000 in beach badge sales, which is very good for us,” he said. “Last year at this time we had around 30 or 40 thousand sold.”
While many towns raced to repair their boardwalks and beaches after Sandy, that approach angered some local homeowners, who saw little progress in residential areas.
On the ocean block of Fielder Avenue in Ortley Beach, where every home sustained damage from Sandy, most have now either been torn down or are on their way to restoration. It took Barry and Ileana Ingram 15 months, but their home is whole again, raised up several feet. After waiting more than a year for Sandy aid, they finally received $110,000.
In order to afford flood insurance, the couple didn’t have health insurance. This winter, Barry contracted a rare form of pneumonia. When he went to the hospital, the doctors asked if he had eaten any weird fruits or had traveled out of the country within the past few years. He told them that he hadn’t, but he thinks he may have contracted something from all the mold, mildew, and sewage he was exposed to.
Now some of the government money meant to reimburse the Ingrams for contractor fees will help defray their $100,000 in medical expenses.
At the north end of the Jersey Shore in Sea Bright, there’s no boardwalk or carnival games. It’s more of a place that locals go to spend the day at the beach. But though it lacks the star power of places like Belmar and Seaside Heights, it’s still highly dependent on revenue from just a few summer months.
At Angler’s Marina, owner Fred Leonardis is hoping for business to pick up after a poor showing last year.
“It was off probably 40 percent by people who either totally lost their boat or lost their summer house or it’s just the economy,” he said, noting that pleasure boating tends to be one of the first casualties when people hit hard times. “So many of our customers took their boats home and said to me, ‘I’m sorry. I can’t come back next year,’” he added.
Leonardis said the New Jersey Marine Trade Association estimated that over 45,000 boats were totaled as a result of Sandy, and another 20,000 uninsured boat registrations were turned in after the storm. “When you take that out of a market, that’s a lot of boats,” he said. A few weeks ago, he only had one boat tied up in his 48 slips, but usually at this time of year he’d have about 20.
He said he needs things to get better so he can recoup some of the money he and his wife spent out of their own pockets to do all the repairs. And taking a loan from a bank isn’t really possible, he said, since he doesn’t have flood insurance for his business.
“You can’t raise this concrete building, so that means I’ve got to get insurance where it’s possible to have 4 feet of water again. The price for that kind of insurance is outrageous.”
Just down the street on Ocean Avenue in Sea Bright’s downtown, crews were busy painting storefronts, getting ready for Memorial Day weekend. Michelle McMullen recently reopened her homemade ice cream shop, “Gracie and the Dudes,” but business so far has been slower than she’s ever experienced, even in the dead of winter.
“Once customers leave and start going somewhere else, it becomes a habit. I think that’s what we’re seeing now, here a little bit, even since we’ve reopened,” she said. “People got used to going to their other sushi place or the other pizza place, the other ice cream place, and now we have to kind of retrain them that we’re back, and to come back into Sea Bright.” She’s hopeful, though, that things will improve once paving crews finish repairing Sea Bright’s parking lot.
Another sign of hope that this summer will be better than last is the number of beach badge sales. In 2013, the borough sold about halfas many tags as it would in a normal year, but this spring, preseason sales were even higher than they were before the storm.
“It’s going to be a long road before you can say Sea Bright is 100 percent recovered from Sandy,” said Dina Long, the borough’s mayor, “but I think if you look at what’s happened this year, it’s very encouraging. We added back $20 million in taxable ratables, so that is a huge impact in terms of our municipal budget and our financial recovery.”
“We’re not out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination,” she added. “We still had to rely on an Essential Services Grant from the state to balance our budget this year, but hopefully by next year we’ll be well-positioned to stand on our own feet.”
At Northshore, a high-end clothing shop that was destroyed in the storm, owner Brian George agreed that things are coming along, slowly but surely.
“You had to be here to see what happened to this town. There was a war zone,” he said. “Cynics come into town and they go, ‘Well, this place is boarded up, this place is boarded up,’ but you have to realize what it was like! I mean, we’ve made such remarkable progress.”
He said he’s extremely positive going into the summer, and he’s uplifted by the news that his business was recently approved for a low-interest loan from the New Jersey Economic Development Authority. The funding will allow him to add an addition to his building for the women’s clothing department. He hopes to start construction as soon as possible and have it ready by July 4th.
Now, after all the preparations they’ve made for Memorial Day and the summer season, businesses and local officials in Sea Bright and other communities along the Jersey shore are just keeping their fingers crossed that visitors actually show up. “We need a hot, dry summer, and we need people to come to town,” one shop owner said, laughing nervously. “Otherwise, it’s not going to be good.”
Tracey Samuelson reports for WHYY/NewsWorks, a partner of NJ Spotlight.
Janet Babin covers economic development for NJ Spotlight partner WNYC.
The proposed Seaport City project would be built to withstand a 100-year-storm and make a generous allowance for sea level rise, according to a just-released feasibility report. But that still would fall short of European standards, which often require projects to be designed to withstand a 1,000-year, or even 10,000-year, storm.
The difference in standards has sparked a debate between disaster experts concerned about the long-term viability of the project, and current and former city officials who fear that making Seaport City more resilient will have other consequences.
“The danger we face is that if we look out not 100 years, but 200 years or 300 years, the cost of that protection is going to be so great that we will end up not being able to do anything, which is the worst possible situation to be in,” said Seth Pinsky, who was the president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation under former Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
The project, which would create a neighborhood on landfill in the East River in order to buffer the low-lying areas of the Financial District and Chinatown, is still a long way away from becoming a reality, no matter how it is configured. City officials say the next step is to solicit community feedback.
A team of architects and consultants is proposing to build a new neighborhood of residential towers and office buildings on landfill in the East River as part of a counter-intuitive plan to make the city more flood resistant.
The idea, called Seaport City, was hatched last year by the Bloomberg administration. It would be constructed high enough to block major storm surges from flooding the Financial District and also generate enough money to pay for itself and potentially another $900 million worth of resiliency projects around the city by selling the development rights, according to the study expected to be released today by the city’s Economic Development Corporation.
The recommended option in the Seaport City feasibility study calls for a two-block wide landfill to be constructed in the East River. Buildings shown for demonstration purposes only. (Thomas Schaller and FXFOWLE)
The $4 billion levee would, however, take an enormous commitment by City Hall and at least eight years’ worth of approvals and additional studies before ground is broken. The neighborhood would take an astounding 80 years to fully build out after that. The city, or a city authority, would issue the bonds and then pay them back by the sale or lease of development rights.
"We need to be asking ourselves difficult questions about ambitious plans where traditional solutions will be unlikely to be effective," said Daniel Zarrilli, the director of the city's Office of Recovery and Resiliency.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has spoken favorably of the Seaport City's idea, also called a "multi-purpose levee." But he did not include any money to pursue further studies of the idea in the budget plan he presented earlier this month. Zarrilli said the next step would be to bring the study — and the city's other resiliency plans — to community boards and other groups in the coming months to get their input.
"We got this study and it showed the multi-purpose levee is certainly a world-class solution," Zarrilli said. "It would work. It’s feasible. But it’s clearly a long-term endeavor that would continue to develop in partnership with stakeholders and community residents over time."
The study’s legal team, Sive Paget & Riesel, determined that the project could pass legal muster. However, some environmental groups oppose the project because it would fill in a waterway that serves as habitat for fish and other sea life.
“If we put our eggs in a basket of an infill practice like this, and litigation and controversy ensue, it may end up taking far longer than other solutions would,” said Roland Lewis, president and chief executive of the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance. “Is this the best way to spend economic and political capital? Probably not.”
