Hurricane debris near the damaged ConEd power plant on 14th Street and Avenue C. Photo by Laura Mishkin.

This week power returned downtown, kids went back to school and the crane dangling 74 stories above West 57th Street was secured. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, however, New York City is far from fixed.

More than 70,000 residents remained without power on Monday. The inundated Brooklyn-Battery and Queens-Midtown tunnels remained closed. Ruined homes and businesses along the city’s shores left thousands of New Yorkers in emergency shelters. The city faces billions of dollars in damages and billions more in lost economic activity.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg summed up the city’s recovery on Oct. 30, the day after the storm: “This is going to take a while.”

Looking down the long road ahead, though, New Yorkers are also looking back, and asking big questions about the city’s readiness for a storm of Sandy’s magnitude. Did we see it coming? What more could we have done to prepare?

The threat of a massively debilitating hurricane in the city, it turns out, is nothing new to local weather experts. In fact, many have anticipated—with near-faultless accuracy in regard to damages—a Sandy-sized storm in the city for years.

In 2005, Aaron Naparstek, a writer for New York Press (this paper’s predecessor, now online at nypress.com), interviewed emergency preparedness and response coordinators and weather scientists to find out just how likely it was that the city would soon be struck by a large-scale hurricane. The resulting article was prescient.

“A storm of that magnitude may repeat every 70 to 80 years or so,” said Mike Lee, then-director of Watch Command at New York City’s Office of Emergency Management. He spoke with Naparstek about the infamous 1938 “Long Island Express,” a near-Category 4 hurricane that hammered West Hampton and decimated parts of the East Coast. “Do the math,” he said. “Whether it happens this year, next year or in five years, it’s going to happen.”

Naparstek’s article lays out the evidence for Lee’s claim: The city’s location at the apex of Long Island and New Jersey’s right angle is ideal for collecting water; its shallow continental shelf acts as a funnel for storm surges(New York City, Naparstek mentions, has some of the highest storm-surge values in the country); wind shear and sea-surface pressure are low; and climate change is only making things more tempestuous.

“In the event of a direct hit by a Category 3 hurricane,” Naparstek writes, “surge maps show that the Holland and Battery tunnels will be completely filled with seawater, with many subway and railroad tunnels severely flooded as well. The runways of LaGuardia and JFK airports will get flooded by 18.1 and 31.2 feet of water, respectively.”

The article is all too convincing in light of the devastation Sandy wreaked, but there never was an opposing argument. Naparstek said he began interviewing weather experts for the article when he received a standard-issue Hurricane Emergency Evacuation Map at his western Park Slope apartment and saw, to his disbelief, that parts of his own home would be underwater in the event of major storm.

“A lot of people say, ‘How can you come up with these numbers? Thirty feet, that’s ridiculous. It’s science fiction.’ ” Lee told Naparstek. “Actually, it’s science fact.”

The question that motivated Naparstek is still relevant today. “How can it be that nobody’s talking about this?”

“I think people are aware of the threat of flooding,” says Professor Nicholas K. Coch, a coastal geology expert at Queens College who once bore the nickname “Dr. Doom” for being the first scientist to widely publicize the city’s hurricane history and vulnerabilities. “But there are political negatives about forcing people to do things.” He said that people are reluctant to spend money on infrastructural defenses against disasters that are unlikely or infrequent. The installation of storm-surge barriers along the city’s coastline, for instance, could cost $10 billion.

When major storms do hit, though, Coch emphasized, huge amounts of money are lost in reparations, as made clear in Sandy’s aftermath.

“There’s a lot of blindness,” Coch lamented. “There are too many people refusing to face the reality of the situation.”

Ross Dickman, the meteorologist-in-charge at the National Weather Service’s New York office in Upton, agreed that New Yorkers, like all East Coasters, have a dangerously complacent mindset when it comes to the risk of natural disasters.

“People have a mentality that they’ve lived through this before,” he said. “There is this ‘home’ mentality that needs to be overcome.”

