Is New York City Prepared For Another Hurricane Sandy?

After Hurricane Sandy ravaged large parts of New York City, New Jersey, and other spots along the East Coast, the region has attempted to improve its stormwater management capacities. But as the third anniversary of the storm ticks past, is the region prepared for another storm on par with Sandy?

Three years ago, “corrosive stormwater quickly inundated the subterranean arteries that connect New York and New Jersey, generating widespread damage and causing years of episodic delays on Amtrak, New Jersey Transit, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and the Battery tunnels, as workers slowly repair what is, at best, a woefully inadequate transit system,” The New Yorker recently reported.

Sewage was Sandy's "untold filthy legacy," as Climate Central put it. The storm sent 11 billion gallons of raw and partially treated waste into regional waterways. About "one third of the overflow (3.45 billion gallons) was essentially untreated raw sewage. The remainder (7.45 billon gallons) was partially treated, meaning that it received at least some level of filtration and, perhaps, chlorination."

Since then, the federal government has doled out $4 billion for New York City to recover its transportation systems. New projects have included flood barriers, water-resistant submarine cable, two new pump trains, and tunnel improvements.

But that doesn’t mean the city is ready for another major hurricane, according to Klaus Jacob, a Columbia University geophysicist. He had issued a warning about New York’s “fragile” infrastructure before Sandy, according to The New Yorker. Now he says that even with the upgrades, most Metropolitan Transportation Authority facilities and operations “remain vulnerable.”

Brad Gair is an executive focused on emergency management and enterprise resilience at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. He raised concerns, as well.

“No one in New York City is really prepared for a major wind event, and we could be facing Category 3 or 4 hurricanes. The debris from broken windows, construction sites, and even cranes would be truly dangerous,” he said, per the report.

Paul Schwabacher, Langone’s senior vice-president for facilities management, added: “We’ve invested a lot in backup power systems for air-conditioning, so Langone should be O.K., but not all other hospitals. That’s a code requirement for hospitals in Florida, where they have tropical weather, but not in New York. With climate change, it probably should be here, too.”

Though many experts say the improvements are far from sufficient, Sandy helped bring attention to infrastructure challenges on the East Coast and spurred pockets of political action. For instance New Jersey approved a measure last year “authorizing $1.28 billion in state financing for drinking water and wastewater improvement projects will also allocate $355 million for resiliency and protection projects for Sandy-damaged infrastructure," New Jersey 101.5 reported.

Chairman and CEO of New Jersey Natural Gas (NJNG) Laurence Downes say the state is stronger than before Sandy.

“Back in March of 2013 the board asked all of the state’s utilities to come back with proposals and plans, things that would help us and put us in a better position to deal with these issues if there was another Sandy incident,” Downes said, per the Asbury Park Press.

Projects aimed at improving the durability, redundancy, stability, integrity, and safety of NJNG’s infrastructure were approved. “We are now in a much better position to deal with Sandy. Hopefully, we won’t be in that position again,” Downes said.

For more on preparing for storm events, visit Water Online’s Stormwater Management Solutions Center.