Tempest and aftermath: Twelve years on, the lessons of Sandy remain
A dozen years ago today, what came to be known as Superstorm Sandy was bearing down on New York City with unprecedented force and devastation after it had already ravaged swaths of the Caribbean and other parts of the country. New York had borne the brunt of big storms before, of course, but we were not necessarily prepared for the incredible storm surge that the hurricane generated, which caused extensive flooding, tens of billions of dollars’ worth of damages and more than 50 direct deaths in NYC, not to mention the likely dozens of excess deaths that were caused by complications from the storm.
A dozen years ago today, what came to be known as Superstorm Sandy was bearing down on New York City with unprecedented force and devastation after it had already ravaged swaths of the Caribbean and other parts of the country. New York had borne the brunt of big storms before, of course, but we were not necessarily prepared for the incredible storm surge that the hurricane generated, which caused extensive flooding, tens of billions of dollars’ worth of damages and more than 50 direct deaths in NYC, not to mention the likely dozens of excess deaths that were caused by complications from the storm.
Sandy showed us a couple things. Most saliently, it showed us we were vulnerable, that all the might and prestige of NYC could be brushed easily aside by the force of nature unless we took active precautions to safeguard ourselves. The more specific lesson it gave us was that the preparations we had devised and were devising, the standard approach to emergency management that had worked for so long, did not hold in this new era of climate change.
Our precautions had not fully incorporated the notion that storms could very quickly dump inches of rainwater into the city — as Hurricane Ida would do to deadly effect about nine years later — or that sea level rise would make surges more potent and come more inland. Everyone will have to adjust accordingly, and the process has been slow. Earlier this year, the Government Accountability Office chastised the Army Corps of Engineers for having drawn up mitigation plans for the five boroughs that didn’t properly account for the changing climate.
Even if the Corps takes all these recommendations, we’re looking at rollouts that will take lots of bureaucratic wrangling and years to implement. It’s not that there isn’t work ongoing; just this month, the city unveiled the seawalls built as part of the Lower East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, put in place to protect miles of vulnerable waterfront. Yet even that project has faced pushback and delays, including a community lawsuit that had to be thrown out before the project could proceed.
Time, unfortunately, is not a luxury we possess on climate mitigation. There are some encouraging signs around our climate posture — renewables keep growing and getting cheaper and more accessible, reliance on oil and gas keeps dropping, emissions are down — but it is not enough to head off some of the more severe impacts of climate change. We as a city and state cannot single-handedly shift the balance on climate change, but we certainly can do things to protect ourselves as these issues arise.
One idea is to consider cutting some red tape specifically for climate mitigation projects. No one is saying that anything that could feasibly be said to have a climate-related purpose should steamroll all existing zoning and regulatory processes or completely cut out community input, but such projects need to get off the ground as quickly as possible. It’s comical to allow something like the need for a thousand-page “environmental impact study” to delay for years the implementation of projects meant to address climate impact (or, for that matter, do our part to improve our environment; see congestion pricing).
We can’t prevent another Sandy, but we can prevent the worst of the devastation.
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