Dickman noted that his team predicted Sandy’s severity well in advance, and gave presentations to emergency managers that detailed the storm’s anticipated behavior and effects. “From an outreach perspective, we did everything that we possibly could,” he said.

Professor Coch and Naparstek both acknowledged that the city’s immediate emergency response certainly went better than it could have, applauding evacuation notices and subway closures. It was the city’s big-picture infrastructural and planning decisions, though, that both questioned.

“Our defenses against flooding are abysmal,” Coch pointed out.

Local politicians also have identified numerous flaws in the city’s preparedness for severe storms, and have begun suggesting changes that need to be made.

“The construction of this city did not anticipate these kinds of situations,” said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in a recent radio interview. “We are only a few feet above sea level. As soon as you breach the sides of Manhattan, you now have a whole infrastructure under the city that fills.”

Congressman Jerry Nadler has been outspoken about the city’s need to invest in more comprehensive protection from extreme weather conditions. He supports “looking into barriers, levees and other infrastructure and making the necessary federal investments to ensure that cities and communities are protected,” a rep from Nadler’s office told Our Town. “And we should do such a review keeping in mind the effects of climate change, rising sea levels and the growing frequency of intense storms, as well as other areas of the country that are vulnerable.”

Coch and Dickman asserted that money spent on storm preparation would not be wasted.

“With expected climate change over time, we definitely need to prepare for events like these,” Dickman said.

Coch was more direct. When asked if New Yorkers should expect more frequent storms of Sandy’s intensity, he turned the question around. “The sea levels are rising, and parts of the city are sinking. What do you think?”

Downtown Hospital to hold Emergency Preparedness Symposium on Friday

By Paul Bisceglio

Dr. Antonio Dajer is no stranger to emergencies. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, he was the physician on duty at New York’s Downtown Hospital—the only hospital in Lower Manhattan. The World Trade Center attack forced him to coordinate treatment for over 10 times the emergency room’s daily average of 80 to 100 patients, including those with severe burns, gaping wounds and head injuries.

Now the hospital’s chairman of emergency medicine, Dajer will use his experience in emergency response to direct this year’s Emergency Preparedness Symposium, an annual, daylong series of presentations sponsored by the hospital that will be held at Pace University on Friday, Sept. 14. The talks this year will take a hard look at the city’s integrated emergency communication systems, asking just how coordinated the NYPD, FDNY and local hospitals are in the face of crisis.

“My experience of 9/11 convinced me that communication issues in disaster response are paramount,” Dajer told Our Town Downtown. “NYC—and every city and state—needs to keep integrating Fire Department and Police Department communications.”

Dajer said that this year’s symposium differs from previous years’ in its exclusive focus on the issue of communication. According to him, the day will provide health care and corporate attendees with practical information on “real-world response tools,” including how to improvise with the tools we all have, but don’t always think to use in emergencies—smart phones and social media.

The day’s six presentations will discuss technological and conceptual advances in emergency response at local, national and international levels. Retired U.S. Army Gen. Brian Geehan will begin with the talk “Advances in FDNY Response Practices,” and lectures on technologies’ role in recent relief efforts for post-earthquake Haiti and post-tornado Joplin, Mo., will follow. After lunch break tours of Downtown Hospital and the World Trade Center, FEMA’s regional communications director, Sean Kielty, will detail his agency’s extensive communications map, then a Downtown Hospital representative and the emergency preparedness coordinator for New York-Presbyterian Healthcare System will break down the city’s own emergency response techniques.

Asked what especially would stand out in the presentations, Dajer predicted that “the recent dramatic advances in how social networking can be applied to disaster response” would dominate most of the day’s conversation. Tweeting may seem trivial when you’re typing about the burger you just ate, but social media has the power to streamline on-the-scene updates of emergencies as they unfold, which can provide response teams with up-to-the-minute information on where their resources are most needed—one component of “crisis mapping,” which Dr. Jennifer Chan will address specifically in the Haiti earthquake presentation.

