Superstorm Sandy’s impact on Long Islanders was as dramatically varied as fate usually is.
For some, the storm of October 2012 was over when the rain stopped, or when power was restored. But for thousands, it meant gut-churning losses and a tough haul to a new normal — a haul that for many isn’t over.
Those in South Shore communities that were the hardest hit are still struggling to recover five years after Sandy swept in and changed their lives. Others are enjoying water views from an elevated house.


Long Island

James T. Madore

Superstorm Sandy’s impact on the economies of Long Island and New York City in the first three days after the storm was equal to 135,000 people being out of work for an entire year. 
That was according to state estimates used in the initial response to Sandy and obtained by Newsday this month. The estimates cover the three weekdays following the storm’s landfall on Monday, Oct. 29, 2012. 
Empire State Development, the state’s primary business-aid agency, calculated that the millions of workers affected by Sandy together lost an estimated $8.2 billion in wages and other personal income. 
Sandy flooded thousands of businesses in the metropolitan area and left many without electricity. Commuters were stranded, with the Long Island Rail Road and other mass transit shut down in the days following the storm. 
Personal income includes salaries, investment earnings and the proceeds of owning a business. 
The initial estimates of Sandy’s economic impact haven’t been made public before and were released in response to a Newsday request. 
They are based on formulas from Regional Economic Models Inc., an Amherst, Massachusetts-based forecasting firm that studies the fiscal impacts of hurricanes and other natural disasters. The two-page state report presents a dramatic picture of Sandy’s first effects on jobs and business activity. 
Production of goods and services in the metro area fell by $16 billion in the three weekdays after the storm, Oct. 30 through Nov. 1. 
“This initial analysis of the scope of the economic impact of the storm served as a starting point for our response,” said an ESD spokeswoman. “The report was used in our efforts to help businesses recover, in the request for aid from the federal government and many other efforts.” 
Local economists said Sandy’s economic impact lessened after a couple of weeks as mass transit and electricity services were restored and companies reopened. 
The ESD estimates “most likely overstate some of the impacts . . . because most individuals did go back to work after the immediate emergency period ended,” said Richard Vogel, an economist who studies the impact of disasters and is dean of Farmingdale State College’s business school. “What we are talking about are temporary losses.” 
John A. Rizzo, chief economist for the Long Island Association business group and a Stony Brook University professor, agreed, saying most workers who were idled by the storm didn’t lose their jobs. 
CORRECTION: Superstorm Sandy’s economic impact in the first three days following the storm equaled 135,000 people being unable to work for one year, according to additional information provided by Empire State Development after the story was posted online Tuesday morning. An earlier version of this story misstated the impact.

Business

BZSAND1115

Report: LI, NYC workers lost estimated $8.2B in 3 days after Sandy

Report: Sandy cost workers estimated $8.2B

IMGU9FU_WEB

Nicole Fuller

Five years after superstorm Sandy, road and waterway infrastructure deficiencies still plague Long Island’s South Shore, where some Sandy victims are still displaced, a coalition of activists said Sunday. 
About 75 activists from various Sandy relief, community and environmental organizations gathered Sunday on Venetian Shores Beach in Lindenhurst — an area especially hard-hit when Sandy struck in October 2012 — to rally for infrastructure upgrades and investments in renewable energy.
“Sandy is not over,” said Ryan Madden, the sustainability organizer with the Long Island Progressive Coalition. “Five years later, there are folks dealing with a myriad of issues that prevent them from being whole.”
The lingering effects of Sandy — which damaged some 50,000 homes on Long Island — are still visible, activists said, a contention that was highlighted by Sunday’s storm that brought pounding rain and whipping winds. As activists and Sandy victims took a walking tour of parts of Lindenhurst, including Venetian Boulevard and Granada Parkway, rainwater flooded some streets shin-level deep.
A handful of houses along one block were still undergoing Sandy-related repairs. One home, stripped down to its wood frame, had a Town of Babylon building permit displayed outside, allowing the homeowner to raise it 15 feet. Another boarded-up home adjacent to the water was abandoned after the storm and is in foreclosure, neighbors said. 
Madden said many infrastructure fixes still haven’t been addressed, such as the dilapidated condition of wooden bulkheads in many coastal communities. He also said roads need to be raised and drainage systems repaired in flood-prone areas. 
Donald Werle said he spent about $100,000 of his own money to raise his Lindenhurst house nine feet above sea level and repair flooding damage, while dealing with the emotional roller coaster of shifting rules and regulations for state and federal aid. 
He just finished putting in a new driveway, damaged in the storm, about a month ago. And he said he’s still missing his second stove.
“It’s been five years of hell, I ain’t gonna lie,” said Werle, 55.
“It was bad enough that our houses got destroyed, my daughter was 14 years old at the time. We had no home. We had no place to stay. ... There are still parts of my home that are still not whole.” 
Activists pointed to this year’s hurricane season — a rapid succession of storms that caused severe damage and resulted in the loss of life in Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands — as evidence of the effects of climate change and the reason lawmakers should invest in clean environmental policies.
Kevin Reilly, of Long Beach, took aim at the centerpiece of the state’s response, the New York Rising program, the agency in charge of helping homeowners through Sandy repairs. He said a series of reforms are needed, including a more transparent appeals process. 
“They need to be more open with basically the people coming to them for help,” said Reilly, 49, who raised his own home 11 feet above sea level after Sandy. “They made homeowners promises in the forms of grants that have been reviewed over and over and over again, and on a whim, they can change those grant amounts.”
A spokesman for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo did not respond to a message seeking comment Sunday.

LISAND1030

Activists say South Shore still unprepared for storms

Activists: South Shore still unprepared for storms

Suffolk

Lindenhurst still struggling, 5 years after Sandy

Newsday

John Asbury

No one expected the ocean to meet the bay in Long Beach like it did during superstorm Sandy, and now, five years later, representatives of the barrier island community noted the storm brought them together as much as it tore things apart.
City officials and residents gathered Sunday to commemorate the anniversary of the storm, moving the event inside as torrential rain and gusty winds buffeted the city as if in an acknowledgment of the Oct. 29, 2012, storm.
“It’s surreal to stand here five years after superstorm Sandy made landfall in Long Beach. Not a resident was untouched by the storm. So many of us here lost so much,” City Manager Jack Schnirman said at the event in Long Beach City Hall. “The damage was catastrophic. Many thought Long Beach would never recover. Boy were they wrong. Look how far we’ve come.”
The tidal surge from the Atlantic Ocean flooded the city and destroyed the boardwalk on the south side as waves from the bay on the north roared into homes and infrastructure along Reynolds Channel. 
The storm caused $150 million in damage to the city’s infrastructure, including the water and sewer treatment plants.
Sen. Todd Kaminsky (D-Long Beach) said Sandy was a wake-up call for local governments to improve infrastructure and expedite the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project to protect the beach and bayside from future storms.
“With all the devastation Sandy brought, this was a moment that galvanized the community,” Kaminsky said. “Regular people stepped up and became heroes. That’s what Long Beach is about. We all know how worse it could have been.”
Local officials said neighbors came together to help recover after the storm, and the city’s Martin Luther King Center became a resource shelter for those flooded from their homes to get clothing and food. Nearly 90 percent of residents have either returned home or relocated, but many residents are still raising their homes or staying with relatives until they can return, officials said.
“So much of what we’re still working on is Sandy-related. Sandy is not over yet,” said Assemb. Melissa Miller (R-Atlantic Beach). “The storms are continuing stronger and so many people are still not home.”
City leaders thanked the first responders from around the country who helped during the storm and those who helped rebuild.
Long Beach officials echoed the slogan used since Sandy: the city was rebuilt, “stronger, smarter, safer.”
The Long Beach boardwalk was reconstructed in a year with $42 million in federal funds. The Army Corps is expected to complete a $230 million dune and jetty project on the beach by next spring. Engineers are still conducting a Back Bays study while the city constructs a $12.5 million bulkhead project along public land. 
Councilwoman Chumi Diamond read a proclamation on behalf of the council declaring Oct. 29 every year to be “Community Day” to recognize the efforts after Sandy. 
Councilwoman Anissa Moore stood at the podium and sang the song “Feels Like Home” to mark the anniversary.
“Five years ago, Sandy would forever change our lives,” Moore said. “It revealed the boundary of our neighborhoods did not matter. It revealed the beauty of the Long Beach family. We realized the storm could not wash away our memories and strength that lies within our city.”

Nassau

LILONG1030

Long Beach ‘stronger, smarter safer’ after Sandy, officials say

City ‘Stronger, smarter’ after Sandy, officials say 

LILONG1030_WEB

Magda Rosenberg has lived in Long Beach for more than 60 years, and in 2012, superstorm Sandy nearly drove her out of it. 
“The water came up to here,” Rosenberg said, gesturing about a half a foot above her living room floor. “If I had stayed in the basement, I would have drowned.” 
But the 89-year-old is resilient, and she’s a survivor. 
Rosenberg was the lone member of her family to survive the Holocaust. They were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942, and then she and her sisters were forced to work at a munitions factory in Germany, where she lost her left arm. 
“I never thought I would come to America,” she said. “I was far from even hoping that would happen.” 
She settled in Long Beach in the 1950s, where she raised her family of four, and has been there ever since. 
Rosenberg's&nbsp;clean, white cottage sits uniform with the rest of the homes neatly lining her block. A scrawled note with the word “knock” is taped to her front door. 
She teaches an exercise class for senior citizens at the Long Beach Public Library; a flyer with&nbsp;her photo pinned to its busy bulletin board. Down the road is the Lido Kosher Deli, where Rosenberg has ordered countless knishes and chats with the owner, whom she knows on a first-name basis.&nbsp; 
When Sandy hit, it uprooted Rosenberg’s life in Long Beach. &nbsp;&nbsp; 
On the first day of the storm, Rosenberg lost electricity. She was able to contact her son Maury — who lives in Rochester — thanks to a tenant who lent her a cellphone. 
“I said to him, ‘Come and get me,’” she remembered. “And he didn’t quite know what was going on, not to the extent that was happening.” 
Maury was able to get into Long Beach by the following evening in his Chevrolet cargo van. By the time he&nbsp;arrived, it was around midnight, he said. He and his mother packed up her belongings and headed to Rochester, driving in stormy conditions throughout the early morning. She wouldn’t return to Long Beach for two months. 
Meanwhile her older son David, who works in construction, helped her by hiring workers to come repair&nbsp;her storm-damaged basement right away. Over the course of all the repairs, ultimately,&nbsp;she said,&nbsp;“I emptied out my bank account.&nbsp;Every bit that I saved went for reconstruction.” 
When she was able to move back in, she found that there was still a lot of work to be done. 
“The city of course was in trouble,” she said. “We had nothing. People were going to Kennedy Plaza, which is the center of our city, to get food and water. And of course we had no toilet. Basically, everything was flooded.” 
With help from Southern Baptist Disaster Relief volunteers, her living room walls were rebuilt and repainted. Once her home began resembling what it was before, she started hosting her exercise classes at home, as the library was being repaired. 
Little by little, her students showed up at her front door. 
“We had no furniture,” Rosenberg remembered. “The place was empty so we had chairs there, chairs here. I was sitting [up front] so everybody could see me. I think we had about 40 chairs. That’s the way I felt I could help, because I was maybe even one of the first ones that came back to Long Beach, where I could live again in the house.” 
Once the library reopened, Rosenberg’s classes moved back in. &nbsp; 
Rosenberg has been watching the news and following the coverage of the three major hurricanes this season: Harvey, Irma and Maria. It’s easy for her to feel helpless, she said, and she knows from personal experience how those unaffected by this kind of trauma may have a hard time empathizing. 
“As individuals, unless we can go down there and be useful, there is really nothing we can do other than cry,” she said. “[The hurricane coverage] affected me very badly, and it’s like how many people don’t really care about the Holocaust [when] you don’t go through it.” 
Rosenberg feels strongly about future generations learning about the Holocaust and its aftermath. She also has faith in the volunteers offering their time and resources during this hurricane season. 
“When people are in need, in a situation like Sandy or any other disaster, there is help,” Rosenberg said. “It’s beautiful. There is help. I was very happy with how things went after Sandy. Everything, for me, worked out fine.”