But Seaport City supporters argue that there are few clear sources of revenue to make New York City more resilient other than building into the river. Revenues from the project would also pay for interim solutions, like a ring of seawalls and levees around the southern end of Manhattan that would be constructed in the near term, well before Seaport City is completed. It would be similar to the “Big U” proposal put forth under a design competition sponsored by the federal Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force and the Rockefeller Foundation.
The study team for the East River project, which cost $950,000 to conduct and was led by the Dutch engineering firm Arcadis, looked at 20 options for the 1.3 mile stretch from the Battery Maritime Building to just north of the Manhattan Bridge. The recommended design calls for concentrating the development at the south end near the financial district on landfill that would extend 500 feet, or two blocks, into the East River. Office buildings there would rise 40 to 60 stories, roughly the height of other buildings in the Financial District. A gentle rising slope would bring pedestrians from South Street, below the low FDR Drive, to a mound about 19 feet above low tide.
The levee would narrow further north, to allow the South Street Seaport to continue operating on piers, at least for the short-term. Closer to the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, it would turn into a narrow strip of parkland to provide open space for nearby public housing. The levee would bulge out again just north of the Manhattan Bridge for another apartment complex. An esplanade for biking and walking would stretch the entire length of the levee.
The preferred option calls for about 11.1 million gross square feet of residential space — roughly enough for 20,000 residents — and 7.7 million square feet of commercial office space. The amount of money the project would generate for other resiliency projects depends largely on how much affordable housing it would provide. A traditional 80/20 model (80 percent market rate, 20 percent subsidized housing for low-income families) would yield $900 million in today’s dollars over the life of the project, but only $70 million if developed on the 50/30/20 model that is increasingly coming into vogue (50 percent market, 30 percent for moderate-income families and 20 percent low-income).
The levee is modeled on similar projects in Europe and Asia, but it would have a lower level of protection. Hamburg’s HafenCity, for example, is designed to withstand flood levels that only have a 0.1 percent chance of occurring in any given year. The feasibility study assumed Seaport City would be constructed to withstand a 1-percent-a-year event — commonly known as a 100-year-flood – and then added 6 feet to allow for sea level rise. The 100-year standard has become the norm for the United States, but Klaus Jacob, a senior research scientist at Columbia University, said that if the city is taking such big risks by building in a waterway, it should make sure to protect the new area sufficiently.
“That is not sustainable resilience. That is only short-term resilience,” said Jacobs, who is also a member of the New York City Panel on Climate Change. “When a Katrina comes along and things are not entirely maintained to that 100-year storm level, then bad things can happen. And I hope that we never have a Katrina in Manhattan.”
Around the time of the first anniversary of Sandy, back in October of 2013, Victor Dolan gave up; he and his wife sold the property on Staten Island where they had lived together for decades.
It was an old-fashioned single-story bungalow on Bedford Avenue in Midland Beach — green with white trim — that had been in his wife’s family for 80 years. When Sandy hit, the water reached as high as the attic. (Dolan and his wife had evacuated.)
The couple had applied to Build it Back, the city’s rebuilding program, but thought it would take too long, and it was unclear how much aid they would qualify for.
“A year into it, I could see there was no light at the end of the tunnel,” Dolan said. “And to emotionally separate and financially separate just seemed the better thing to do.”
The couple sold the property for $325,000, according to public records. Dolan said it was worth $600,000 or more because of the size of the lot. the purchaser, a contractor, is building a pair of three-story townhouses. The foundation is already finished.
The Dolans’ saga is one of the more extreme examples of the frustrations homeowners are feeling with delays in the program, 10 months after it began accepting applications and 17 months after Sandy hit. The program began repairs on its first house on Wednesday, according to Amy Spitalnick, a spokeswoman for the city.
Dolan himself sold the property before he completed the intake process and got an estimate of how long it would be before he would get any assistance. But last fall, for example, Build it Back told applicants that construction for many homeowners would not begin until July of this year and might not finish until the end of next year. The program has seen more delays since that timeline was issued.
“From Day One, I’ve asked, “Where is the cookbook?” Dolan said. “There’s been a million disasters in America and around the world. We’ve responded to billions of disasters. You don’t know what to do after a disaster?” he said.
Unfortunately for Dolan and the 20,000 other Build it Back registrants, there is no cookbook. The reasons for the delays are various, stemming from funding priorities established by the Bloomberg administration to a computer problem by one of the outsourcing companies hired to process paperwork.
But in addition, experts say that it is not unusual for areas to take 20 years or more to fully recover from hurricanes, earthquakes or river floods.
By contrast, Mary Comerio, a professor of architecture at the University of California Berkeley, said Chile has recovered from a 2010 earthquake and tsunami much faster.
Within the first two years, according to Comerio, more than 100,000 had been completed and occupied.
“Lots of smaller local builders competed for these jobs,” she said. “They organized it sort of town by town.”
On Feb. 24, Mayor Bill de Blasio promised that he would revamp the Build it Back program “in the next few weeks” to make it work faster. An aide said an announcement would be made in the coming days.
According to numbers from the Build it Back program, the city is getting more registrants through the early parts of the processing pipeline. As of March 12, the city had offered $241 million to almost 3,000 homeowners. However, that is only about 15 percent of the total applicants.
Two large townhouses are under construction where Dr. Victor Dolan's modest bungalow once stood.
If Tolstoy were alive today, he might say: Every unhappy Build it Back family is unhappy in its own way.
Build it Back is the city’s program for Sandy-damaged homes, and it has drawn numerous complaints. But each one is a little different.
Tami Cherichetti of Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn, was told she had to resubmit some lost paperwork — which ended up being on a customer service representative’s desk.
Scott and Cindy Plissner of Dongan Hills, Staten Island, said one inspector offered to have their whole basement refinished. Then another team came by and said they could not do that, but offered to make repairs upstairs, which was not even touched by Sandy.
Alison Kase of Broad Channel, Queens, got so tired of waiting, she enlisted a local charity, Friends of Rockaway, to repair her home instead.
“It infuriates me. Here I had been, playing by the rules,” she said, “extending my faith that my government was going to do as they prescribed that they were going to do.”
Sixteen months after the storm, not one home in New York City has been rebuilt or repaired with housing aid provided from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development under the Sandy federal aid bill. And while the delays have much to do with tight federal regulations, the program has also suffered from choices by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his aides that limited funding for the program and added complexity. In addition, one of the private companies running the program bungled the intake process.
A Build it Back official said that the processing has sped up in recent weeks. By Sunday, 154 households had agreed to the awards offered by the city and another 2,407 have been offered awards and are either considering taking them or contesting them. Still, those categories account for less than 13 percent of the 19,920 owners of one- to four-family building owners who have applied to the program.
“These are absurdly low numbers,” said Joe Pupello, executive director of Zone A New York, a nonprofit organization helping residents navigate the recovery process. “I think that one of the biggest problems is that people are starting to wonder whether or not they are going to get any help at all.”
New York State, by contrast, has given out more than $360 million through buyouts, reimbursements and pre-payments on repairs to more than 5,000 homeowners, according to Barbara Brancaccio of the New York Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery. New Jersey has disbursed about $200 million through reimbursements, pre-payments and other awards, according to Lisa Ryan of the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs.
Some housing advocates have criticized New Jersey’s program, in particular, for initially denying high numbers of people seeking aid. Many were later approved. (The denials were to some degree a result of the state relying on FEMA's previous damage assessments rather than undertaking the more time-consuming process of sending out its own inspectors.) And the architects of New York City’s program said they wanted to focus their money on homes that were still uninhabitable, rather than reimbursing people for repairs already made. But that strategy has resulted in a far more complex process.
Build it Back’s lethargy can be traced back to the day when HUD announced the first tranche of its Sandy aid: Feb. 6, 2013. The money was parsed out in roughly equal chunks — about $1.8 billion each for New Jersey, New York state and New York City. The type of funding, called Community Development Block Grants, allows local officials to come up with proposals for how to spend their money.
