Ten years ago, Hurricane Sandy, or Superstorm Sandy if you prefer, swept up the East Coast and devastated parts of the coast from the mid-Atlantic, to New England. New Jersey and New York City were particularly hard-hit and all told, over 70 people died in the US, with another 70 people also dying in Cuba and Haiti. The damages cost over $50b.
The storm was technically not a hurricane by the time it reached the coast of NY, but it hardly matters. The coastal surge was around 5-6 ft in the NY area, and much of the coastline was left tattered and flooded, or just buried in sand.
Since then, there has been some very inspiring progress.
An organization I follow is called the Waterfront Alliance, and in this month’s newsletter it documents a collaborative boat tour that they organized to show the work that has been done to improve resilience - both physical and social - along the shoreline. There has been so much work, and so many partnerships built to create deeper resilience. It really shows what can be done when everyone is pulling in more or less the same direction.
It’s super important that along with improved building codes, zoning, and emergency planning comes community resilience - strong social connections, residents empowered with knowledge, good health, and adequate financial resources to mitigate and deal with disruption. The Waterfront Alliance supports all these projects.
And check out this article with innovative architecture deployed since Sandy - from floodable basements, to temporary flood barriers, to oyster beds as breakwaters, to a first floor designed to be a ‘pass through’ for water, to raising buildings, to small-scale storm-proof power plants and so on. Such amazing ingenuity and I love to see the range of solutions, not just a one-size-fits-all approach.
The Department of Interior as well as other federal agencies spent hundreds of millions of dollars on wetland and habitat restoration in the wake of Sandy. Not only will the habitat be more resilience for its own survival, but will be a buffer for the human environment behind it.
The recovery from Sandy has been far from trouble-free, and of course there are challenges and outright failures in who gets the dollars to build back, but progress IS happening. We won’t fully know how well we have created resilience until the region is tested again, but all indications are that the city of NY and surrounding states and communities is more prepared than it was a decade ago.
Continuing climate change will however, continue to put buildings, and more importantly, people and habitat, at risk. More and more of the housing stock in NYC will be subject to flooding based on rising seas, for example. Essentially the work will never be done for the foreseeable future.
However, the innovations and most especially the partnerships built post-Sandy will continue to be the backbone of creating the 21st Century communities that will be safer, cleaner, and more resilient in a changing climate.
So glad to hear this. The ocean owns the coast. People don't understand it, but it's true. It always was. It's just becoming more pressing with climate change.
Fascinating to read about the building design changes especially....