Holocaust survivor reflects on superstorm Sandy, 60 years in Long Beach

Holocaust survivor remembers Sandy on LI

Magda Rosenberg/lt

David M. Schwartz

Five years after Sandy exposed the vulnerabilities of Long Island’s gasoline supply, officials said the system is stronger, although dozens of gas stations have not complied with a state law that would prepare them for another power outage.
Superstorm Sandy flooded South Shore gasoline distribution terminals, closed New York Harbor, shut down pipelines and left gas stations powerless with useless pumps.
The result was weeks of snaking lines of Long Islanders waiting, often for hours, to fill their cars and gas cans.
Part of the state’s response was a law, passed in 2013, that required larger gas stations near highway exits or evacuation routes to get backup generators or install “transfer switches,” which would allow generators to be plugged in and power the stations in case of an outage. The state offered grants of up to $13,000 to comply with the order.
To date, 345 Long Island gasoline stations can now be connected to backup power in an emergency, according to the New York State Department of Energy Research and Development Agency, which oversees the FUEL-NY plan.
Another 84 gas stations on Long Island are out of compliance with the law, the agency said.
The state Department of Agriculture and Markets has begun issuing $1,600 fines to 50 stations across downstate New York that remain out of compliance after a series of escalating fines.
“When multiple outreach attempts are unsuccessful, the department will issue penalties to gas station owners who do not comply with Fuel-NY requirements, and will coordinate with the owners to provide them an additional opportunity to come into compliance,” said energy and research development spokesman William Opalka.
Officials say the system overall has been strengthened. There is a 2.5 million gallon gas reserve in Suffolk that could be tapped in the case of emergency, which the state touted as the first-in-the-nation such reserve. Additionally, a FEMA grant that New York received in 2017 will allow the state to place 109 generators on Long Island by the end of 2018. The state also conducted a survey of the storm readiness of the petroleum terminals.
“No one can dispute that New York is stronger in the face of extreme weather,” Opalka said.
Kevin Beyer, government affairs director of the Long Island Gasoline Retailers Association, said the transfer switches and generators are an improvement. But he said the longest term problem after Sandy was the gasoline supply. Flooded terminals near Inwood and Lawrence were shut down for more than a month in some cases.
Tanker trucks had to wait in line at the open terminals — such as the one in Holtsville, which receives gasoline through Port Jefferson Harbor — for hours.
“They couldn’t get the product. You had drivers waiting on line for hours at the terminals,” Beyer said. “Where tankers could normally do three trips a day, they could only do one.”
While more gas stations might be able to have power, the resiliency of the terminals remains to be seen. “I think we’re better off. But we haven’t had it tested yet,” he said.
Robert Sinclair, spokesman for AAA Northeast, said he also believed that the waterside terminals are the biggest question mark.
Transfer switches and generators at gas stations “are excellent. But the chain is only as good as the weakest link. And the weakest link in all of this is the waterside terminal,” he said.
Opalka said studies of the petroleum terminals were conducted following superstorm Sandy. The final report, which was released in March 2014, said that terminals in general “have taken measures to protect their facilities against flooding, including elevating electrical systems; protecting cabling; and installing berms, levees, or floodwalls to protect their facilities,” though additional work remained to be done.
At the Shell Terminal in Lawrence, where tankers fill up every day with gasoline mostly piped in through New Jersey, terminal manager Stephen Moscarella remembered the morning after Sandy.
The terminal, then called the Motiva Terminal, had been flooded with six feet of water, overflowing dykes around petroleum storage tanks and shorting out electrical power.
“Seeing everything trashed, I was just in a state of shock. I’d never seen anything like it,” he said.
It wouldn’t be until Dec. 3 that the terminal reopened again for tanker trucks to fill up.
Since then, the main building has been gutted. Some equipment has been raised. And work on replacing most of the electrical wiring with water resistant cables is expected to be completed at the end of November, Moscarella said.
“We’re a lot better off,” he said. “Everything we do is preparing for the next one.”

LIGAS1026

LI gasoline supply system bolstered after superstorm Sandy

Gasoline supply system bolstered after Sandy

sandy gas--cropped

Scott Eidler

Laura Cromer hikes two, sometimes three miles each day in the wooded trails near Lake George. Scurrying alongside is Remy, a 9-month-old golden retriever mix.
Not much of life upstate reminds her of Lindenhurst, the South Shore community she called home for 12 years but left in May 2013 — six months after superstorm Sandy flooded her bungalow beside a canal, and her car.
“I couldn’t get off that island fast enough,” she remembers thinking as she packed up her new Mazda SUV.
Her life in Queensbury, where she looks for work as a real estate appraiser, is free of several stressors, particularly the tidal waters that define Long Island’s South Shore.
And the undeveloped contours of upstate New York evoke the familiar — her 1970s childhood in Farmingville, past where the major highways ended, with sprawling woods frequented by teenagers.
“It’s rejuvenated my soul,” she said. “I have peace of mind now.”
<h4>’We’ll never move back’</h4>
Cromer, 58, is among the displaced Long Islanders scattered across the region, state and country in the aftermath of superstorm Sandy. Many of those who migrated off the Island, or away from the shore, had endured months — or years — of battles with insurance companies, banks and contractors.
The resettlement certainly has brought relief, but also means families separated by long distance, interruptions in schooling and homesickness.
Some of them are in agreement: Long Island is, and always will be, fixed in their rearview mirror.
“We’ll never move back to Long Beach as a postscript,” said Peter Hawkinson, 67, who lived in the “City By The Sea” for 33 years with his wife Barbara, 63, and whose house was flooded in the storm. They now reside in Marina del Rey, California.
The couple moved to Southern California in February 2013 and reunited with their adult daughter, Nina, who works as an attorney in the Los Angeles area and helped her parents get settled. After a few moves in the area, they’ve downsized to a 1,200-square-foot condominium overlooking the marina.
“We love Southern California,” Hawkinson said. “I think I would highly recommend it as a lifestyle. There’s nothing like it.”
The Hawkinsons have embraced a more minimalist approach to life. “I don’t worry as much, I’m not that focused on possessions,” said Hawkinson, who works as a construction manager.
“I’m a little surprised we’re living so close to the water,” he said. “It’s so pleasant and so easy, that we never looked back and never thought twice.”
<h4>Panic and anxiety</h4>
Those who decided to leave Long Island did so as repair bills piled up and personal hardships intensified. Memories of the storm — and the recent news coverage of hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria and Jose — have triggered flashbacks and anxiety.
Jim Parente, 65, who lived nearly 20 years in a cottage in Copiague, decamped for Bradenton, Florida, in November 2015. He was struggling at work and suffering anxiety and panic attacks.
“Since Sandy, I have been in a fog,” said Parente, a media technician.
“Feelings of unreality come and go after this entire storm,” he said. “It’s traumatic, and you try to convince yourself it’s only things that were destroyed. It really does affect you.”
He returned to his West Drive home a few days after the storm and had “the only laugh I was going to have in a while” when he opened the door and saw a beer bottle balanced upside down.
“What didn’t strike me as funny was the smell in the house. [It] was awful. It was a distinct sewage smell,” he said.
Parente’s financial situation grew worse, and he eventually defaulted on the home, he said.
“What did I do wrong?” he remembers asking himself. He eventually met with mental health counselors made available to Sandy victims.
“Irma was a trigger,” Parente said of the hurricane that pounded Florida last month. This time, he did not evacuate. “I was a wreck during it.”
He has struggled to adapt to his new community, he said. He also has had trouble finding work. He enjoys the wildlife of the Robinson Preserve, particularly the community of birds and reptiles surrounded by salt marshes and mangroves.
“I miss Montauk,” he said, wistful for the dayslong fishing trips for tuna or “deep drop” tilefishing on the bottom of the ocean’s floor. He’s contemplating a move to Cozumel, the Mexican island off the Yucatán Peninsula’s eastern coast, because of the cost of living in Florida. “It looks like it would be a good place for me to heal,” he said.
<h4>Some relocating</h4>
Five years after the storm, some are in the midst of relocating.
“We’re leaving, and it’s not on our terms,” said Silke Wedding, 54, a longtime Freeport resident living in an apartment atop Hurricane Harry’s, a bar on the Nautical Mile that she owned and managed with her husband, Rick Sweet, 57, until last month. The property is in the process of foreclosure, she said.
The couple have been apart since early September, when Sweet, a freight forwarder with the Teamsters working in the shipping industry, moved to Greenville, South Carolina.
The family purchased a home there in an auction and Sweet left the Island last month in search of work. Their son Ricky, 13, is attending parochial school in Queens and living with Wedding’s mother in Flushing. Wedding visits Ricky on weekends.
The transition has been tough on him, she said. “He was born in that house and that’s all he knew, all he knows,” she said. “He was adamant. He didn’t want to leave.”
Recently she stopped by the family’s old house to check the mailbox for missed correspondence. “I broke down crying, walking around the place,” she said. “It was really hard to see my home.”
Wedding works as a teaching assistant in the Freeport district, providing extra math instruction for students needing academic intervention. She hopes the family will reunite in South Carolina after the school year ends in June.
“He has to try to establish himself there,” Wedding said of her husband. “We’re kind of playing everything by ear, because this wasn’t exactly part of our grand plan.”
<h4>‘Rhythm completely lost’</h4>
Feelings of homesickness abound — even for those who stayed on the Island.
Deborah Fauci-Dardis, 55, moved out of her ranch-style home in Massapequa after the storm and stayed in Deer Park for 10 months before moving to Hauppauge in September 2013. Today, she lives off the ninth hole of a golf course in a gated community there.
The departure from Massapequa, where she lived across the street from a canal, to the Suffolk County hamlet in the middle of the Island, was “absolutely gut-wrenching” at first.
“I was extremely homesick,” she recalled recently.
Fauci-Dardis said it was challenging to relocate her daughter, then a freshman and a special needs student, to a school district with comparable accommodations. A local Special Education PTA chapter president, she lost her “mommy network” and closed her excavation business.
“It’s a rhythm, and that was completely lost here,” she said: “Establish a new relationship there, figure out where was the better pizza place to order in a pinch, all of it because the mental and emotional strength felt like mountains to climb. Nothing was a no-brainer.”
Life events were put on hold. She and her fiance married in September 2016, nearly five years after the couple were engaged.
And, Fauci-Dardis said, “I’m still discovering things that are missing.” Recently she went to search for an evening bag while getting ready for a wedding and realized it was nowhere to be found.
The feelings of homesickness have begun to fade, taking on an air of nostalgia.
At one point, her then-fiance surprised the family, arranging for boulders and landscape rocks that had been on the Massapequa front lawn to be moved to her Hauppauge home. Those had been a perennial spot for family pictures on the first day of school, Halloween and other special occasions. Now, they continue the ritual for important pictures.
“We built a wonderful life here,” Fauci-Dardis said.
“If I had the opportunity to go back to Massapequa right now, I would say no,” she said. “Now, I’ve put down roots here. It’s my home now.”