Mayor Bloomberg appeared far ahead of his peers in Trenton and Albany at the time. At a news conference held in the Blue Room at City Hall the very same day, Mayor Bloomberg said he had already developed a plan for more than $1 billion of the money: $720 million would go for housing; $185 million for business recovery; and $140 million for “infrastructure resiliency” — projects that would later feature prominently in his much-heralded “Stronger and Resilient New York” plan to prepare the city against long-term climate effects.
That funding mix seemed to contain plenty of money to begin repairs the city’s damaged housing stock. And Bloomberg and his aides seemed intent on getting the money out quickly.
“We expect that most of these programs will be under way in late April or early May,” Bloomberg told reporters that day. “So that’s a good time frame for you to focus on.”
Cas Holloway, deputy mayor for operations at the time, then added, “We’re going to work to try to get the money out as contemporaneous as possible with the application process and we’re going to do everything we can to beat the time frame.”
But it turned out to take until early May just for HUD to approve New York City’s plan. After taking into account administrative costs, only $648 million was really left for housing. And, given the needs of the New York City’s public housing complexes and large apartment buildings, the city really only had $306 million dollars to repair one- to four-family homes, according to the approved application. For the 20,000 homeowners who were expected to apply to Build it Back, that would come out to $15,000 per building — not even the cost of a new kitchen.
The lack of funds led to two kinds of delays. First, the city originally refused to reimburse people for repairs they had made out of pocket to their homes. When, under pressure from Sen. Charles Schumer and others, the city agreed to reimbursements, it did so reluctantly, stipulating in the approved application that “applicants seeking reimbursements may, in general, be given lower initial priority for processing than applicants who are requesting funds for essential rehabilitation or reconstruction of their homes.”
Reimbursements, as governors Cuomo and Christie learned, are a quick way to get money into the hands of struggling homeowners.
Second, while officials expected they would receive another tranche, and maybe a third, of HUD money, they did not know when it would come or how much it would be.
So Build it Back developed an elaborate system to make sure the poorest and hardest hit got to the front of the line and began assigning each applicant Priority One, Two or Three.
“We are going to start, as we said all along, with those families who have the greatest financial need based on household income and highest level of damage,” Brad Gair, the Build it Back director, said in an interview with WNYC in July.
But to assign each applicant to a priority group, the city first had to process paperwork, verify eligibility and sometimes do in-person damage assessments of people’s homes — all for many more people than it could afford to help right away. Some of those steps were required by federal regulations intended to prevent fraud. But the system required a lot of up-front work that did not yield on-the-ground results quickly.
By contrast, New Jersey and New York state each allocated more of their HUD money for housing than New York City did — $1.16 billion and $838 million respectively, according to the applications approved last April and May. They did that even though the states had less need that was not being met by insurance or other payments. According to the approved applications, New Jersey said it had $2.5 billion in housing needs, New York state (outside of the five boroughs) had $3 billion. By contrast, New York City said it faced $6.6 billion in unmet housing needs.
It may have been impossible for Bloomberg to have put as much money towards housing as Christie and Cuomo did in proportion to New York City’s need. But Bloomberg also put a far higher priority on funding long-term resiliency measures than did Trenton or Albany — although those measures are still, nine months after the funding was approved, still in their early stages. The city also planned to spend more on administrative costs than New Jersey or New York State, according to the applications.
Gair and Deputy Mayor Holloway, two officials who closely monitored the HUD program, declined through spokesmen to speak on the record.
In his July interview with WNYC, Gair acknowledged the process was taking longer than he had expected, but he said the pace of work was picking up.
“We think that by early September, we will be starting to do repairs,” he said.
But in fall 2013, Gair stopped running day-to-day operations to work on broader Sandy issues. A Department of Environmental Protection official, Kathryn Mallon, took his place. Mallon suspended damage inspections for a few weeks in October in order to rethink the program, according to a Build it Back official, who did not want his name used because he is not a spokesman. That, in turn, temporarily disrupted the repair pipeline, even though, according to the official, the overhaul ended up streamlining procedures significantly.
Also, according to the official, the city discovered that customer service representatives were failing to upload documents correctly to the central database. Some homeowners were told they needed to refile the papers — although the official said only a few people were affected and that the problem has been fixed.
A spokesman for the URS Corporation, which runs the customer service operation for Build it Back, did not respond by deadline to two requests for comment.
The new mayor, Bill de Blasio, said earlier this week that he knows Build it Back has to be fixed.
“We’re doing a full review and we’re setting our own framework of how we want to proceed and our own personnel, and then we are going to announce that,” he said.
According to the City Hall press office, the current Build it Back director, Kathryn Mallon, is leaving Friday. She will be replaced on an interim basis by her deputy, Benjamin Jones. A permanent director, along with an overhaul, is expected to be announced “in the coming weeks.”
In its final days in office, the Bloomberg administration appeared to acknowledge that it had put too little money into the housing program. After HUD awarded the city its second tranche of aid last November — $1.4 billion — officials came up with a new plan for spending it. It proposed spending more than $1 billion of the new money toward housing. Of that, $700 million will go to Build it Back, tripling the amount available for that program, according to a draft posted online. The administration also proposed no new spending on resiliency, diverted money that was destined for economic development to the Build it Back program, and kept administration and planning costs fairly flat.
It is one thing to get 30 of your neighbors to decide to throw a block party together. Or to all put your trinkets out of the sidewalk for a rummage sale on the same Saturday. But imagine getting them to decide to raise their houses up on higher foundations. And then, all together, build a boardwalk about four feet in the air that everyone can use to their doors.
And imagine if you need not just a majority of shareholders who have to agree, as happens in a co-op apartment building, but pretty much everyone on your block.
That is the task confronting one bungalow community in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, that was devastated by Sandy more than a year ago. Its geographic features are so unusual that ordinary flood-proofing strategies would come short.
“It’s a real complex process,” said Elana Bulman, an organizer from the Pratt Center for Community Development who is involved in the project. “It is dealing with individual homeowners who are thinking, ‘Okay, what does this mean for me?’ And then you are also trying to convince everyone that this is only going to work if everyone pitches in and has the same vision for their block.”
The homes, almost 200 of them, are arranged along mews near the intersection of Emmons and Nostrand avenues. These are pedestrian passageways, just six feet across, not streets. (They are called “courts” in Brooklynese.) And the mews themselves are four or five feet below the level of the cross-streets on either side.
The bungalows were built as a summer cottages in the late 1920s, only to be converted to year-round use in the 1940s. Sometime later, the city raised the streets around them, but left the courts where they were because they are private property.
In October 2012, Sandy turned the courts into bathtubs, filling them up with six or seven feet of water. They took several days to drain because of the primitive, privately maintained sewer pumps below the walkway. The same problem, to a lesser extent, occurs after storms that are far less serious than Sandy.
But otherwise, residents there like it.
“There’s good and bad, but I’m so used to it,” said Missy Haggerty, who was born and raised there. “To bring out the garbage, you have to bring it up to the corner and put it on Emmons Avenue. You can’t just put it outside and the sanitation men are going to pick it up.”
The courts are hard to find unless you know what you are looking for. The walkway is privately owned. (Amy Pearl/WNYC)
On a recent tour of the neighborhood with a reporter, she called out to everyone she passed by name, both on her court and on the other courts nearby, asking after their mothers, spouses and children.
“It’s one big family,” Haggerty added.
Haggerty and a number of other community leaders have been organizing their neighbors to support plans developed by the Pratt Center that would solve their drainage problems and elevate their houses at the same time. (Higher flood insurance premiums expected to kick in by next year will penalize homeowners in flood plains whose houses are not above flood level.)
