Wh e n t h e B i g A p p l e me t H u r r i c a
Just after low tide ocean water reaches up to the damaged section of NC 12 just north of the Mirlo Beach area of Rodanthe on Hatteras Island on Monday, Nov. 19, 2012. The road was damaged by storm surge from Hurricane Sandy. A temporary sand road was built to the west of the right of way, passable only by four wheel drive vehicles. Access to that stretch of sand road was closed to all traffic intermittently due to ocean overwash.
© PA Images
To be sure, New York City has faced many major emergencies and even life-changing events, but the city has never experienced in modern times an event that damaged so many areas and impacted so many residents. Each phase of response and current recovery has taken a massive and coordinated effort. Sandy taught us that response and recovery from a super storm required the City’s response to get big enough fast enough to handle the myriad issues we faced – almost all of which arrived at the same time as Sandy did. This necessitated the City having in place the task forces, agencies, space and structures long before Sandy’s arrival to deal with the critical issues in the aftermath of the storm, including dewatering, power restoration, debris removal and residential support.
As Commissioner of the New York City Office of Emergency Management I am paid to be a pessimist. I look to the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. And plan we did. Preparations for this storm did not start the week before Sandy arrived; they started in the wake of Hurricane Katrina which devastated the City of New Orleans in 2005. NYC OEM studied the reports and analyses of Katrina and built the largest and most operational coastal storm plan in the country. In 2007 OEM issued the NYC Coastal Storm Plan. This detailed plan is really a series of plans that guides the City’s storm tracking and decision making, response and recovery from the hazards that large scale coastal storms, like hurricanes, bring. The plan is “operational” because it addresses not just what we need to do, but how we get it done.
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The decision to activate the Coastal Storm Plan was made by the Mayor at executive- level briefings first at City Hall and then at OEM headquarters in Brooklyn. As Sandy approached, each of the plan’s component parts were activated – from evacuation considerations for the general population to health care facilities to sheltering to recovery efforts including task forces centered on downed trees, debris, power restoration and the care and feeding of our residents. This plan guided New York City through a very
difficult period: evacuations were ordered for more than 370,000 residents across many coastal communities and 65 evacuation centers and 75 shelters were opened, supplied and staffed.
Certainly, life-safety was the first and foremost priority before and after the storm. Thirty-six hospitals, nursing homes and adult care facilities were evacuated and patients and residents relocated. Post-Sandy, the Police and Fire Departments initiated aggressive search, rescue and security operations. Further supporting our efforts, Urban Search and Rescue Teams conducted door-to-door searches of 30,000 homes in impacted areas before switching to an unprecedented humanitarian mission. Our federal partners,
our communities and many others joined with us to execute the operation.
Over 2.1 million meals were distributed to those in need; disaster relief centers were established to offer cash assistance, food, and medical and prescription support. Private facilities and public infrastructure were inundated with salt water, requiring extensive dewatering and repairs. Approximately 600 million gallons of water infiltrated our nation’s busiest and oldest underground mass transit system, tunnels and critical inter-city roads, the World Trade Center site, critical telecommunication infrastructure in Lower Manhattan, Con Edison utility vaults and many other parts of the city’s infrastructure.
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