LIMOVE1022

Rebuilding post-Sandy lives elsewhere, both near and far away

Former LIers rebuild post-Sandy lives off LI

IMGP0AD_WEB

When superstorm Sandy hit Long Island, the Euliano family was left with almost nothing. 
But there was one thing the storm couldn’t take from them: Ron Euliano’s beloved 1967 Corvette, which had been submerged in 4 feet of floodwater. 
Five years and thousands of dollars later, Euliano’s prized vehicle is back on the road.
“Everyone told me to get rid of it, but I just couldn’t let this one go,” said Euliano, 61, of Oceanside.
The two have a long history. In 1973, Ron heard about “this nice little car” for sale outside an auto shop on 86th Street in Brooklyn: a ’67 Corvette with about 18,000 miles on it. Ron’s mother, who came with him to see it, wrote a $100 check toward the purchase. 
A similar car currently can go for $150,000 or more on Autotrader.com. But Ron — then 18 or 19 — was more than happy to pay the $3,500 price tag. 
“I said, ‘Mom, I’m never selling this car,’ ” he recalled.
He painted the car himself, choosing a unique cream color. He picked up his girlfriend — now his wife, Laurie Eulanio — from her Rosedale home for long drives together. 
Through the years, the Corvette — with a “RONS67” license plate — turned heads, whether at the grocery store or one of the classic car shows Ron frequented. He even wrote a song about it: “Corvette Heaven,” about driving the beloved car into the afterlife. 
In 2012, Ron wasn’t worried about his car when superstorm Sandy approached — he had long had a car-show sign that read “Ron’s Pride and Joy, driven in the streets of Brooklyn rain or shine.” 
But during the storm, water started seeping into his home. By the time Sandy subsided, the entire first floor was flooded. A thick layer of mud coated the floor and furniture.
The floodwater reached windshields of the Corvette and two Pontiac GTOs next to it.
“My heart was broken,” Ron said. “I didn’t even want to look at it.” 
The family didn’t have flood insurance, and couldn’t save the other cars. But the Corvette stayed. 
“I said, ‘you can’t give this up, it’s part of you,’ ” said Laurie, 60. 
Ron put the car in storage, but kept it from rusting through cleaning and repairs. 
Finally, after he completed repairs on his house last year, he began to work with employees at Baldwin’s National Collision Co. almost daily to get the Corvette running again. Nearly everything had to be replaced, from the interior to the engine.
About a month ago, Laurie heard the rumble of the Corvette’s engine outside her window. 
“I said ‘Oh my god, it’s really back on the road,’ ” she said as she began to cry. “Sandy didn’t get it. She took a lot, but she didn’t take that.”
Although the car isn’t quite finished yet, Ron has taken it to two car shows this month, and he has requested a few more parts for his birthday next week. 
“It doesn’t matter what it’s worth,” he said. “I’m driving it again and I’m so happy.”

LIVETT1029

Oceanside man restores 1967 Corvette destroyed by Sandy

LI man restores 1967 Corvette destroyed by Sandy

LIVETT102917_0NV_WEB

Despite worries about climate change, an overwhelming number of Long Islanders don’t believe the possibility of another destructive hurricane makes Nassau and Suffolk counties a less desirable place to live, according to a Newsday/Siena College poll taken for the five-year anniversary of the storm.
By a nearly 2-to-1 ratio, most Long Islanders believe “human activity” is to blame for rising global temperatures and nearly three-quarters think the Island will experience another storm like Sandy in the near future, the poll found.
The poll surveyed 1,007 registered voters. It was taken Oct. 17-22 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.
If and when another Sandy-like storm hits, three-fourths of respondents supported using government resources to help rebuild homes and businesses on the coast. Further, they don’t believe the government has done enough to protect against future hurricanes.
Still, the survey found the threat of storms wasn’t triggering residents to leave: 75 percent said it had “no effect” on their view of Long Island’s desirability as a place to live. Only 22 percent said the threat makes the Island a less attractive place to reside.
They are more likely to feel like Louis Alleyne of Freeport.
“Where you gonna go? California? They have terrible earthquakes. Florida? They have even worse hurricanes,” said Alleyne, 73, who said he had no plans to move from his house even though Sandy swamped it with 4 feet of water five years ago. 
“No, I wouldn’t move out,” Alleyne said. “I’ve been here 37 years.”
“This seemed to speak to that overall Long Island pride,” said Donald P. Levy, director of the Siena Research Institute. He noted there was no “meaningful difference” among Nassau or Suffolk residents when asked that question, even though Nassau suffered more Sandy damage: 74 percent of Nassau respondents said the likelihood of future storms had no impact on their view, compared to 76 percent of Suffolk residents.
The poll sought Long Islanders’ views on a variety of hurricane-related issues five years after the superstorm, as it was called, pummeled the East Coast and killed 48 New Yorkers. It damaged 95,000 homes, businesses and government buildings on Long Island alone, knocked out power to much of Long Island, crippled transportation, and altered the dunes and channel at Fire Island. 
Since then, more than 7,000 Long Island homes have been rebuilt and more than 1,300 elevated to avoid future storm surges. Thousands more still have not been fully repaired or addressed.
“You know how I view Long Island? Like the California of the Northeast,” said Thomas D’Angelo, 57, of East Northport. “California has fires. It has earthquakes. But people still live there because it’s beautiful. I like Long Island, the people like Long Island. It’s that stubborn streak that people tap into. We’re playing the odds.”
There was a slight difference depending on political view: 81 percent of voters who consider themselves conservative said future storms didn’t affect their view of the Island’s desirability compared to 65 percent who called themselves liberal.
Among the other Sandy-related findings, 50 percent of those surveyed said they had a household evacuation plan now — up from 30 percent before Sandy — while 48 percent don’t. Asked whether the government has “done enough” to enhance Long Island’s ability to withstand such storms in the future, 60 percent said no, while 25 percent said yes.
“Truthfully, I don’t know what you can to do plan against the storm. You can’t stop water and you’ve got water all around,” said Susan Byrnes, 55, of Lindenhurst. She said perhaps drainage could be improved, but added “I don’t know how you can prevent [storm surge] from breaching the Island.”
“Absolutely not,” D’Angelo said when asked if government had done enough. “They are just so slow at doing things. The [U.S.] Army Corps of Engineers, they’re so slow and they don’t do enough.” 
Overall, 74 percent of Long Islanders said they supported the use of government resources to help rebuild homes and businesses in coastal flooding areas. But among the 23 percent who opposed that, some expressed very strong opposition.
“I think they should either pay for insurance and have their insurance cover it” or not be allowed to rebuild so close to shore, said Holly Williams, 53, of Port Jefferson Station. “I don’t think my tax dollars should . . . have to pay for a new house for them.”
By a nearly 2-to-1 ratio (60 percent to 32 percent), Long Islanders said they believed human activity is to blame for global warming. That is roughly in line nationally, if slightly lower. A national Gallup Poll earlier this year found 68 percent of Americans blame human activity. On Long Island, like elsewhere, far more voters in the 18-to-34 age bracket agree with that assessment (73 percent) than those 55 and older (56 percent).
“Pollution is ruining the ozone layer, all the scientists say,” said Siku Hamin, 26, an Elmont resident who was among those who said human activity is causing global warming and Long Island is likely to get hit with another severe storm in the near future. “You’re seeing all the other storms happening around the world and what’s going on with nature.”
Some expressed doubt.
“I believe it’s more based on normal weather activity,” Williams said. “The reason I feel that way is I worked for an environmental consulting firm for 13 years and I have a lot friends and co-workers” who believe the current changes are part of natural fluctuations.”
“I know there are skeptics,” Alleyne countered. “But there probably are skeptics that the world is round.”

LIPOLL1029

Poll: Threat of future Sandys doesn’t hurt LI’s desirability

Poll: LIers foresee another Sandy, but don't want to move

IMGDLZZ_WEB

Maura McDermott

Five years after superstorm Sandy devastated Long Island, hundreds of local residents are still fighting with the federal government over what they call underpayments on their flood insurance claims. 
On Long Island, 714 homeowners were making their way through the National Flood Insurance Program’s claims review process as of Oct. 23, data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency show.
FEMA launched the program in 2015, after widespread accusations that private companies hired by the agency forged documents to reduce settlements. The agency contacted about 144,000 policyholders with Sandy claims, on Long Island and elsewhere, and offered to review their cases, saying homeowners could have their claims reviewed within three months by a judge or attorney acting as a neutral third party. 
Two years later, FEMA said that of the 19,461 requests for third-party review, 99.9 percent of homeowners have received the results, and 87 percent of cases were resolved as of Sept. 8. Of those closed cases, 84 percent received additional payments totaling more than $223 million, or about $16,000 on average, and 16 percent got no additional money. In some open cases — including about one in four on Long Island — homeowners had not provided all the necessary documents, FEMA said. 
FEMA officials have said the agency has improved the way it handles flood claims, creating an independent office that advocates for policyholders and a toll-free phone number for help.
“We recognize this process has taken a significant amount of time — it’s taken too long — and we are working diligently to resolve these claims,” a FEMA spokesman said Monday. “The majority of the remaining claims to review are represented by law firms, and we are working with the firms to finalize dates to complete the remaining claims as expeditiously as possible.” 
On Long Island, where vacant and yet-to-be-rebuilt homes still blight many coastal communities, homeowners and attorneys criticized the reviews as slow, bureaucratic and wasteful. Some homeowners said the added payments fall far short of what they have spent to rebuild. 
“The review process was supposed to be a very quick, easy process,” said Melissa Luckman, director of the disaster relief clinic at Touro Law Center in Central Islip, which represented about 100 Long Island homeowners at no cost. “That definitely wasn’t the case.”
Moreover, “We’ve had people who tried to go through the process themselves first and then called us,” she said. The amount they were offered, she said, “always increased when they came to us.”
FEMA has set an Oct. 25 deadline for homeowners to complete their hearings, although Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement that FEMA will allow homeowners to have hearings after that date if necessary. The additional time “gives anyone with a pending claim the chance to receive their just compensation,” although “larger reforms” are needed, Schumer said. 
The homeowners demanded reviews because they believe FEMA underpaid them for damage caused by the Oct. 29, 2012, storm. 
Cathy and John Fallon’s one-bedroom home in the Village of Babylon was heavily damaged by Sandy. Cathy, 61, who helps care for a family member who is disabled, and her husband John, 73, who drives a school bus, sought estimates from three contractors to repair the 655-square-foot structure. But “it was an old beach house and they said if we try to lift this, it would just fall apart,” Cathy Fallon said. 
It cost almost $200,000 to rebuild, the couple said. But when they put in a claim on their $190,000 FEMA flood insurance policy — their only claim in 27 years, they said — they were paid $68,000. In addition, NY Rising, the state’s storm recovery agency, gave them about $70,000, they said.
The Fallons requested more from FEMA, but the agency’s initial offer of an additional $3,277 would not have helped much, the couple said. They’re hoping for a substantial increase in the third-party review.
The insurance adjusters are using software programs that relied on lowball cost estimates, said John W. Houghtaling, whose Louisiana-based law firm has represented about 900 homeowners who are undergoing third-party reviews of their Sandy claims, including the Fallons. Of those, roughly 180 have open claims.
“I talk with people every day who are losing their homes or going bankrupt because of this,” Houghtaling said.
Some homeowners said the process did get them additional funds — even if it didn’t make up for their expenses.
Beth Henry, a New York City schoolteacher, said it cost $130,000 to rebuild the Massapequa home she shares with her husband, a New York City fire marshal, and their two young daughters. Insurance originally offered $52,000, and NY Rising gave them about $30,000. 
After the neutral review, they received an additional $36,000 from FEMA, she said. 
“Is it enough?” Henry said. “No, but it’s much higher than what the majority of people got.”
Even the most fortunate homeowners do not get what they deserve, said August Matteis, a partner in the Washington, D.C.-based law firm of Weisbrod Matteis &amp; Copley, which is representing about 1,200 homeowners in the third-party reviews; about 325 have open claims. 
By the end of the grueling process, he said, “all you get is what you should have gotten in 2012.”