The most popular idea to date is to build a boardwalk about four feet above the current pathway that would meet the grade of the surrounding streets. Then elevate the houses as well, maybe as much as eight feet. The boardwalk would reduce the need for tall steep staircases in the small front yards. The sewage system would also be raised.
One Pratt Center design for the courts would raise the houses and add a boardwalk roughly at street level. (Cristina Zubillaga and Sean Gold/Gans Studio)
“They realize they want it to be an integrated solution,” said Deborah Gans, the architect who developed the plans and has been leading community meetings. “They do want to raise their houses. And they also want to raise how they get to them.”
All of it takes a lot of coordination and community spirit. And while Gans and Bulman are optimistic, some of the most active residents are getting frustrated.
“If you want to see this become the same generational neighborhood like it is right now, somebody has to say something,” said Barbara Berardelli, a grandmother who has been living next to a court (though technically on a regular city street) her whole life. “You have to take a little time out of your life to get involved.”
Barbara Berardelli, one of the community's leaders. (Amy Pearl/WNYC)
Part of the problem is funding. No one knows how much the project would cost and how much would be covered by federal Sandy aid, if any. Berardelli and others hope that if the neighbors present a united front, they will be able to make a better case for taxpayer support. But without knowing the details, people are reluctant to endorse any plan.
“Who can? Who can’t? Who’s willing?,” said one resident, Joe Zito. “Who’s going to foot the bill?”
For the time being, the community is planning to ask for up to $100,000 from NY Rising, a state program funding community-based flood-proofing projects. The money would pay for a feasibility plan that would, among other goals, come up with a cost estimate.
But that plan is competing against many other priorities for just $6.7 million that has been allocated for the entire Sheepshead Bay neighborhood, an area of three square miles with more than 100,000 people. A local committee entrusted with coming up with a list of how that money should be spent is expected to report out at the end of March.
While Sandy victims in New York wait anxiously for government assistance to rebuild their homes, a charity organized by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the wake of the storm to aid homeowners has steered millions of dollars to two troubled state-sponsored housing developments in Brooklyn.
The complexes are partially owned by funds managed by a private equity giant, the Blackstone Group, that also employs a powerful state housing official who has authority over spending from the charity.
The Empire State Relief Fund, established by the governor weeks after Sandy hit, committed in April to grant up to $3.5 million to two housing developments in Coney Island deluged by the storm. The Sea Rise and Harbor View projects are part of the state-supervised Mitchell-Lama program, and much of their financing comes via investors with Blackstone, an asset manager specializing in turning around distressed property.
The Empire State Relief Fund raised about $15 million from the public through television ads featuring celebrities such as Robert de Niro and Brooke Shields, showing photographs of damaged houses and asking New Yorkers to donate to rebuild the “tens of thousands” of homes Hurricane Sandy had “destroyed.”
At the time, the relief fund drew criticism from disaster relief experts for its leadership — a board made up of Cuomo’s top donors and his campaign treasurer — and its unusual structure, which uses the Housing Trust Fund Corporation, a division of the state’s Homes and Community Renewal super-agency, instead of an established aid group to oversee the disbursement of donor money.
The Housing Trust Fund Corporation has just two board members: Chairman Darryl Towns, who is the state’s commissioner for Housing and Community Renewal, and Housing Finance Agency Chairman William J. Mulrow, who is also senior managing director for investor relations and business development for the Blackstone Group.
The fund began distributing grants to homeowners through an automated process in December 2012, delivering checks to New Yorkers if they had received the maximum amount of state Homeownership Repair and Rebuilding Fund and Federal Emergency Management Agency assistance. Most homeowners with losses covered by flood insurance were ineligible to receive money. What’s more, the relief fund had no application process. By June the fund had given out $8.8 million to 1,345 households hit by the storm.
Then the charity abruptly changed course. In April, the relief fund’s board members — who include James Simons, a billionaire investor who chairs a firm with a large stake in Blackstone — voted to direct the majority of remaining charity donations to Sea Rise and Harbor View.
Grenadier has not yet received funds from the charity but the aid to Sea Rise and Harbor View is designated to replace roofs, install generators, place new lights in hallways and stairwells, redo landscaping and rebuild basketball courts and playgrounds. It’s also going to pay insurance deductibles, according to relief-fund records.
A spokesman for Homes and Community Renewal, Chris Browne, said that the relief fund had deferred to the Housing Trust Fund for guidance on the use of some grant money.
“The Empire State Relief fund received a large single donation on the condition it be used on a single project related to Sandy recovery," Browne wrote in an email. "The Housing Trust Fund identified three close-together Mitchell-Lama properties in Coney Island that were damaged by the storm and in need of repair. The HTF forwarded these recommendations to the Relief Fund’s board."
Browne added: "This was a process that enabled the fund’s board to receive informed, expert recommendations on how to best use this funding in a way that would help thousands of residents in a community that was badly hurt by Superstorm Sandy."
The state has not named the donor of the $3.5 million. Simons is among the publicly identified contributors to the foundation, but a spokesman said he was not the one behind the gift and had no idea of his own financial connection to the buildings that the charity was helping out.
"He owns dozens of funds including Blackstone," the spokesman, Abe Lackman, said in a statement, "and when he made this decision he had no clue that Blackstone had some relationship to one of these properties whatsoever."
A spokesman for Blackstone Group said Mulrow’s role at the firm had nothing to do with the charity aid. “He works in investor relations at Blackstone, not our real estate group,” said Peter Rose.
“Bill [Mulrow] was not asked by anyone at Blackstone or anyone connected with Blackstone to get Sandy relief money for any property connected with Blackstone. Bill had no knowledge that any of the three properties at issue here had applied for Sandy money. He didn’t know. He had no influence on any of the decision-making process by any Sandy relief funds.”
Mulrow told him personally on Thursday, Rose said, that “he had not heard of the three buildings” and was unaware that Blackstone had any interest in them.
Homeowners in Need
The Empire State Relief Fund’s commitment to help state-sponsored buildings was a departure from early promises by the charity to zero in on homeowners in need.
In a November 2012 presentation posted to its website, the relief fund said it would “develop a program focused on single-family home repair and rebuilding.” The charity said that administering the fund through the state’s housing agency would ensure aid money was spent on storm victims instead of overhead.
A public service announcement released late last year to solicit funds from the public for the Empire State Relief Fund featured Edie Falco, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and others.
Thousands of Sandy victims have since applied for federal aid through the state’s New York Rising and city’s Build it Back programs, which are distributing billions of dollars from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Many are still waiting for insurance and government assistance to come through. Yet they were ineligible for the Empire State Relief Fund aid.
In Wantagh, Long Island, 34-year-old Christa Higbee and her husband waited months after the storm struck before deciding to raid her husband’s 401k and other funds to pay for substantial repairs to their home.
“We’re using every penny of our savings,” she said. “This is our absolute last resort.”
She recently learned that New York Rising will deliver $85,000, much of it toward elevating their house. But meanwhile her family is paying the cost up front, and even with insurance proceeds will likely have to spend about $50,000 of its own money.
Some co-ops and condos are in similar straits. Brightwater Towers, a 734-unit condominium near the Coney Island aquarium, saw its electrical and heating systems savaged by Sandy.
“Fish were swimming in our lobby,” said board president Cynthia Reich. Now the complex is wrestling with its insurer over millions of dollars in claims and slogging through an “excruciating” Build it Back application. The board ultimately may have to raise maintenance fees for residents, many of whom are elderly.
“We’re in need as well,” Reich said of the charity aid going to the Mitchell-Lama projects. (Brightwater was built under Mitchell-Lama but later left the government program.) “It really begins to feel like you’re getting discriminated against.”
