Council to hold hearing on storm failures
The City Council plans to investigate why Mayor de Blasio and transit officials didn’t better prepare for the devastating storm that struck New York this week, starting with an oversight hearing featuring testimony from several agency representatives.
The hearing will take place Sept. 14 and focus on getting a clearer picture of what de Blasio’s administration and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority did — or didn’t do — in the lead-up to Hurricane Ida’s remnants slamming the city, Council Speaker Corey Johnson said in a statement Friday.
“What happened on Wednesday raises several urgent questions, including why we weren’t better prepared for an anticipated storm,” said the statement.
The Council is requesting testimony from officials with the MTA, the Department of Transportation, the Office of Emergency Management and the Department of Environmental Protection, according to a spokesman for Johnson.
Ida claimed the lives of 15 New Yorkers, flooded entire neighborhoods and crippled subway service as it pummeled the city overnight Wednesday.
Despite preemptive warnings of “life-threatening floods” from meteorologists, the MTA didn’t shut down the subway until the storm was already in full swing.
De Blasio, meantime, didn’t declare a state of emergency until shortly before midnight Wednesday, hours after Ida’s torrential downpours began across the five boroughs.
Johnson and the other Council members said “the future of our city and planet” depends on officials doing a better job the next time a storm arrives.
“We know climate change is an unavoidable factor at this point, so at the very least, we need an infallible plan to warn and protect New Yorkers for the storms to come,” they said.
Johnson’s statement was co-issued with Resiliency and Waterfront Committee Chairman Justin Brannan, Environmental Protection Committee Chairman James Gennaro and Transportation Committee Chairman Ydaniz Rodriguez