BZFEMA1023

Hundreds of LI homeowners fighting Sandy ‘underpayments’

LI homeowners fight Sandy ‘underpayments’

IMGM4IQ_WEB

Superstorm Sandy may have been the worst disaster to hit the LIPA electric grid, but the storm’s aftermath brought a wave of changes that included a new system operator, badly needed technology and infrastructure upgrades, and more than $1.4 billion in federal funding to repair and prepare for the next big storm. 
By Oct. 31, 2012, Sandy had knocked out power to 945,000 Long Island Power Authority customers, and a subsequent nor’easter would push the total past 1 million. Some 15,000 workers were called from across the country to work on restoring power, with a price tag of more than $700 million. 
Tensions ran high. Customers protested in the streets, public officials temporarily commandeered a LIPA substation, and flood damage meant 40,000 homes needed to be inspected before the juice could be turned back on, infuriating customers whose outages lingered for days and weeks. 
Sandy’s impact surpassed the biggest storm to hit the grid, Hurricane Gloria in 1985, when 750,000 lost power. LIPA’s acting chief executive and its chairman resigned in the wake of the storm, and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a frequent LIPA critic during the restoration, empaneled a Moreland Commission to investigate the failings. 
The panel’s findings resulted in the LIPA Reform Act of 2013, a law that reduced LIPA to 40 employees from more than 100 while giving PSEG Long Island, the new system operator, a greater role than one originally envisioned. (About half of the act involves refinancing LIPA debt through newly issued securities.) 
Federal emergency funds not only covered $700 million in storm reparation costs, but in the aftermath another $730 million came LIPA’s way to fortify the grid. The work, which will harden the LIPA system to a level not seen in the utility’s history, is just about half done. 
“Work is in progress across the Island and the Rockaways, with projects being completed in literally every town,” John O’Connell, PSEG’s vice president of transmission and distribution, told LIPA trustees recently. 
Most of the work is being completed by outside contractors, from Long Island and out of state. Already, O’Connell said, PSEG has hardened 417 circuit miles since the program began last year. The work includes installing thicker poles able to withstand higher wind speeds, replacing wires, and installing new automated equipment called sectionalizers that let the utility shut off sections of the grid affected by an outage. 
In addition, nearly all of the 12 substations that were affected by flooding or other damage during Sandy have been elevated and their equipment upgraded and replaced. There are hundreds of substations across Long Island — facilities that step down high-voltage power from plants and other sources to lower voltages used in homes and business. Heavy damage to substations during Sandy was a major setback for the grid, particularly in flood-prone areas such as Long Beach, which experienced the longest outages. 
PSEG also completely revamped the system by which it trims branches and other vegetation around distribution poles and wires and around bigger high-voltage transmission lines.
A four-year program started in 2014 has already seen trees and vegetation on 7,739 miles of LIPA’s total 8,800 miles of distribution lines trimmed, with a larger cut away from the lines than LIPA’s previous contractor, National Grid, had done. PSEG has also completed trimming around 950 miles of high-voltage transmission lines. 
“We continue to see reductions in outages when we trim branches away from the wires,” O’Connell said. 
One of the biggest breakdowns during Sandy was communication — between LIPA and elected officials, businesses and residential customers. During Sandy, LIPA and outside crews were handed paper assignments and maps, and the computer system was based on old computer language. 
PSEG early on moved to replace the utility’s old outage management computer system with a more modern one that gives customers more information about outages and restoration times than ever before. 
PSEG is also sending customers more alerts, using telephone, email and text message, often in advance of approaching storms, and when the events are over. 
“Our efforts revolve around providing more information, better information, and having that information more easy to access,” O’Connell said. Customers can now send a text to report an outage with a single click.
The outage center on PSEG’s website lets customers know the status of the crew working on their outage, the cause, and the estimated time of repair. Customers can also isolate their address and see graphics showing how many other customers in their area are affected by the same problem. The website is available in Spanish. 
With bad weather coming, O’Connell said, “We’ll reach out to all customers, not just those who experienced an outage.” 
One former LIPA trustee who sat on the board during the difficult Sandy years and transition called the improvements “substantial.” 
“We’re seeing a much better system than when that storm hit five years ago,” said Neal Lewis, executive director of the Sustainability Institute at Molloy College. And while many of the improvements came with PSEG and without federal aid, Lewis noted that LIPA’s status as a municipal utility made all the difference in terms of providing dollars to harden the system after the storm. 
“The funding from FEMA would not be possible if we didn’t have a public utility on Long Island,” he said. “That is a very real number.”

News

LIPOWE1026

LIPA after Sandy: Hardened grid, upgraded technology

LIPA after Sandy: Hardened, upgraded 

LIPOWE1026_WEB

Joan Gralla and Ted Phillips

A new tristate commission — funded by surcharges on property insurance premiums and empowered to select and pay for projects — is needed to counter the threat of rising seas, according to a Regional Plan Association report.
A Coastal Commission for New York, Connecticut and New Jersey would ensure there is a consistent approach to the flood threat 2 million coastal residents will face by 2050— double the number now at risk, according to the RPA, a nonprofit created in the 1920s to spur the area’s “prosperity, infrastructure, sustainability and quality of life.”
The region’s response to climate change has been “slow, sporadic, underfunded and uncoordinated,” the RPA said, partly because so many levels of government play roles.
The new commission would oversee 3,700 miles of coastline — including cities and suburbs — where the infrastructure often has decayed, the report said.
“Restoring wetlands, building sea walls, raising buildings, retrofitting infrastructure and buying out vulnerable homeowners are among the actions that 167 coastal cities, towns, villages and counties will need to consider and find the resources to implement,” the report said.
Scientists and elected and agency officials from all levels of government would run the commission, independently choosing and paying for projects, the RPA said.
“We’d want to make sure that the state, counties and localities feel they have good representation on the Commission,” said Robert Freudenberg, an RPA vice president, by email.
Spokesmen for the three states’ environmental agencies reacted noncommittally to the proposal, promising to review it. So did the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which counts anti-flood projects among its many duties. 
Commission members should be appointed by more than one person to ensure a diverse board, Freudenberg said, as similar bodies have done. The report did not issue more specifics on how board members should be selected, to allow the three states more latitude.
Other regional panels have successfully protected the Chesapeake and San Francisco bays, the report said. Additional examples it cited include Long Island’s Central Pine Barrens Commission and New Jersey’s Meadowlands Commission.
(The full report can be found here: <a href="http://library.rpa.org/pdf/RPA-Coastal-Adaptation.pdf">library.rpa.org/pdf/RPA-Coastal-Adaptation.pdf</a>.)
Congress likely would have to bless the new multistate commission, just as it did with the Port Authority, Jesse M. Keenan, one of the report’s authors, who teaches at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, said by email. 
The report follows the RPA’s 2016 analysis, which predicted the Atlantic could rise a foot by the middle of this century — and perhaps as soon as 2030 — flooding out 7,000 people who make their homes on Long Island. 
Though rising seas chiefly imperil the coasts, Freudenberg said in an interview that Hurricane Irene devastated parts of upstate New York. That storm struck one year before superstorm Sandy hammered the Eastern Seaboard in 2012.
“There’s also a certain amount of ‘We’re all in this together,’ and there’s a certain need to adapt,” he said.
Though Congress approved $51 billion in aid after Sandy, the report warned “it is very likely that future disasters will come with the requirement that states pay a greater share for recovery.”
The surcharges on both commercial and residential property owners’ insurance premiums the RPA proposed would help fill this gap. All three state legislatures would have to enact the surcharges, said Keenan.
Ending the surcharges after 10 years likely would make them more palatable — and help ensure the funds are not squandered, explained Keenan. New York City residents would pay about $5 a month, he estimated.
That would cover the $9.6 billion of post-Sandy improvements the city said it lacked funding for, he explained.
A surcharge estimate for all New York State will be issued next month, Freudenberg said.
New Jerseyans would pay $15 a month to cover an $11.8 billion shortfall the state identified, Keenan said. Connecticut property owners, who incurred much less damage from Sandy, would pay a surcharge of just $1; their state only lacked $475 million, he said. 
All estimates are preliminary and could rise after more research, Freudenberg said. 
While each state would have its own fund, the commission would control all “underwriting and allocation decisions,” the RPA said. Each state would be guaranteed a minimum amount of financing, the report said.
Freudenberg said the RPA hopes the commission “would invest in projects that span states. . . . But each state could decide how much of their trust fund could go towards multi-state projects.” 
Loans and grants could also be part of the program; Keenan noted that issuing bonds backed by the surcharges could halve them.
The new body also would develop standards based on the latest science and require localities to submit detailed reports about their requirements to help the states set priorities, the experts said.
A spokeswoman for the New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation, said it is reviewing the report. She noted Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s administration already “is building resiliency into permitting and funding actions, and providing key information, like sea-level rise projections, to help local governments, business owners, and planners ensure public safety and prevent the loss of property and services.“
Similarly, a spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection said: “We would be willing to evaluate whether such an approach is useful to New Jersey and the region.”
Connecticut’s spokesman for its Department of Energy and Environmental Protection said it has been working hard to help residents, businesses, institutions and infrastructure withstand climate change.
“We are certainly open to the concept of more regional cooperation to help address it,” he added. 
A spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said the proposed commission “appears to be a worthwhile initiative.” 
Noting Congress must approve the Corps’ projects, he added: “Should the Tri-State Coastal Commission come to fruition, offer specific proposals and request our involvement, we would take it into advisement.”
Keenan stressed that coordinating how the region responds to storms or rising seas — before crises arise — is cost-effective and will ensure dollars are spent wisely.
“We can . . . pay for this now and get ahead of this — investing a dollar now is going to save $4 to $7 later,” he said.
And, he said, this regional approach could help ensure ineffective projects are not selected in haste after a storm strikes and that the funds are spent for the “collective good.”

