1978 report warned of storm vulnerability

ALBANY -- More than three decades before superstorm Sandy, state law and a series of legislative reports warned New York's elected officials to prepare for a storm of historic proportions.

The documents spelled out scenarios eerily similar to what happened on Oct. 29: a towering storm surge, overwhelming flooding, swamped subway lines and widespread power outages. The Rockaways peninsula was deemed among the "most at risk."

But most of the warnings and a requirement in a 1978 law to create a regularly updated plan for the restoration of "vital services" after a storm went mostly unheeded.

"I don't know that anyone believed," Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said last week. "We had never seen a storm like this. So it is very hard to anticipate something that you have never experienced."

The 1978 executive law required a standing state Disaster Preparedness Commission to meet at least twice a year to create and update disaster plans. It mandated the state address temporary housing needs after a disaster; create a detailed plan to restore services, maintain sewage treatment plants, prevent fires, and assure generators for nursing homes and other health facilities; and "protect and assure uninterrupted delivery of services, medicines, water, food, energy and fuel."

Reports in 2005, 2006 and 2010 added urgency.

"It's not a question of whether a strong hurricane will hit New York City," the 2006 Assembly report warned. "It's just a question of when."

And a 2010 task force report to the Legislature concluded that "the combination of rising sea level, continuing climate change, and more development in high-risk areas has raised the level of New York's vulnerability to coast storms . . . The challenge is real, and sea level rise will progress regardless of New York's response."

The Disaster Preparedness Commission met twice a year some years, but for other years there is no record of a meeting. Some administrations, including Cuomo's, convened many of the same agency heads to discuss emergency management. But even under Cuomo, who has taken a much greater interest in emergency management after three violent storms in his first two years in office, there are still three vacancies on the commission.

Richard Brodsky, a former New York Democratic assemblyman who was chairman of the committee that created the 2006 report, credits administrations with making some improvements to the plan in recent years, such as requiring a specific program to protect and evacuate the infirm and to save pets.

"But on two issues related to Sandy -- prevention and recovery -- they did almost nothing," Brodsky said. "If Goldman Sachs was smart enough to sandbag its building, why wasn't the MTA smart enough to sandbag the Battery Tunnel?"

Sandy flooded both tubes of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, now called the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel, which was one of the major and longest transportation disruptions of the storm.

Among the other crises Cuomo and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg faced on a daily basis during Sandy were the shortage of temporary housing, which continues, the long disruption of electricity and gasoline supply, generators in health care facilities swamped by floodwaters, restoring power from swamped electrical infrastructure and repairing commuter rail lines.

"What you've got here is a great number of consequences that were foreseeable, but unforeseen," Brodsky said. "Prevention is politically less sexy than disaster response."

There was another obstacle to enacting calls for more preparation: funding. The state and city were each facing $1 billion deficits from a slow economic recovery before Sandy hit.

"As your budget shrinks, the first thing that goes out the door is emergency management," said Michael Balboni, New York's disaster preparedness point man in the Republican-led Senate and in the Democratic administrations from 2001 to 2009.

"To take the 1978 law and really enable it, you need to put a ton of money behind it and there was no political will to do it," said Balboni, who now heads an emergency management firm in Manhattan.

Cuomo is now asking the federal government for more than $32 billion to cover the immediate costs triggered by Sandy, and another $9 billion for preventive measures to better protect the area for the next big storm.