The symposium will close with remarks by Dajer, who noted that Downtown Hospital’s role in 9/11 has earned the hospital an important and iconic place in emergency preparedness in the world. In 2006, the hospital opened a new $25 million, 26,000-square-foot emergency center capable of treating a 9/11-sized patient load, and it continues to facilitate the emergency preparedness symposium to help the city remain vigilant in the always-looming threat of disaster.

The symposium runs from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Friday at One Pace Plaza. For more information, visit the hospital’s website at www.downtownhospital.org.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

How one local group is making sure Upper East Siders are ready for hurricanes, terrorist attacks and other
doomsday scenarios.

Imagine one day in the indeterminate future, you’re going about your day when the unthinkable happens. A bomb has gone off in Midtown. An earthquake has toppled Manhattan. A blackout has disabled all communication and transportation. Thrown into this disaster scenario, without warning, do you know what to do?

Many New Yorkers might simply panic. But there is a group of Upper East Side residents who are working diligently to ensure that their neighbors won’t be among the frenzied masses if a major event throws the area into chaos.

“Nobody seems to be doing anything. Nobody seems to be activating this neighborhood. We have to have effective policy makers and implementation on all levels,” said Jacquie Watkins Slifka, the driving force behind the Upper East Side Community Coalition. The group of stakeholders—representatives from local buildings and businesses, churches and schools as well as from the Office of Emergency Management (OEM), the Fire Department and the Police Department—has been quietly meeting over the past several months in order to better prepare the neighborhood for a disaster.

Slifka became concerned about her community’s preparedness after Hurricane Irene struck the city last summer and she saw how the shelters in the neighborhood were overwhelmed and insufficiently run.

“I went into a shelter,” Slifka said of that time. “Nobody knew how to run a shelter. I made up my mind that I would go back to work and that we would create a model and a pilot program. I am very discouraged by this whole situation where there is no preparation by the community whatsoever.”

Slifka had formed the Association of Residential Boards, a group of Upper East Side co-op and building presidents, in 1990 and had always been surprised that few buildings had comprehensive emergency plans in place. She joined the East Sixties Neighborhood Association’s Community Emergency Response Team (ESNA CERT), a volunteer group trained and operated by the Office of Emergency Management, but felt it wasn’t doing enough, which is why she began to form the Coalition.

She soon recruited Dr. Robert Bristow to the effort. Bristow is the medical director of emergency management at New York Presbyterian Hospital and the director of disaster medicine at Columbia University’s College of Physicians & Surgeons. He’s seen his share of emergency situations around the world, and was particularly inspired to get the local community better prepared after his trip to Japan in 2011 in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami there.

“They had invested an awful lot of time and energy in community preparedness. Five days post-event, the community itself has sort of organized where the survivors were, gotten bedding and food and were coordinating with the state and federal governments,” Bristow said.

Many displaced survivors were on their own for about seven days, he said, while the federal government was dealing with the nuclear disaster and the local governments were overtaxed helping the severely injured and most vulnerable populations.

“It kind of gave me pause. I was thinking about the snowstorm after Christmas where people were complaining that the government couldn’t [plow] the streets quickly enough,” Bristow said. “Most of the preparedness is at the city level, the hospital level. I don’t think the community is as prepared as it needs to be.”

Bristow often trains medical personnel for emergencies, but he began to think about shifting the focus to civilian training. Slifka heard him speak and got him on board with her newly formed Coalition. The goal is to get leaders from every building in the 15-block radius from East 68th to 71st streets between York and Park avenues connected and prepared for a situation that would render the Upper East Side isolated or in heavy crisis mode.