Region/State

LIRPA1023

Tristate region needs commission for flood threat, nonprofit says

Report: Region needs commission for flood threat

When superstorm Sandy roared ashore five years ago it flooded streets, damaged thousands of homes and knocked out power for weeks across Long Island.
It also altered the coastline, cutting three holes in Fire Island.
Two of those breaches on the barrier island were filled in by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers shortly after the 2012 storm. But one remains open to the sea, and it’s changing the environment even today.
Salinity levels in the Great South Bay have risen and scientists have documented an increase in salt-loving and migratory species there.
They have also found evidence of fish moving from ocean to bay more often than in the past, when the only openings to the bay were from the Fire Island and Moriches inlets on either end of the 32-mile-long island.
“The ecosystem is really still adjusting to the breach and the salinity changes in the bay,” said Janet Nye, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences.
Chief among the changes: More lady crabs, fewer blue crabs.
Traditionally found only near Fire Island Inlet, lady crabs — known for their reddish purple spots — were plentiful during the post-Sandy surveys.
“With the breach, they spread out across the entire bay,” said Bob Cerrato, also an associate professor at SoMAS.
Every spring, summer and fall from 2013 to 2015, Nye, Cerrato and their SoMAS colleagues went out on trawlers and dropped nets randomly in 30 to 45 locations of Great South Bay, counting the catch and then releasing it back into the water.
As part of the study — funded by state Department of Environmental Conservation, New York Sea Grant and National Park Service — they compared the data with a similar survey done of Great South Bay in 2007.
Numbers of predators like summer and windowpane flounder, striped bass, sea robins, bluefish and mantis shrimp also increased compared to 2007.
“There’s basically more of these large predatory fish,” Nye said.
Horseshoe crabs also increased.
The findings indicate that the opening — in a remote, protected section of the Otis Pike wilderness area, across from Bellport Bay — is fostering a more connected and mature ecosystem than found a decade ago. Mature ecosystems have more organisms, or diversity.
“It means that the system is larger than just the bay is and will tend to be more resilient,” Cerrato said. 
Diversity and abundance of species also means a more complex food web, with more things upon which to feed. If one species succumbs to disease or is overfished, the results are not so drastic.
“The more connectivity there is ... the more stable the system will tend to be, just because if you break one link, there are still other linkages happening,” Cerrato said about the diversity of species.
The researchers also measured salinity levels, which before Sandy typically hovered at 24 to 25 parts per thousand. But in the eastern part of Great South Bay, levels were between 31 and 32 parts per thousand during the 2013-2015 surveys. Ocean water is generally at 32 parts per thousand, Cerrato said.
While the breach has shifted, narrowed and widened as storms and waves come and go, sand stopped being deposited by the sea into the bay after about 18 months, said Cheryl Hapke, a research coastal geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Coastal and Marine Science Center in St. Petersburg, Florida. 
“There’s no longer any increase to the volume of the sand in to the bay,” Hapke said.
Still, the future of the breach is an unknown. Waves, wind and tidal flows lead to an ever-changing system that forms spits and sandbars, but then erode again before the process starts over.
A USGS report published in September and authored by Hapke said the breach is a “quasi-stable” system but it’s unclear how long it will remain open. USGS is currently working with a Dutch modeling firm to try to predict conditions that would lead the breach to close or one to open. The data are under review and not yet public.
When hurricane-turned-tropical-storm Jose neared Long Island in September, the waves removed a lot of the sandbars that had formed in the mouth of the breach on the bay side, said Charles Flagg, an adjunct professor and principal investigator at SoMAS.
“The exchange with the ocean appears to be a little bit more,” Flagg said. “It’s not an overwhelming change, but it’s a change.”
Researchers say the breach is likely still evolving and it’s unclear when or if the ecosystem will stabilize or continue to change.
“We don’t know when or how long it will take to settle into things or if it ever will,” Cerrato said.

LIBREA1025

On LI’s southern coastline, Sandy’s impact is still in evidence

On LI’s southern coastline, Sandy’s impact continues 

IMG4GI9_WEB

Jordan Raphael, park biologist at Fire Island National Seashore, was caught off guard five years ago as superstorm Sandy was approaching.
With all but one computer forecast model saying the storm would head out to sea, he was resting easy. Then, a few days later, the models reversed, with all agreeing on Sandy’s left hook onto land. And things got busy in a big hurry.
Since then, his interest in weather “has almost turned into an obsession,” he said. Now, when storms are approaching, he’s glued to phone apps, television segments and daily weather reports from the government.
As Raphael and other Sandy-affected Long Islanders have become similarly engrossed in weather calls, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — with the National Weather Service and National Hurricane Center under its umbrella — has been upping its game as to forecasting tropical systems and communicating their risk. 
Among the changes since Sandy:
&amp;#110; An increased spotlight on dangers from storm surge, which brought catastrophic damage to some South Shore communities. 
&amp;#110; Plans for the hurricane center to continue issuing watches and warnings for threatening tropical systems, even if they morph into something more akin to a nor’easter or the hybrid that Sandy became.
&amp;#110; Increasing accuracy in predicting storm tracks, with added boosts coming from forecasting-model upgrades and a big jump in supercomputer capacity. 
<h4>Storm surge</h4>
“I was ready for 12 inches of water, but not 42 inches,” says John Poulos, 64, whose Freeport-based marine equipment and supplies business was flooded by Sandy.
That, he said, occurred despite his monitoring hurricane center reports and starting preparations five days ahead of Sandy’s landfall. A pilot, surfer and weather buff, Poulos says he’s developed a new, firsthand appreciation for storm surge.
Since then, the National Weather Service has been beefing up its surge-communication capabilities.
A color-coded map now shows locations expected to be hit by various levels of inundation — that’s the amount of water pushed up over normally dry land by surging seas. And this year, surge watches and warnings, telling of potentially “life-threatening” conditions, were introduced, breaking that information out from other National Weather Service warning products. 
Both the inundation map and a special visualization tool for emergency managers are “probably the most important” new features to come along since Sandy, said Edward C. Schneyer, Suffolk County’s director of emergency preparedness.
Bill Korbel, News 12 Long Island meteorologist, sees these and other new communications tools in a broader context. 
“The emphasis has shifted,” he said, “from where is the storm and where is it headed to include how will it actually affect me.” For him, the way “threats are explained to the public and emergency services officials” is the main change since Sandy.
“Saying tides will be 5 to 8 feet above normal is not nearly as useful as showing how much water could be on the street in front of my house,” Korbel said.
And that’s what these maps do — “show clearly where the flooding will occur in much greater detail, almost down to street level,” which “is a huge improvement,” he said. 
<h4>No longer a hurricane</h4>
If a Sandy-like storm, one transitioning to a dangerous hybrid system, were on today’s radar screen, the National Hurricane Center would continue issuing hurricane/tropical storm watches and warnings, as it did this year with Jose, which changed characteristics but still posed a threat.
That was not the case five years ago with Sandy, as the weather service passed the communication baton for nontropical warnings to its local forecast offices, including the one in Upton, which makes weather calls for Long Island and neighboring areas.
The shift in messaging led to some confusion, NOAA said in a post-Sandy self-assessment report.
Meteorologists in Upton signaled Sandy’s potential for “life threatening coastal flooding,” 6- to 11-foot surge for flood prone areas and “significant threat to life and property.” But this could have been lost on some, as the information was included under the nontropical headings of coastal flood and high-wind warnings, said David Stark, weather service meteorologist in Upton.
A big lesson from Sandy, said Korbel, is that, “What a storm is called is not important. What it is doing is what counts.”
<h4>Forecasting accuracy </h4>
With an increasingly captive audience for storm particulars, the hurricane center touts a steady improvement in forecast precision. 
Forecasters back in 2012 were off, on average for the season, by 95 nautical miles to the left or right of their predicted tracks, when looking ahead two days. That’s been reduced this season to 78 nautical miles either way, according to hurricane center calculations. (As for Sandy, its two-day call was close to spot on, with forecasters off by 41.6 nautical miles in either direction.)
The increasing accuracy is thanks, in part, to advances and upgrades in computer models. That, and a capacity boost to supercomputers that run those models, thanks in part to an added $25 million in post-Sandy funding, meaning speedier processing and better model resolution, NOAA said.
Raphael, the park biologist now fixated with forecasts, says that as he’s monitoring storms, he’s “nervous up to two days out,” appreciating that models tend to become increasingly accurate as a weather event nears. 
Josh Timlin, earth science teacher at North Shore High School in Glen Head, also appreciates the complexities of predicting storms. 
Holding a degree in atmospheric science, he says he thinks too much of a focus is placed on “misses” and not enough on “the nature of forecast uncertainty.” 
“I think we take for granted,” he says, “how good forecasts have become.”

Weather

LIFORE1024

For forecasters and others, lessons learned from a superstorm

For forecasters and others, lessons learned from Sandy

NWS improves its storm-forecasting capabilities

liFORE1024_video

Hempstead Town Supervisor Anthony Santino and three other members of the town board on Monday touted the replacement of a superstorm Sandy-damaged bulkhead in Point Lookout.
Councilwoman Erin King Sweeney, who represents the hamlet, was not invited to attend the news conference announcing the status of the project, even though she said she worked on it.
The move builds on disputes between King Sweeney and Santino, both of whom are Republicans, that have lasted for months ahead of the Nov. 7 election when Santino is running for re-election.
“I think there’s a proven track record of the supervisor excluding me from events in my district over the last 18 months with a few exceptions,” King Sweeney said Monday afternoon. “I just think it’s further proof that the supervisor is playing politics. He is vindictive and it’s retribution for me having an independent voice.”
Santino appeared in Point Lookout Monday with senior Councilwoman Dorothy Goosby and Councilmen Anthony D’Esposito and Dennis Dunne Sr., all of whom are also running to keep their seats on the town board.
“The issue of storm recovery is not exclusive to any one particular district,” town spokesman Mike Deery said in a statement after the news conference. “The supervisor included those members who have worked with him on storm recovery.”
But King Sweeney said she’s had conversations with the commissioner of conservation and waterways about worker training for the Point Lookout project and also has been involved in other storm preparedness issues.
At the event, Santino said 400 feet of bulkheading has been replaced along Point Lookout’s north shore, which borders Reynolds Channel, since late April. Another 300 feet is expected to be completed by midwinter, with a life span of 50 years.
“It goes a long way to protect the barrier island,” he said.
Santino said the project is to cost $315,000 because the town is using its own workforce. A private company’s bill would have run about $840,000 for the work, he said.
King Sweeney and Santino have been at odds for months, starting with the councilwoman’s call for an inspector general and ethics reform. Santino later introduced his own ethics reform legislation that included a $125,000 outside income cap, which King Sweeney has said is aimed at keeping her, an aviation attorney, from running for re-election. The ethics reform law was passed last month but Santino has said it will be brought up for a revote after an error was discovered in its public notice last week.

