SANDY’S
DEVASTATION
the county’s population increased
nearly 70 percent, from 346,000
to nearly 577,000. More residential building permits were issued
in the county in 2010 than anywhere else in New Jersey.
The intensity of development
along the coast clearly influenced
the scale of the disaster, said Bill
Wolfe, a former analyst for the
state’s Department of Environmental Protection who now leads
the watchdog group New Jersey
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
“There needs to be an acknowledgement that we can’t keep on
doing what we’ve done in the
past,” Wolfe said. “We have to
face up to the problem.”
Despite ample warning from
forecasters that conditions were
set for a record storm surge, when
Sandy finally swept ashore on the
eastern seaboard two weeks ago
it still caught many offi cials and
residents badly off guard. Evacuations stumbled in places like Atlantic City, where mixed messages
from city and state leaders convinced many to ride out the storm
with little understanding of its
expected severity.
New York City, which saw the
most deaths directly linked to the
HUFFINGTON
12.02.12
surge, also faltered in its efforts
to get residents to safety. City officials waited until the day before
the storm hit to order a mandatory evacuation of flood zones, then
told 40 city-run elderly and adult
care facilities in mandatory evacuation zones to ignore the order
and ride out the storm.
Some residents said the lastminute evacuation order and the
decision not to evacuate the city’s
nursing homes fed a belief that
the storm would not be much
more severe than Hurricane Irene,
which caused only moderate
flooding in the city.
“When the city didn’t come for
the patients, I figured it must not
be too bad,” said Diane Castiglone,
who lives by Park Nursing Home,
a 182-patient facility in the Rockaways, an ocean-facing neighborhood badly battered by the surge.
In a statement to The Huffington Post, a city spokeswoman defended the decision not to evacuate many nursing homes, saying
it was made with the best information available at the time. But
the day after the storm, as the
death toll began to climb, Mayor
Michael Bloomberg appeared to
acknowledge that the city’s early
warning and evacuation efforts
could be improved.
“I think that the best thing we
can do for those that we lost is to