By contrast, Sea Rise and Harbor View were singled out for help. Both are managed by Grenadier Realty Corp., a subsidiary of the developer Starrett Corporation, in which Blackstone is also a stakeholder.
Homes and Community Renewal contacted Grenadier and asked it to apply for the charity’s assistance, said Peter Rose, the Blackstone spokesman.
“Several months ago, someone from HCR came to us and said, came to Grenadier and said, ‘Your properties may be eligible for Sandy relief,’ and Grenadier filed a preliminary application,” Rose said.
This month, Rose added, the state agency followed up to request documentation of storm-recovery costs not covered by insurance.
Experts in philanthropy say that any departure from fundraising promises made to the public can be problematic for a charity.
“If they’ve told donors they were going to use the money for one thing and they’re using it for something else, that’s definitely troubling,” said Sandra Miniutti, vice president of marketing and CFO for Charity Navigator, a national evaluator for philanthropy.
“They need to make a case to their donors why they want to go down this other road.”
Even when it is a donor who determines a shift in direction, if the charity they are donating to is set up by a political leader, the potential for conflicts and lapses only deepens, says Rick Cohen, a philanthropy expert and national correspondent at Nonprofit Quarterly.
“This is the problem of a politician creating a nonprofit, where by virtue of the politician’s involvement there’s obviously a potential benefit to a donor,” said Cohen. “What’s the quid pro quo that I might want as a result of making this donation?” If nothing else, he noted,,a donor buys the promise of access to the official.
Decaying Before Sandy
Both Harbor View and Sea Rise are nearly 40 years old, and, like many Mitchell-Lama developments, were in deteriorating condition long before Sandy.
City building inspectors warned that crumbling façades at Sea Rise were in such poor condition that pieces of the concrete could slough off the towers and hurtle earthward. A HUD inspection report from 2010, the most recent issued, classified the Sea Rise I half of the complex as harboring “life-threatening” conditions.
The Sea Rise complex was also in a financial death spiral. It cost more to operate than it reaped in income from rents and subsidies, state records show, and had plunged into deep debt — more than $38 million owed to the state on two mortgages, whose interest rates are subsidized by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, on top of $41.4 million in past arrears. Sea Rise sends the state just $12,000 a month; at that rate it would take nearly 270 years to pay off the mortgages. In 2011, the Board of the Empire State Development Corporation authorized foreclosure proceedings.
Then came Sandy.
The water filled the first floor, nine, ten feet at least. The Sandy damage was “extensive,” said Grenadier spokeswoman Devorah Fong. “All the apartments on the first floors of the two buildings, including the management office, were destroyed.”
Grenadier used insurance proceeds to bring those units back online. Had the Empire State Relief Fund followed the same rules it had set for individual homeowners — which required application for government aid first — the projects would have not have been able to receive aid. The Housing Trust Fund Corporation board approved the Empire State Relief Fund assistance nonetheless.
Mitchell-Lama affordable housing developments have a special place in Gov. Cuomo’s agenda, with the charity in a key supporting role. At the beginning of 2013, with Coney Island and other waterfront areas still crippled by Sandy, Cuomo announced in his State of the State address a new $1 billion House NY affordable housing program, centered on the rejuvenation of three dozen decaying Mitchell-Lama buildings — including Sea Rise and Harbor View
At an April 2013 committee meeting chaired by Mulrow, the state Housing Finance Agency laid out its game plan: it would use the Empire State Relief charity funds to start tackling an estimated $8 million in Sandy damage not covered by insurance, then borrow more money to upgrade other state-supervised Mitchell-Lama developments as part of the governor’s billion-dollar campaign.
Mulrow waxed enthusiastic about the Mitchell-Lama revival project, charity funding and all. “It’s a huge task but it’s an important task,” he told board members. “This is government trying to make things better, and this is a huge way for us to be of huge assistance to the older projects.”
While Sea Rise and Harbor View are still awaiting the promised Empire State Relief Fund charity money, the work has already begun. On the grounds, 10 infant evergreen trees, recently driven into the ground and secured with stakes, dot a bare lawn. New sod is being planted in one corner. The only visible evidence Sandy was here is a new coat of pale green paint that circles the buildings as high as the flood line.
This story was produced by The New York World and WNYC.
UPDATED: At 8 a.m. Friday, with statement from spokesman for charity board member James Simons.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story erroneously stated that all households with flood insurance were ineligible for aid from the Empire State Relief Fund, when in fact some were eligible. The number of recipients of the charity's aid has also been corrected.
In the year since Sandy, affected neighborhoods have started to rebuild, but also prepare for their response to the next storm. Jaime Jordan, one of the founders of Rockaway Help, talks about the work she and her neighbors are doing in the Rockaways to build up social infrastructure as a key part of disaster response.
It's one year since Hurricane Sandy battered the region. WNYC editor Matthew Schuerman and reporter Janet Babin discuss where we've been over the last year, including things that have changed and things that haven't but should. Plus, your calls: What lessons did we learn over the last year, and what comes next? Call 212-433-9692 or post below.
Today, discussing what has changed and what hasn't changed but should, one year after Sandy. Tweet back #haschanged or #shouldchange
— Brian Lehrer Show (@BrianLehrer) October 29, 2013
WNYC Special: Life After Sandy
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)**
Thousands of people in New York and New Jersey found their daily routines changed after Sandy. One year after the storm, here's what some people experience today as a result.
Browse and listen to the stories, and tell us about a specific time of day that Sandy has changed your life.
A year after Sandy, maybe the most that the region has accomplished is plans—lots of them: From government commissions, utility companies, architects and planners, about what to do and how to do it.
It is harder to find ways in which changes have already taken root. Below, WNYC offers some examples of what's already different than a year ago — and what isn’t.
6 Things That Have Changed: 1. Property owners are buying up temporary flood walls, rather than waiting for the city’s big plans to come to fruition. Landlords can erect the walls around their buildings in a matter of hours. One company, Aquafence, has sold its product to 21 customers over the past year, many to Lower Manhattan office buildings, with dozens of other deals in the works.
“They want assurance that if there is another storm, it’s a one-time cost,” said Adam Goldberg, the New York representative for the company. “They can sleep better at night.”
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At last count, New York State has purchased about a half-dozen homes in Oakwood Beach, Staten Island, the first of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s buyouts. Their properties will not be redeveloped, but instead left as a buffer zone for future storms. More than 300 other homeowners there are waiting in line for the same deal.
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New York City has added hundreds of baby cribs, wheelchairs, cartons of adult diapers, and gallons of Pedilyte to its stockpile in case of another evacuation. Turns out those items were in high demand, not just for special needs shelters, but for shelters for the general population as well.
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Consolidated Edison has built higher walls inside of its East 13th Street substation in Manhattan—the plant that flooded during Sandy and blacked out the lower third of the island. The utility, though, admits it still has much more to do.
5. “Housejacking” crews are putting houses up on stilts to elevate them above flood level.
In Long Beach, Long Island, for example, more than 60 people have applied for elevation permits, though that’s still a small fraction of homes in danger.
6. The tide—forgive the pun—is turning against property rights and in favor of coastal protections. In July, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled against a couple that wanted money because a dune had been constructed in front of their oceanfront house.
And 5 Things That Haven’t: 1. Thousands of people won’t be home for the holidays—again. New York City Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway estimated last week that “hundreds” of residents are unable to move back into their homes because they are still too damaged. The county planning board in Ocean County, N.J., for instance, estimated that 26,000 people there were displaced as of a month ago.
“It just takes time,” said Bill Owens, 61, a retired police detective whose Staten Island home was severely damaged in June and is waiting for permits to rebuild. “Whereas time for you and me might be one or two days, time in city language is one or two months.”
2. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been thinking about putting levees and seawalls along Staten Island and the Rockaways for half a century—but don’t expect to see any of them in the foreseeable future.
