SANDY’S
DEVASTATION
as Sandy approached the Northeast. Gary Szatkowski, the meteorologist in charge of the National
Weather Service’s Mt. Holly, N.J.
station, about 75 miles southwest
of New York City, said that early
satellite tracking led to projections that the storm would be far
more dangerous than Irene.
“By Thursday, when the storm
was still south of the Bahamas,
we started talking about how
there was the potential for record
flooding along the New Jersey
and Delaware coast, which would
exceed anything that we saw with
Irene,” he said.
On Monday, Oct. 29, when the
storm finally hit, the Rockaways
were under a mandatory evacuation order from the city, along
with roughly 300,000 residents
of other low-lying areas in the five
boroughs. But that evacuation order had come only the day before.
Some believe a more robust
effort by the city to inform those
living in threatened areas about
the specific risks they faced
might have saved lives. In hurricane-prone states like Florida,
it is common for public safety
workers to go door-to-door in
low-lying coastal areas urging
people to evacuate.
HUFFINGTON
12.02.12
In some New York neighborhoods, police and firefighters did
directly warn residents against
staying. But some combination
of the late order to get out, and
the city’s immense size, meant
that many residents didn’t learn
until Sunday evening or even
Monday that they were supposed
to evacuate.
Residents also complained that
they didn’t know about evacuation
buses parked in some neighborhoods to take people to shelters.
“Notification is a problem in
every place,” said Jay Baker, a geography professor at Florida State
University who studies hurricane
evacuations. “But being able to
go door-to-door to directly warn
people is by far the most effective
way to convince people to leave.”
Prior to the landfall of Hurricane
Irene last August, Baker and other
academics called 355 New Yorkers who live in beach communities
and asked a set of basic hurricane
preparedness questions. The takeaway, he said: Most people underestimated the potential damage
from hurricane-force winds, but
still ranked wind as a more dangerous hazard than flooding.
Beryl Thurman, an environmental activist on Staten Island, said
the warnings by the city before
Sandy’s impact lacked detail, and
left her shocked by the intensity