TOBULK1024

Sandy bulkhead replacement has Hempstead politicians at odds

Pols’ feud builds as town touts Sandy bulkhead replacement

Hempstead Town rebuilds Sandy-damaged bulkhead

Hurricane Sandy sprung to life in the central Caribbean on Oct. 22, 2012, more than 1,600 miles from New York, probably not much on any Long Islander’s radar.
It drove north, strafing the eastern edge of Jamaica and Cuba and cutting through the Bahamas, killing dozens along the way. By the time it steamed into the Atlantic Ocean, forecasters said it likely was headed north and west where it would eventually dissipate. Its winds had even started to slow.
But on Oct. 27, it took a startling left turn that would change the course of local history. 
When the downgraded storm slammed the shores of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut two days later, it arrived at high tide, creating record storm surges. It also had spread into the largest Atlantic storm by diameter. 
The “superstorm,” as it was called, killed dozens on the East Coast, including 48 New Yorkers. It damaged 95,000 homes, businesses and government buildings on Long Island alone, put communities such as Freeport, Long Beach and Lindenhurst under water, obliterated boardwalks, knocked out power to refineries, schools, waste-treatment plants and electrical substations, altered the dunes and the channel at Fire Island and washed more than 10 billion gallons of garbage, oil and sewage into people’s basements and lawns and eventually out into the ocean.
It was one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history.
Five years later, numbers tell part of Long Island’s story to recover, rebuild and rethink.
<ul>
 <li>$50.5 billion: the amount earmarked for Sandy recovery for New York, New Jersey and other states after a bitter fight in Congress, with $4.5 billion going to New York.</li>
 <li>11,000: the number of Long Island homes included in the NY Rising recovery program — though 3,400 of them still aren’t fully repaired. </li>
 <li>3,500: the number of homes in New York slated to be elevated to avoid future floods, though just 1,300 have completed the process.</li>
 <li>500: Homeowners who decided to get out once and for all, selling their dwellings to the government in a buyout program. </li>
 <li>$1.4 billion: the amount projected to be spent for repairing Long Island’s electrical grid and fortifying it against the next storm. Though the fortifying part is half done, plans included installing thicker utility poles to withstand greater winds and overhauling substations. Meanwhile, New Jersey-based PSEG took over from the Long Island Power Authority as the system operator.</li>
 <li>18 feet: the height of the wall built around the Bay Park Sewage Treatment Plant — double the pre-Sandy size. The storm surge flooded the plant, sending raw sewage into neighboring basements, yards and waterways, and triggering one of most expensive repairs on the Island.</li>
</ul>
Numbers, too, tell of misdeeds: $137,000, the amount Looks Great Services, a cleanup company, agreed to pay in back wages following a state investigation that found it underpaid workers for clearing debris; $225,000, the amount HiRise Engineering, a Uniondale firm, paid after pleading guilty to falsifying storm-damage reports for insurance purposes; 300-plus, the number of alleged contractor-fraud cases the New York Legal Assistance Group handled.
Yet numbers don’t tell the sweep of struggles, changes and proposals in the Sandy aftermath.
There’s Charles Spota, a Seaford resident, who labored for years to get his now-elevated house rebuilt. Despite the money, time and red tape, he told Newsday coming home was one of the best days of his life.
But there’s also Laura Cromer, who said leaving and moving upstate rejuvenated her, and Jim Parente, who relocated to Florida and acknowledged he’s “been in a fog” ever since Sandy.
Science hasn’t stood still, either. In the five years since Sandy, hurricane tracking has improved. The V-shaped cone of a storm’s projected path has been reduced significantly, thanks to better sensors, satellites and computer models, said Jon Miller, a coastal engineering professor at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. Storm surge forecasts — Stevens accurately predicted Sandy’s — have become more reliable too. And, working on a grant with the Port Authority, Stevens is trying to put together street by street “water over land” projections to be able to tell what city blocks and buildings might get swamped by the next big storm.
“The area we are still not all that good at is assessing the intensity of these storms. And that is a real tricky problem,” Miller said. Tricky not only because it depends on obtaining data from near a hurricane’s eye, but also because climate change is making storms more intense, he said. The volume of associated rainfall — such as the roughly 50 inches that fell in Texas during Hurricane Harvey — appears to be rising too. 
“Sometimes it takes these shocks to the system” to learn our preparedness shortcomings, Miller said, likening it to putting off car maintenance until something goes wrong. Building codes, sea walls and beach “nourishment” have been improved, but there is still a ways to go.
“You have to take advantage of the amount of attention and money these storms generate to make yourself as resilient to the next storm as possible,” he said. “You have to realize another Harvey is going to happen. Another Irma is going to happen. Another Maria is going to happen.”

LIMAIN1015

Where LI stands five years after superstorm Sandy

5 years later: Superstorm Sandy’s effects remain on LI

5 years after superstorm Sandy, by the numbers

flSAND1029_SANDYEXPLAINER_VIDEO

Each time a massive hurricane slammed into the coastlines of our islands and Southern states in the last two months, a familiar feeling of dread and vulnerability returned to Long Islanders. 
Even five years after superstorm Sandy pummeled Long Island, five years after the water receded, and boardwalks were rebuilt, many homes elevated, dunes recreated and infrastructure reconstructed, that vulnerability remains. 
Certainly, state and local officials have done much to rebuild in smarter and better ways, to try to protect, however temporarily, our shorelines. Plans for how to respond to such emergencies have gotten smarter. And the infrastructure of our power grid and other electrical equipment is much stronger. But all of these don’t substitute for a regionwide effort to plan for the next big one. 
Take the Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery, a department set up in 2013 to combine recovery and rebuilding under a single umbrella. That effort has been specific to Sandy, officials in that office noted. Its duties are about rebuilding from destruction, not about broader thinking about our region’s resiliency or plans for the future. Even though individuals are having those conversations, that’s not enough. 
We have to continue to help those whose homes were ravaged by Sandy, and we have to complete the larger reconstruction projects. A prime example is repairs needed to the East River train tunnels damaged by Sandy’s corrosive floodwaters — an effort whose launch has now been put off to 2025. 
But attention must be paid. Harvey, Irma and Maria didn’t hit Long Island, but could have with a few different turns. It’s only a matter of time. 
Enter the notion of a regional or statewide coastal commission. Similar to the California Coastal Commission, such an organization would work with municipalities to regulate development to determine what’s best for the shoreline, plan for future massive weather events and, fundamentally, think differently and bigger than we’ve ever thought before. The Regional Plan Association, a Manhattan-based nonprofit public policy organization, suggested earlier this month that such an agency would work across state lines, handling coastal and environmental concerns from New York to New Jersey to Connecticut. That might be a complicated endeavor, but it should be started. The first priority should be to establish a state umbrella agency to bring New York municipalities together to devise a master plan. All that would take would be an act of the State Legislature and a signature from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. 
From Staten Island to Montauk, from Throgs Neck to Orient, we need to assess the needs, gather and address the best ideas, and then put them in place. The storms will surge, the tides will rise. Let’s not wait until the next one to respond.

Opinion

Editorials

VPSANDY1024

Prepare regionally for the next big weather disaster 

Editorial: Prepare regionally for next disaster

VPSANDY1024_A3W_WEB

Carol Polsky

After the storm came the deluge.
The extraordinary demands and decisions and deadlines began after superstorm Sandy’s floodwaters receded and have lasted for years as homeowners struggled to recover while juggling the challenges of ordinary life.
Now, some people say they want a chance to correct mistakes made in the midst of all that, and choices they now regret. Beth Henry, 44, a teacher, and her husband Anthony, 45, a New York City fire marshal, of Massapequa, are among them. They are asking for funds to raise their house, two years after withdrawing from a now-closed New York Rising elevation program.
“I single-handedly got hundreds of people in the program in the beginning,” Beth Henry, a grass roots advocate well-known in Sandy recovery circles, said of NY Rising. “So the irony is that I couldn’t help myself, how I thought I was helping my family at the time, but it wasn’t the right decision.”
About 11,000 Sandy-damaged homes have participated in the Home Recovery Program and more than 7,600 of those have finished repairs, according to the agency. Elevations of homes have occurred more slowly, with just over one-third done of 3,400-plus that are scheduled.
The Henrys, who received NY Rising funds to repair their flooded home, in 2014 chose to enter the optional elevation program, which funded raising of homes in the 100-year floodplain that were not substantially damaged. Properties declared substantially damaged were mandated to elevate.
In December 2014, they received the first installment of the elevation funds. But less than a year later, they sent back the check. They had decided that raising their home would be too costly and stressful and might add to the health difficulties of their older daughter, who was diagnosed with autoimmune diseases. And Beth Henry and her husband too had health issues from Sandy’s rocky aftermath, she said.
Now that NY Rising’s deadline for the program has passed, the Henrys are seeking a hardship waiver so they can reopen their elevation application.
The agency said each case is judged on its merits.
“The important point to stress is that while hardship claims have some commonality, each is unique,” said Catie Marshall, spokeswoman for NY Rising. “There is no formula for success except to have a legitimately — and documented — compelling case.”
Beth Henry is worried that flood insurance rates will go up every year the house is not elevated.
“We’ll be priced out of our house,” she said. “If we can’t pay it, and no one will buy it with a $10,000-a-year flood insurance policy, I really fear we’ll lose the house.”
The Henrys aren’t alone in their regrets.
Scott Kemins, commissioner of the Long Beach building department, said he believes there are many people “who are sorry they didn’t enter into the NY Rising program now that they see neighbors’ housing going up. But I understand. The NY Rising process was very difficult.”
State Sen. John E. Brooks (D-Seaford), who formed a Sandy work group to help constituents with storm recovery snags, said he sees a lot of hardship cases.
“In the five years since the hurricane, their lives have changed, they lost a job or got sick. At the time of the storm, you couldn’t imagine how long a repair would take or how different their lives would be,” Brooks said. “Decisions made early on may have turned out not to be the best, given how their world has changed.”
His office is in contact with NY Rising to help resolve issues, he said.
“There were some people quite honestly that didn’t understand the process. They said, ‘I wasn’t told I had a due date,’ but they have documentation that shows they did have one — but they didn’t understand.”
Brooks’ aide Kevin Devlin said some constituents have come in seeking help after a hardship waiver has been denied, but “at that point, it’s hard for us to do anything.”
“There is no appeal process,” Devlin said. “I’ve tried on a couple occasions and NY Rising said no.”
Kim Reilly of Long Beach, a nurse and mother of two, currently faces a huge problem: She is being asked to return $46,000 to NY Rising, money she said she does not have. The agency can demand return of funds it deems were handed out incorrectly or not spent for the specified purposes.
Reilly said she and her husband told NY Rising they were not going to elevate their home when they applied for an award. They did not submit elevation plans and used much of the funding to repay a Small Business Administration loan that they, like many storm victims, took out to pay for repairs, she said.
When they asked for a final housing inspection, she said, they realized NY Rising had intended that the money be used for elevation.
NY Rising said that a document the couple signed in February 2014 clearly indicated that the money was for elevation, and that repairs were largely complete before the award was made.
“I’m going to compose a hardship letter and pray for the best,” Reilly said. “Otherwise, I will be forced to sell my house that I have fought so hard to keep. I have nothing left in me to give.”
She added, “I feel so bad for the poor people in Florida and Texas who are going to go through what they are going to go through. It’s like living a nightmare all over again . . . I just don’t want to think about Sandy anymore. Five years is a long time to think about a stupid storm.”