“Most of the people in the area, when there’s a disaster, they have a hard time grasping what to do,” said Bill Fichter, the superintendent of the Trump Palace at 200 E. 69th Street. “The whole idea on this is we act together as a community and we help one another. My job in this was to band a bunch of the supers together instead of just being caught in our own little world, our own buildings.”
Fichter said that most superintendents and building presidents they’ve approached have been excited to join the coalition, recognizing how important it could be to have a localized plan. They’re working on developing a centralized communication system that would activate everyone with the coalition’s boundaries, and on a way to get residents more informed.
“There is much more disinformation than information out there,” said Barry Schneider, the executive director of the ESNA CERT. His team of about 17 active members, trained by OEM in areas like fire fighting, light search and rescue, and basic medical triage, has been deployed only four or five times since it formed, but he said that the most important role the CERT can play is in education.

“We try to go out and lecture and discuss Ready New York,” a manual the city publishes on disaster preparedness, Schneider said. “We should be doing more of that, the city should be doing more of that. Most people haven’t got a clue.”

One of the most important things, Bristow said, is to let people know that in an emergency, they should not automatically go to their nearest hospital.

“If there’s a major event, we’re really going to need the community to be somewhat autonomous and take care of itself,” Bristow said. “The reality is that during a disaster, a hospital is going to be the last place to go. We’re going to be scrambling to take care of everyone.”
Slifka emphasized that people cannot rely on the local authorities to step in immediately in a disaster, which is the driving motivation behind her efforts.

“Families have to be able to make some quick decisions. We’re trying to get all that in place so that we’re not relying on the city, state or federal government,” Slifka said. “There will be go bags in every apartment, there will extra water in every building. I’m determined to have this one area prepared, and I hope it will serve as a model.”

While all of this may sound terribly unpleasant, it is simply to point out that September is National Preparedness Month, and your friendly neighborhood CERT would like to remind you that emergencies occur every day, that they can happen to anyone and that the time to prepare is not when an emergency is actually occurring, but beforehand.

CERT stands for “Community Emergency Response Team,” and there is one in every community board district in the city. CERTs comprise citizen volunteers who have taken an 11-week course in emergency preparedness and response given by the Office of Emergency Management. The training includes fire safety and suppression, disaster medical operations, psychological first aid, light search and rescue, traffic control, terrorism awareness and incident command structure. Many CERT members are also certified in CPR, First Aid and the use of the automated external defibrillator. We are also required to continue our training through ongoing city courses and disaster simulations.

A CERT’s mission is threefold: to provide outreach about emergency preparedness to the community through the city’s “Ready New York” literature and free presentations, to assist first responders (FDNY, NYPD, EMTs, etc.) in various ways during actual emergencies and, in rare instances, to serve as first responders when first responders are delayed. You may have seen us under our green canopy at local street fairs and community events, providing information on emergency preparedness.

The most important things you need to do to prepare for emergencies are: develop an emergency plan and a communications plan, and create a go-bag and a “shelter in place” carton.

An emergency plan includes planning evacuation routes and meeting places for separated family members. A communications plan includes connecting with family in an emergency, including an out-of-state number that separated family members can call to report their safety and location. A go-bag (one per family member) is what you take with you if you need to evacuate quickly, and includes items such as a flashlight, water, food (e.g., energy bars), a battery-powered radio, a first aid kit, medicines, an extra set of house/car keys, some cash and a waterproof bag with copies of critical documents (IDs, passports, leases, insurance policies, prescription/medical info, etc.). A “shelter in place” carton contains enough necessities to allow your family to remain in your home for up to 72 hours, including water, non-perishable ready-to-eat canned foods, a manual can opener, a whistle (to summon help if unable to speak), a phone that does not rely on electricity and all of the items listed for the go-bag above. Detailed information on all of the above is available at Office of Emergency Management’s website, www.nyc.gov/oem.

If you have not taken these steps, National Preparedness Month is the perfect time to start. Because the better prepared you are, the more secure you and your loved ones will be.
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Ian Alterman is deputy team chief of the Upper West Side Community Emergency Response Team (UWS CERT).