Midland Beach, Staten Island: one point along the coast where the Army Corps long envisioned levees to keep back storm surges
Previous plans were dropped for lack of funding and interest. New studies have been expedited but face a long approval process.
3. Evacuating people from flood zones will be tough in future storms, particularly for newcomers and people who survived Sandy relatively unscathed. “People who didn’t get flooded, those people aren’t likely to learn too much from other people’s experiences,” said Earl “Jay” Baker, a hurricane evacuation expert at Florida State University. “That is, they are not likely to say, ‘Gee, that could have been me.’”
According to a city survey, just about a third of the residents in Zone A fled for higher ground when ordered to before Sandy.
4. Sandy flooded the South Ferry station on the Number 1 subway line, forcing the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to reopen the old South Ferry station—the one that forces straphangers to crowd into the first five cars because the platform is too short.
The MTA expects it will be a number of years before the new South Ferry station gets fixed and flood-proofed.
5. Sea levels are still rising. The New York City Panel on Climate Change, a panel of experts convened by the Bloomberg administration, estimates that the sea level in this area will rise by 1 to 2.5 feet by the year 2050. With sea walls just a couple of feet above high tide, the city predicts that 43 miles of coastline will be as risk of daily or weekly flooding — and that 24 percent of the city’s land mass could become part of the 100-year flood plain.
"A year later, Sandy is still pretty fresh in everybody’s mind,” said Adam Sobel, a professor of atmospheric science at Columbia University. “But a lot of the things we really ought to do to protect us from the next one are expensive and will take come commitment. People forget quickly.”
A year after Sandy flooded the South Street Seaport with eight feet of water, some small businesses are still closed, but many have re-opened over the past few weeks and there's a spirit of optimism.
"To many of us who were closed for so long, just to have your doors open, even not a hundred percent complete, feels so amazing," said Amanda Byron Zink, owner of the Salty Paw, a doggie boutique and groom spa on Peck Slip.
The Salty Paw spent months hopping from one temporary space to another as its landlord fixed problems with the building. Now the shelves are filled with ceramic I♥NY dog bowls, Salty Paw fish cookies and Bowser Beer, a non-alcoholic beer for dogs that comes in beef and chicken flavors.
As recently as March, the Salty Paw and 85 percent of the restaurants, cafes and shops were still shuttered; now, the neighborhood is having a renaissance.
Neighborhood leaders organized a block party in mid-October to announce the Seaport is open for business, and a non-profit merchant association formed in Sandy's wake — the Old Seaport Alliance — has been receiving donations, including a $50,000 check from the Howard Hughes Corporation, which owns Pier 17.
While a handful of merchants have moved to higher ground nearby, others like the restaurants Il Brigante and Nelson Blue on Front Street are staying put and rebuilding.
"I decided to come back because I love this neighborhood and I have a personal attachment to this space," said Stefano Barbagallo, owner of Barbalu restaurant on Front Street, which partially re-opened October 18.
Midland Beach, Staten Island, is a working-class neighborhood on the eastern shore of Staten Island that sits just a few feet above sea level. It is exactly the kind of neighborhood where, according to a major report issued in August by the federal government, homeowners need to elevate their homes to prepare for rising sea levels and stronger storms. In one square mile there, 11 people drowned in their homes during Sandy.
But George Gabel isn't interested in altering his home at this point.
"I know in today's dollar what a nail costs and a piece of wood and labor. The house ain't worth me raising," hesaid."If I was going to raise anything I'd build new."
The 63-year old and his wife have lived in the area nearly their whole lives. They're retired, own their 2-story clapboard home, but did not have flood insurance. So now they have maxed out their credit cards making it livable again with new floors, walls and appliances. And the value of Gabel’s home has dropped about $120,000 after Sandy, so he says there is no way he would spend money to elevate the place now.
George and Shirley Gabel have lived in Midland Beach for over 60 years and don't plan to raise their homes to meet new guidelines. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
In this neighborhood people are supposed to elevate their homes about 10 feet above the mean sea level or more to meet new federal guidelines. Gurand's house sits roughly at the ground level, Gabel’s is about seven steps up.
And then there is 63-year old Joe Bertacchi, who is willing to elevate his home. But there is not much of it left at this point.
At the end of Iona Street, his 2-story home is just a shell. The roof is missing, there are no interior walls and not even a front door.
After Sandy, he began renovating his own home without permits or permission.
"We had relatives. We had volunteers to break up the ceiling because the water was still leaking," he said on a recent visit to his home. "It was trapped in between the floor and the cement ceiling."
Bertacchi got pretty far along, ripping out entire floors, putting in new joists and pillars and fixing the foundation. But last May, the city Department of Buildings stepped in and issued a stop work order on his renovating. He was fined $4,000 for demolishing his home without a permit. He paid it, but a spokeswoman for the buildings department, Kelly Magee, said he has not filed the proper paperwork to get the stop work order lifted.
Joe Bertacchi's in his damaged home on Iona Street in Midland Beach, Staten Island. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
More than 650,000 homes were damaged or destroyed by Sandy in New York and New Jersey, according to estimates. And while $1.8 billion in federal funds has gone to New York City to help bridge the gap between what homeowners received from flood insurance and what they need to rebuild, city officials say that will only help a small fraction of those homes to elevate above flood level.
Shaun Donovan, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, who issued the federal guidelines for rebuilding smarter in August, told WNYC that it is unfortunate many people have rebuilt their homes back just the way they were before Sandy.
"We know that for the long term what we’re building is a set of standards, and working with local communities that will ensure that communities are better protected when the next storm hits," he said.
He added, while the process for receiving federal aid has been slow, he expects more homeowners will begin receiving money over the next few months.
To listen to the full story, click the audio player.
Early on Oct. 29, 2012, tropical storm Sandy, churning through Atlantic Ocean waters in an easterly direction along America's Eastern Seaboard, hit a high pressure cold front and curved north-northeast. It was a left turn that became a left hook, aimed straight at the ribs of New Jersey.
Sandy's center made landfall at 7:30 p.m. at Brigantine, just north of Atlantic City. Its storm surge and 40 to 60 mile per hour winds delivered a uppercut to New York City, a lethal blow that was cloaked in darkness.
The combination of a huge tropical storm colliding with a massive cold front at high tide during a full moon meant were in for something that no one alive had ever experienced in the NY area.
New York City's 24/7 subway system — 656 miles of it — were shut down. All three area airports were closed. Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered mandatory evacuations of low lying and coastal areas. Millions of people lost power. Our region hunkered down and WNYC was on the air live watching and waiting with our listeners. More than 100 people in New York, NJ and Ct lost their lives to the storm, mostly due to drowning. The material damages were massive. Sandy would become the second-costliest hurricane in US history after Katrina leaving assessed damages of almost 65 billion dollars. And as we’re learning, the emotional toll is still being tallied everyday by those still putting their lives back together.
Listen as we follow up on where we stand twelve months after Sandy.
One year of covering Sandy in photos:
Sandy burned down more than 100 homes in Breezy Point. In the days after residents continued to pick through the rubble for belongings. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
(Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
The morning after Sandy in Coney Island. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
Outside of the housing projects in Far Rockaway residents charge cell phones while the power is still out. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
The morning after Sandy residents in ground floor apartments in Brighton Beach were inundated with water. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
In February the boardwalk at Beach 116th Street in Rockaway Park remains warped, yet residents continue to walk on it to get to the beach. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
In January residents in Rockaway Beach still had no power and ran an extension cord from a neighbors home for power. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
On Rockaway Beach Boulevard 17 buildings burned down during Sandy. In February most of the debris from the fire has been removed. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
Construction on comfort stations at Beach 116th Street in April, 2013 in Rockaways Park, Queens. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)
On Oct. 29 of last year, Cherell Manuel and her kids escaped Sandy's rising flood waters on Beach Channel Drive in Far Rockaway. The storm demolished their rented apartment and ruined their belongings.