LISTRU1022

Five years after Sandy, homeowners live with regrets

Years after Sandy, homeowners have regrets

LISTRU1022_WEB

Joie Tyrrell

Charles and Laura Spoto were among the first residents of Seaford’s Somerset Drive to elevate their home after superstorm Sandy. Today, the street — once a quiet dead-end — still resounds with the whir of construction activity.
Of about 40 houses on Somerset, at least 10 have been demolished and another eight or nine have been raised or are in the process of being raised, said Charles Spoto, 58. Workers arrive daily and a construction crane is parked along the narrow roadway.
“I never thought — ever in my life — I would be able to say it is commonplace to see a home being lifted,” said Spoto, who has lived on the block for almost three decades. “Five years ago, it was unheard of someone lifting their home; now it is almost unheard of for them to not lift.”
In all the years he lived there, he said, storm-driven water never invaded the two-bedroom bungalow. Then Sandy’s floodwaters destroyed the first floor.
Now the home sits atop 10 feet of concrete, with one set of steps leading to the front door and a second set to the back deck.
Living above ground level has taken some adjustment.
“It is incredible — you don’t realize how many times a day you walk in and out of your house. Now you have 15 or 16 steps and it is a lot,” said Spoto, a customs broker. “But I don’t regret doing it. I was blessed to be able to do it.”
Nearly 700 houses in the Town of Hempstead have been elevated and another 1,124 are in the process, according to town officials. Islandwide, more than 3,400 elevations have been scheduled, figures from the Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery show.
Elevation heights are based on FEMA flood base levels and vary by location. An estimated average cost of elevation today is more than $250,000, according to the Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery’s Action Plan.
Spoto, who had insurance through the National Flood Insurance Program, did not have exact figures of the cost of elevating his home, saying it was part of the overall rebuilding project. He and his wife evacuated along with three dogs, a bird and a fish, staying in Lynbrook until they were able to move back to Somerset Drive in June 2013.
Since the house was raised, Charles Spoto has noticed several changes. There have been a few leaks and some cracks, and the need for other minor repairs as the house settled and where reconstruction work was done in a hurry.
He also had thought that living so far above ground level would be quieter. “It is much noisier and I thought it would have been less noisy, but sound travels,” he said.
He and his wife, Laura, 51, said elevating the house was the right decision. They have a sweeping view of the water out back and can see the ballfield at Seamans Neck Park across the canal.
“I love my home,” said Laura Spoto, who grew up on the waterfront in Babylon.
These days, Charles Spoto watches the tides daily and says he sees that the water is rising. He predicts that Sandy won’t be the last storm to flood the neighborhood.
“Unless you live through it, you don’t know what it is like, losing your home,” he said. “Coming back home was one of the best days of my life.”

LIELEV1022

The Spotos of Seaford: Early to raise, with no regrets

Nassau family among first to raise home after Sandy

IMG5AW0_WEB

Nowhere on Long Island were hospitals more fortified against superstorm Sandy than those near the Great South Bay, where sandbags and “dam doors” helped meet the challenge five years ago — and spurred planning for a future event of even greater force and fury.
South Nassau Communities Hospital in Oceanside, Southside Hospital in Bay Shore and Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip all came through Sandy’s pummeling in October 2012 largely unscathed thanks to lessons learned a year earlier during tropical storm Irene.
Not so for beleaguered Long Beach Medical Center, with its 162-bed hospital and complex of buildings near Reynolds Channel, the strait that separates the Long Beach barrier island from the mainland.
Sandy sounded the death knell for the medical center, which had been ailing financially for years, flooding the complex and causing irreparable damage to three structures. Only two still stand.
“Right now, they are dark and cold. That’s the term of art,” said Joe Calderone, a vice president and spokesman for South Nassau Communities Hospital, which purchased the former medical center’s assets in 2014 for $11.8 million.
“We are taking those buildings down to steel,” he said of the studs, and starting a rebuilding project that over the next several years will reinforce the structures to withstand a 500-year storm. That kind of turbulence packs torrential rain, high-velocity winds and substantial seismic forces.
Although the terminology seems to suggest a storm that emerges once every 500 years, meteorologists define it as one that has a 1 in 500 chance of occurring in any year. Hurricane Harvey, which crashed into the Texas coast and Houston in August, was a 500-year event. Weather phenomena of similar proportions also struck the Houston region in 2015 and 2016.
Sandy, by comparison, was a 100-year storm.
And the damage in Long Beach was extensive and expensive. South Nassau has yet to reach the fortification part of its plan to transform the former site into storm-bolstered medical buildings.
To date, South Nassau has spent $38.8 million in Long Beach, including $6 million for the initial Urgent Care Center in the area and an additional $14 million to upgrade it to a free-standing 911 Emergency Department. Demolition of the three buildings that could not be salvaged cost $6 million.
On top of that, $45 million in FEMA funds is earmarked to build a permanent home for the Emergency Department on the Long Beach campus. Its first floor is to be elevated more than 20 feet above the ground.
Calderone defines his own hospital — South Nassau — as a “defend-in-place” institution in the event of a monster storm. That means the hospital is open for business and all staff members are on-the-job awaiting patients, regardless of weather conditions.
Other hospital administrators have taken the same stance and said Sandy reinforced lessons learned during Irene, which tore through the region in August 2011.
“We are just 1,000 feet from a major tributary of the Great South Bay. Our entire campus is only a few feet above sea level,” said Donna Moravick, executive director of Southside, a division of the Northwell Health system.
Irene’s surge was so potent that water flowed into the first floor of the Bay Shore hospital.
“We learned from Irene what we needed to do to protect ourselves from Sandy,” Moravick said, so that in the 2012 storm, “We identified the most critical patients and said, ‘Let’s be prudent about this and move these patients to Manhasset and LIJ’ ” — that is, North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset and Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park.
A primary lesson learned at Southside and other hospitals near the shoreline is that storm defense is as much a part of patient care as guarding against hospital infections and other pressing safety issues.
After Irene, Southside purchased “dam doors” — removable flood protection devices placed in doorways to prevent water from entering the building. During Sandy, sandbags were arrayed along the hospital’s perimeter as a barrier to hold back the surge.
Joseph Loiacono, senior vice president of business and development and planning at Good Samaritan Hospital, said that during Irene the hospital took no chances and acted in the interest of patient safety.
“We evacuated the hospital during Hurricane Irene because of the very high tidal surge predictions. Ultimately, those predictions didn’t pan out,” he said. “So during Sandy, we partially evacuated because the predictions were a little more accurate. But we didn’t get much damage other than a few [uprooted] trees and a few damaged doors.”
Since Sandy, he said, “We have been working with the state and federal government to upgrade our generators that supply power to the hospital.”
A new building that will house the generators is planned, Loiacono said, and rather than the current seven machines, only three more powerful ones will be needed in the new structure. Designs have been presented to the Town of Islip Planning Board and the hospital soon will seek construction bids, he said.

Health

LIHOSP1019

South Shore hospitals put high priority on storm defense

South Shore hospitals put priority on storm defense

IMGS5YV_WEB

Vanessa Clarke keeps an emergency backpack in the bottom of a closet in her first-floor apartment. Among its contents are tuna fish, can openers, soap, washcloths, candles, a cigarette lighter and asthma pumps.
Her preparation is guided by memory — the hardship of being without power, heat and gas for several weeks after superstorm Sandy’s floodwaters engulfed the basement boilers and heaters in Freeport’s Moxey Rigby public housing development, which has about 100 units.
“It’s a very frightening experience. We’re used to the water rising, but not knowing if you’re going to be able to survive or have water or all those things, because nobody really prepared us for the storm” was the unique challenge with Sandy, said Clarke, 58. “But after Sandy, I can tell you I’m prepared now.”
Mention Sandy’s fifth anniversary and tenants of the complex on Buffalo Avenue, which opened in 1958 and has about 400 residents, are quick with recollections. Many left during the power outage to stay with relatives or friends, and those who did said their hearts broke for the neighbors who remained there.
“Most of the people didn’t have family to go to, so most of them were stuck in their apartments,” said Nathaniel Gregory, 60, who served as the building’s superintendent until his retirement last December. He and his family still live in the complex.
Gregory remembered the night of the storm, when he instructed his son Nathaniel, then 9, not to look outside the window as intense rain beat down. The family was separated for 10 days as they sought shelter with friends and others, though Gregory returned every day to his job.
Many of the residents traveled to the Freeport recreation center in search of hot meals and supplies.
“We helped each other. We all try to work together. Stay together,” resident Eula Adams, 71, recalled in a recent interview outside the complex.
During Sandy, Adams was living in Moxey Rigby with her daughter and grandson, Mason, who was 1 at the time. Her 1996 Nissan Sentra, parked in the back lot, was destroyed in the flood.
Freeport Housing Authority officials, with past troubles in mind, are pressing forward with a “long-range game plan,” said John J. Hrvatin, the authority’s executive director, who took office in 2014.
After Sandy, he noted, tenants “were living in a tough situation there.”
Construction has begun on a new $40 million state-of-the art facility just west of the complex — informally dubbed “New Moxey Rigby” — that is expected to open in two years and is to include two community centers and about 100 units. The facility will be built on pilings, and its buildings and parking spots will be above the flood-elevation base. There will be no basement or subbasement.
In Sandy’s flood, about a dozen parked cars were destroyed, and Moxey Rigby currently has 14 spots. The new facility is to accommodate 102 vehicles.
“This building that’s coming out of the ground, it’s going to have national recognition for what housing and what affordable housing should be for this country,” Hrvatin said.
The new complex, to be supported by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, is being funded as part of a low-income housing tax-credit transaction with New York State, Nassau County, the Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery, and New York State Homes and Community Renewal.
“It will be a lot stronger,” Gregory said. “The building is brand-new. This building is shot.”
For Clarke, there was a moment after the Christmas holiday in 2012 when Sandy began to recede in her mind.
“We had heat, electricity, I was able to cook and prepare my own food again,” she said. “You know, home is where the heart is. This is all I know. I’ve been here for 25 years.”