They were four of several thousand New Yorkers who took shelter in city hotels after the storm. A year later, the family is among about 100 households that remain. The cost of the hotels — once covered by the city — is now being footed by the Red Cross.
On Friday, Manuel and her daughters will be transferred to their fourth hotel since Sandy hit. After awhile, Manuel said, you stop unpacking.
The 46-year-old mother recently stood in her cramped hotel room in The Manhattan at Times Square, surrounded by piles of clothes in bags and her 7-year-old’s toys. Manuel and Najhja have been waking up at 5:30 each morning to make the two-hour trek to her Queens school.
The older daughters live down the hall (her son lives in Brooklyn). Twenty-two-year-old Diamond Williams keeps Fefe, the pet rabbit saved from the flood waters, in her room. Manuel said being homeless has made Williams moody. But Williams said that you’d be cranky, too, if you had to exist on fast food chicken and hamburgers. They’ve all complained of stomach ailments and lingering colds since becoming displaced.
"We can't cook, we got to eat the same thing over and over, so it’s like we’re not used to that — my mother used to cook,” she said. “I think when we move out of the city, I will never come back [to Times Square].”
That thought — finally moving — is what has been keeping them all going.
After months of real estate hell, Manuel finally signed a lease this month on a three-bedroom duplex back in Far Rockaway. But then there were a few tense days when it looked like the landlord was going to renege. Finally, Manuel got the keys and hopes to move on Nov. 1. The family is planning a massive Thanksgiving feast to celebrate their new home.
To hear Kathleen Horan's full feature, click the audio player.
One year since Sandy washed away whole houses, knocked out boardwalks and flooded roadways, pockets of the Jersey Shore remain dead zones, with few residents back at home and little progress on damaged homes. Residents who applied for federal loans have fared far better than those who applied for government grants.
In February, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie announced that the state would initially funnel most of the $1.8 billion it received in federal monies on grants for residents and businesses.
"Our goal on this first section of the money, is to use it predominantly for a homeowner grant program, and a small business grant program," Christie said. "Notice I’m saying grants not loans. We know a lot of our homeowners already have debt."
And yet, a good deal of the grant money has yet to reach residents, especially those who applied for the Reconstruction, Rehabilitation, Elevation and Mitigation (RREM) Program. That program provides a grant of up to $150,000 for homeowners to rebuild.
The New Jersey Department of Community Affairs administers the grants. It said that of the 15,100 homeowners who applied for the RREM grant, only 100 applicants have actually received the money. Another 200 would be receiving their grants by the end of this month, said Lisa Ryan, Communications Director, New Jersey Department of Community Affairs, which administers the federal grant.
That leaves thousands of New Jersey residents waiting for the grant money in order to rebuild and in some cases, elevate their homes to comply with newly mandated federal flood maps.
“It’s hard to find a positive story. What we’ve heard is lots of stories about how people were denied funding for reasons that were so obviously wrong that it was as if nobody looked at their file,” said Adam Gordon, staff attorney at non-profit advocacy group Fair Share Housing Center. The group has filed a lawsuit against the Christie Administration seeking more information about where the grant money is going and why it's taking so long to reach residents.
The lack of payouts from the RREM program is in sharp contrast to loans originating from the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA). Of about 85,000 applicants, all but 100 have been processed.
Fewer than one percent of the applications for disaster loans related to Hurricane Sandy still have to be processed, according to data from the Small Business Administration. The SBA received more than 85,000 applications, about 100 were being processed as of Monday. The program provides government-backed lower interest loans to homeowners and businesses who qualify.
The lack of grant money has slowed rebuilding, especially in places hardest hit by the Sandy. "Ortley Beach was ground zero during Sandy," said Tom Kellaher, Mayor of Toms River Township.
Houses on the town's ocean blocks sustained significant damage. The township says it's working to condemn and demolish more than 600 houses that are more than 50% damaged by Sandy and left abandoned by residents. Some homes still lack basic utilities.
On Fielder Avenue, 10 homes were completely destroyed, and most of the others on the block sustained more than 50% damaged. WNYC has been visiting the block and collecting the stories of residents and their struggles to rebuild. Most of the homes are still vacant, and the few that have been rebuilt are rental properties that qualified for business loans, not grants.
"We weren’t able to get any free money. Through the SBA we secured about $128,000. That’s why you see it in the condition that it is," said John Rominski who owns three rental units on Fielder Avenue.
He's hoping to see more construction happening in his neighborhood soon, as are other residents.
Until last October, Santo and Gale Lisa had spent 30 dry years in their house in Ocean Breeze, Staten Island. No wave had ever come close to cresting the raised boulevard that lies between them and the beach.
But then Sandy pushed a white-capped surge of water down their street. "That's how fast it came in: boom, boom," Santo Lisa said.
But that was only the start of the couple's trauma. Before the night was over, their 89 year-old neighbor across the street, Ella Norris, would be dead.
"It was horrible," Gale Lisa said. "Thinking about it gives me chills."
Ms. Lisa still struggles with her memories from that night. Like others, she has turned to counseling for help. She's improving—"I laugh more now," she said—but knows a full recovery will take time.
New York state estimates that its crisis counseling program has been contacted a million times by people affected by Sandy. Christian Burgess, a helpline director at The Mental Health Association of New York City, said media coverage of the storm's first anniversary is also likely to stir up emotions in survivors.
"It exposes them to memories—sights, sounds that might take them back to the disaster," Burgess said. "And if they've had struggles in the past year, that can trigger flashbacks, nightmares."
To hear the full story, click on the audio player.
Nearly a year after Sandy devastated some public housing projects, thousands of people at those developments still depend on temporary, mobile boilers for heat and hot water. Residents say these devices deliver unreliable service, and many worry they are in for another cold winter.
Thousands of people in New York and New Jersey found their daily routines changed after Sandy. One year after the storm, let us know what you do differently because that newsstand on the corner is no longer there, your neighbor has moved or your favorite restaurant is closed.
Tell us about a specific time of day that Sandy has changed forever.
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.
Hours before Sandy hit on Oct. 28, 2012, Mayor Michael Bloomberg stood in an evacuation shelter on the lower east side and urged residents of Zone A — the area most in danger of flooding — to get out.
“We have a plan to keep you and New Yorkers safe. If you follow that plan we’ll get through this storm just fine,” Bloomberg said, addressing a nervous city.
But that plan didn’t work for everyone and, in the chaotic days after the storm, stories emerged of people trapped in darkened high-rises struggling to survive.
To be sure, many of those people chose to ignore evacuation orders and didn’t prepare for the storm despite repeated warnings. But for some — particularly the city’s 900,000 disabled residents — the local emergency plans were inadequate, according to advocates for people with disabilities.
Those advocates are suing New York City in federal court alleging the city’s emergency plans violate the Americans with Disabilities Act — a case that could have implications for local governments nationwide.
“We brought this lawsuit because people with disabilities in New York were scared of what was going to happen during a disaster,” said Julia Pinover, a senior staff attorney for Disability Rights Advocates, the organization handling the class-action lawsuit against the city. The plaintiffs include the Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled and Center for Independence of the Disabled, New York.
According to the lawsuit, the city doesn’t have adequate transportation to help disabled people evacuate, has failed to ensure shelters are accessible and has no plan to find and rescue those trapped after an emergency.
And advocates say practically nothing has changed since Sandy — meaning the city’s most vulnerable are in just as much danger today as they were a year ago.
“I haven’t seen any improvements in the plans over the past year. So I think if a hurricane were to hit tomorrow we’d see the same thing as we saw during Sandy,” Pinover said.
City officials and attorneys declined multiple interview requests. Throughout the case they said the city has numerous plans and resources to help all New Yorkers. They also stressed the importance of personal responsibility.
The city’s Law Department did provide a prepared statement.
“Through a wide range of on-the-ground efforts, targeted communications, outreach, and specialized programs, the City takes tremendous care to incorporate the needs of people with disabilities into every stage of its emergency planning,” according to the statement. “After Sandy, we engaged in a rigorous and expedited process to further enhance our existing programs for all New Yorkers, including, of course, people with disabilities.”
The Department of Justice, however, seems to disagree. The feds weighed in on the case in May — filing a statement with the court supporting the plaintiffs and urging the judge to find against the city.
Such filings carry a lot of weight, said Samuel Bagenstos a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and an expert on disability law.
“The Department of Justice is the agency that’s responsible for enforcing the Americans with Disabilities Act against state and local governments and they have a special responsibility to tell the courts what the law means and the courts listen to them very carefully,” Bagenstos said.
He added that people across the country are paying close attention to the New York case.
“I think it’s a very big deal,” Bagenstos said. “These are really life and death issues for people with disabilities. And this is a case that establishes the principle that people with disabilities, like everybody else, have to be fully accounted for in emergency preparedness actions.”
Pinover said the suit was part of a growing recognition nationwide following Hurricane Katrina that people with disabilities are particularly vulnerable during a disaster. Her group actually filed the lawsuit in 2011 after Irene.
“The lawsuit is kind of amazing because if you read the complaint it reads like a play by play for what happened during Sandy to the class of persons with disabilities who we represent,” Pinover said.
It’s only the second such suit in the country. Disability Rights Advocates also handled the first lawsuit, which was against the City and County of Los Angeles. A federal judge in 2011 ruled against the City of Los Angeles and the advocates reached a settlement with the county.
The New York case went to trial in March, after Sandy. So, most of the testimony and filings focused on the city’s performance during that storm.
The case included the testimony of Joyce De La Rosa who has an orthopedic bone defect and is in a motorized wheelchair. She lives in a Kips Bay high-rise just outside the area Bloomberg ordered to evacuate during the storm.
When her power went out she was trapped with her daughter, who is also in a wheelchair, in their third-floor apartment.
De La Rrosa uses an electric-powered oxygen machine at night. Without it she gets headaches, her body hurts and she can’t sleep.
“My daughter wanted me to go to the hospital right away after 24 hours. Because she said ‘Mommy you know you can’t sleep and you’re going to have trouble breathing,’ you know. So she was really concerned,” De La Rosa said. “I said 'Well this is just 24 hours now.' And then it was 48 hours. But after that then the next day, the third day, I said 'No, I’m going to go.'”
De La Rosa ended up calling an ambulance and going to the hospital.
Advocates say the city had no plan to check on people like De La Rosa. Emergency personnel didn’t start going door-to-door until 10 days after the storm hit. And the city’s program to help evacuate the homebound might as well have been nonexistent. It evacuated fewer than 100 people before Sandy hit and was never restarted after the storm, according to documents and testimony filed as part of the lawsuit.
The case also showed that the city didn’t really have a way for disabled people to get information during the storm other than 311, which was overwhelmed and had wait times of 26 minutes on Oct. 31.
The city failed to stockpile shelters with items for disabled evacuees — supplies like meals for diabetics. And testimony revealed officials didn’t even know how many shelters were accessible to people in wheelchairs.
In court, city officials and attorneys defended the city’s performance testifying that the city does consult with disability rights groups in emergency planning, has a volunteer emergency response program, uses an advanced warning system to reach many with disabilities and operates special needs shelters for evacuees. The lawyers also raised questions about how much the city was at fault in individual cases. For example, a city attorney questioned why De La Rosa hadn’t gotten a back-up oxygen tank prior to the storm as opposed to relying on her electric-powered machine.
The city also appears to have taken steps to address some of the disability rights advocates’ concerns. In the past year, the city has tried to figure out which shelters are accessible and the Mayor's Office recently recommended making door-to-door searches for the vulnerable standard protocol.
But advocates say the changes aren’t enough and the city has known for years how vulnerable disabled people are during an emergency.
Melba Torres, who evacuated to an inaccessible shelter during Irene, testified in the trial. Torres has cerebral palsy and uses a 500-pound motorized wheelchair to get around. She went to a shelter with her aides for the 2011 storm.
“I have to tell you that it was not equipped for us, for somebody in a wheelchair,” Torres said. “They had military cots so I stood in my chair and put pillows to prop myself because being in a military cot was unbelievably awkward for me and it just made my back hurt.”
She slept upright in her wheelchair. If that wasn’t bad enough, the shelter’s bathroom door was too narrow. So her aides had to carry her into the stall, which was embarrassing, she said.
Despite the experience, Torres said she was willing to evacuate again during Sandy. But she said she wasn’t told to leave until 5:40 p.m. the night the storm hit — less than three hours before her building’s elevators were scheduled to shut down. Torres said the shutdown actually started closer to 7 p.m. and she didn’t have time to line up transportation that could take her wheelchair.
“We were still here. The elevators had been shut down so at that point I was thinking ‘Oh dear God, how am I going to come down?’ I live on an eighth floor and I was really afraid,” she said.
Hours later, the power went out leaving Torres and her aide in total darkness.
“Total fear came over me and I just cried. I just cried because I felt trapped and I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to leave,” she said.
It’s unclear when the judge in the case will issue an opinion. Some involved in the lawsuit speculate he might release a decision soon to coincide with the anniversary of Sandy.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is expanding his Sandy buyout program to more storm-damaged homes—this time to Long Island.
The state has sent out several hundred letters to homeowners in six clusters, most of them directly along the waterfront on the island’s South Shore. The communities targeted include parts of Lindenhurst, Oakdale, Sayville and Bayport, Patchogue and Mastic Beach, as well as the Flanders section of Riverhead.
The buyouts are optional—the owners decide whether to take part or not. But if they do, the land would be turned into open space permanently to provide a buffer along the coast, so that if the land flooded in future hurricanes, there would be minimal damage to property.
Cuomo targeted his first set of buyouts earlier this year on a hard-hit section of Staten Island known as Oakwood Beach. Enthusiasm for the buyouts there has been strong, and closings are taking place this month.
But on Long Island, the reception is far more mixed. One homeowner in Lindenhurst, Joan Ensulo, said she would happily take one. She was at home during Sandy, and her house took on four feet of water, causing major damage to an income-producing apartment on her ground floor.
“It is beautiful,” she said, looking across Bayview Avenue West to the Great South Bay on the other side. “But now it’s scary. I wasn’t scared before but now I am. You know. It’s different.”
(Matthew Schuerman/WNYC)
Joan Ensulo, the owner of a Sandy-damaged home in Lindenhurst, wants the state to buy her out.
Across the street and down a few houses, Michael Taddeo was more reluctant. He said he has already poured money and energy into repairing his home and didn’t want to leave.
“We have to love the ocean,” he said. “We have to put up with the bad and the good: 363 days are good, two days are bad.”
According to Seth Diamond, the director of storm recovery for Cuomo, the state is offering to buy out a total of about 600 properties in Suffolk County. If a property owner is interested, the state will assess the home and offer what the property would have been worth before Sandy damaged it, plus a small bonus as an enticement.
Environmentalists say the buyouts will save taxpayers money because it removes homes from dangerous coastal areas that are likely to flood again and require federal agencies to pay for emergency relief.
Said Eric Goldstein, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, “There is a growing recognition among at least some folks who live in the most dangerous flood zone areas that staying in place only to experience repeated flooding episodes is not a wise strategy, it’s not economically sound and it puts their family in jeopardy.”
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