LIPUBL1022

Freeport public housing complex flooded by Sandy to be replaced

Flooded public housing complex to be replaced

LIPUBL1022_WEB

Five years ago, superstorm Sandy slammed Long Island like an angry bull shark, its colossal waves and raging gales wreaking havoc on homes in the region.
The wind and water juggernaut — recognized as the largest storm in New York history — brought the Atlantic Ocean into living rooms, converted streets into marinas bobbing with unmoored boats and sent trees crashing through roofs.
In all, some 50,000 Long Island homes suffered major damage, officials said.
The centerpiece of New York State’s effort to help residents recover has been NY Rising, created from scratch in Sandy’s aftermath to offer financial assistance through several programs. As revealed by numbers released recently by state officials, it’s an effort that continues, five years after the waters receded.
More than 7,600 of the 11,000 Sandy-damaged Long Island homes that participated in NY Rising’s flagship Homeowner Recovery Program have finished their repairs — leaving one-third of them, about 3,400, short of that goal.
At the same time, the elevation of homes in flood-prone areas is proceeding at a slower pace. Just 1,243 of the 3,438 elevations scheduled to be performed have been finished, according to state figures.
Those responsible for the program have touted its success.
“I am very happy with where we are as we inch closer to the fifth anniversary,” said Lisa Bova-Hiatt, executive director of the Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery, which was created in April 2013 and oversees the several NY Rising recovery programs. “I feel very proud with the work that our office has done.”
Others, however, have given it mixed reviews, with complaints focusing on bureaucratic glitches, delays in processing paperwork and frequent personnel changes among the caseworkers handling individual cases.
The NY Rising program “has allowed homes to rise from Sandy’s ruins into beautiful, storm-resistant structures that will withstand the test of future storms,” said state Sen. Todd Kaminsky (D-Long Beach), who, along with other legislators, successfully appealed to state officials in March to extend the deadline for completion of elevation work to June 1, 2018.
“However, everyone is not home yet,” he added. “I am still hearing from families every day who are displaced, living in partially repaired homes or in debt. This has been a five-year ordeal for these storm victims, and our government must not forget them and must exhaust every last resource and marshal every effort to get them home.”
Money for disaster recovery was part of a massive $50.5 billion federal aid package that aimed to help communities damaged as Sandy ripped up the East Coast from Florida to Maine — causing at least 48 deaths in New York alone, according to federal figures.
In New York, funding went into two big buckets, with $4.2 billion to New York City and $4.5 billion to Long Island and other affected counties outside of the city. The package included money for programs designed to help New Yorkers recover not only from Sandy but from tropical storms Irene and Lee, which hit upstate communities especially hard in 2011.
Bova-Hiatt said the state has disbursed more than 60 percent of the $4.5 billion in federal Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery funds distributed to the Island and upstate counties for programs designed to help New Yorkers recover from Sandy, Irene and Lee.
Nearly $2.7 billion of the $4.5 billion allotment was allocated for housing, with the bulk of that, or $1.6 billion, devoted to the homeowner recovery programs. In addition, $680 million was earmarked for the state to buy and resell or demolish damaged homes; $49 million for mortgage assistance; $234 million to shore up rental properties; and $700 million to fortify other structures in communities wrecked by the storm.
Architects of the funding programs also set aside money to elevate homes, especially those in flood zones, to make them less susceptible to future storm damage.
“As you will hear in storm recovery repeatedly, there’s no one single approach to storm recovery, no one-size-fits-all approach,” Bova-Hiatt said. “We need many tools in our toolbox.”
Here’s a look at the status of the various programs under NY Rising on Long Island.
<h3>Homeowner recovery program</h3>
By late September, participating families had received $927 million in funds to fix their homes, officials said. Bova-Hiatt said that 7,646, or roughly 66 percent, are done, while another 3,300 remain works in progress. Of the completed repair jobs, 5,691 are in Nassau and 1,955 in Suffolk, officials said.
The program also is funding the elevation of 3,438 homes on Long Island and has disbursed $610 million to homeowners who must raise their homes, because they are in a 100-year floodplain, and to those who choose to elevate despite being outside of the flood-prone area. There have been 634 elevations completed in Nassau and 609 in Suffolk, officials said.
Bova-Hiatt said delays in performing the elevations could be because there are not enough contractors for the volume of work.
<h3>Buyouts and acquisitions</h3>
This two-pronged program allowed homeowners to get rid of storm-damaged homes by selling them to the state.
Under the buyout program, properties would be demolished and the parcel “returned to nature” or another environmentally resilient use. The outcome for properties in the acquisition program differed in that the state was allowed to resell those houses back to the public, generating revenue for use in other housing or storm recovery programs.
On Long Island, the state purchased 150 Suffolk properties under the buyout program at a cost of $54 million. Those properties were slated for demolition or conversion into environments designed to help flood-prone areas better cope with storms, such as wetlands, which scientists say can absorb a high volume of water as well as wind and tidal forces.
More than 100 properties have been demolished, and some were vacant land at the time of purchase. More than 50 of the parcels were donated to municipalities or sold, state officials said this month.
Under the acquisition program, the state bought 361 properties on Long Island — 199 in Nassau and 162 in Suffolk — and resold them at several auctions at a fraction of their pre-storm value, allowing some $54 million paid by new homeowners to be reinvested for other housing and storm recovery programs, Bova-Hiatt said.
The revenue generated from the sales of acquired properties, Bova-Hiatt said, will help fund other projects such as the construction of a new complex to replace the Moxey Rigby apartments, a 100-unit public housing development in Freeport that sustained extensive damage from Sandy.
<h3>Interim mortgage assistance</h3>
Homeowners who were ousted from their living spaces so that their homes could be repaired were provided mortgage assistance. As of late September, state officials said, $41 million had been distributed to 1,550 Long Islanders to pay mortgage loans during the time they were displaced from their homes — $30 million in Nassau and $11 million in Suffolk.
<h3>Community reconstruction</h3>
This program, with $698 million in funding for Long Island and upstate counties, has directed approximately $250 million to 86 projects in Nassau and Suffolk counties, including the $8.2 million American Venice Bridges project, consisting of the replacement of two bridges over the Santa Barbara Canal in Copiague.

LIRIS1017

Thousands of NY Rising homes still need repairs from Sandy

LIRIS1017_WEB / mg

John Hildebrand

Long Island’s public schools, after more than $80 million spent on cleanup, repairs and renovations from damage caused by superstorm Sandy, still lack adequate safeguards against flooding and power losses that caused massive disruptions of classes five years ago, educators said.
Veteran school officials who witnessed Sandy’s destruction firsthand said shortages of emergency power generators, as well as inadequate sea walls and other flood controls, leave many schools vulnerable.
Most of the expense of clearing storm debris and restoring schools to their original condition was paid for by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Districts’ insurance also covered a portion.
Sandy’s destructive power was most pronounced in the southwestern corner of Nassau County, according to updated government estimates of school damage costs obtained by Newsday. The hardest-hit districts there included East Rockaway, Freeport, Island Park, Lawrence, Long Beach and Oceanside.
The overall impact of the epic storm, which struck on Oct. 29, 2012, was felt throughout Nassau and Suffolk counties.
Classes were cancelled for more than 450,000 students — most for periods of six to 10 days. Two elementary schools on Nassau’s South Shore were so badly damaged by surging saltwater that they did not reopen until the following September.
While schools now are somewhat better prepared for severe weather, much preventive work remains to be done, school leaders said.
Rosmarie Bovino, superintendent of Island Park schools in southern Nassau, noted that storm-related renovations are continuing in her district, where Sandy inflicted damage totaling more than $11 million. Next summer, the district plans to install new pilings under a section of Francis X. Hegarty Elementary School, which was closed for eight months of the 2012-13 school year because of flooding.
“People don’t realize that five years later, we’re still doing this work,” Bovino said. “That’s why I’m so sympathetic over what’s happened in Houston and Florida and Puerto Rico, and I know how long it’s going to take them.”
Priorities for the region’s school districts include not only structural improvements, but also revamping of curricula with greater emphasis on the impact of global climate change and its effects on weather patterns.
Connetquot High School in Bohemia offers an elective course called “Natural Hazards” that requires students to draw up plans for what they would do if a hurricane or other natural disaster headed their way.
Mary Loesing, the district’s chairwoman for secondary STEM instruction, said the lessons hold special meaning for students whose homes were destroyed or damaged by Sandy.
“Everybody has a story to tell,” said Loesing, who oversees classes in science, technology, engineering and math.
Loesing recently served as an adviser to the state Education Department in the development of new science learning standards covering preschool through 12th grade. The state now is phasing in the guidelines, which include sections on weather and climate change for all grade levels, especially Regents courses in earth science.
Weather issues have special significance for Joyce Thornton Barry, chairwoman of science, research and technology in the Plainview-Old Bethpage district, who also advised the state on the science standards. Barry was flooded out of her Babylon home by Sandy, and she knows of students who worry about being evacuated from their homes whenever they hear of hurricanes forming.
“We all know that it’s easier to learn when it’s something you can relate to,” she said.
The six hardest-hit Nassau districts incurred storm-related costs totaling $71.76 million, according to the state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services. An additional 40 districts throughout the county suffered damage totaling $4.97 million.
In Suffolk, 34 districts sustained a combined total of $3.69 million in losses, according to the state security and emergency services agency. 
FEMA also provides mitigation money to make schools more weather-resistant — for example, by installing storm doors to protect boilers and other vulnerable equipment from water damage.
Renovation work in Long Beach has included elevating boilers in two schools to prevent future inundation by floodwaters.
Michael DeVito, the district’s chief operating officer, is among the local educators who believe Long Island’s schools have made significant progress in emergency planning and preparations.
“I think we’re better equipped to withstand any future storm without incurring significant damage,” DeVito said.
Many experts regard purchases of heavy-duty electrical generators as a high priority — if only money could be found to pay for them. FEMA does not normally pay for such costs.
Proponents note that standby generators can be used during emergencies to keep lights and heat working, allowing schools to serve as temporary shelters.
Peter LaDuca, executive manager of health and safety training and information service at Nassau County BOCES, said most of the 330 school buildings in Nassau lack such equipment.
“I would love to see emergency generators for all our school districts,” said LaDuca, who helped coordinate recovery efforts in 2012. “Anytime anything like that happens, it is a wake-up call.”
Generators capable of powering entire school buildings carry price tags in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, along with additional thousands for annual maintenance.
David Flatley, superintendent of Carle Place schools, said his district purchased generators nine years ago and is glad it did so. Flatley added, however, that state tax caps imposed on districts in more recent years make such investments more difficult.
“We need to strike a balance between our expenditures on instructional programs and our expenditures for hardening buildings against a disaster,” said Flatley, who serves as president of the Nassau County Council of School Superintendents.
In East Rockaway, school officials are negotiating with the state in the hope of raising money to extend and heighten an 1,800-foot bulkhead — similar to a sea wall — along a riverbank behind the district’s high school.
Superintendent Lisa Ruiz said a stronger bulkhead could prevent a repeat of what happened in 2012, when the school was flooded with 4 feet of water and sandy muck. FEMA estimated total damage recovery costs at $15.96 million for the district.
Ruiz added that storm-related construction in her district is not limited to schools. A half-dozen local families with school-age children still are repairing their homes, she noted.
“You’d think after five years, everybody would be back,” Ruiz said. “But some of our families are not, and it’s a challenge for them.”

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