Blaz rethinks floods
Ducks blame for crisis, touts a new plan vs. tempests
Now he has a plan. Mayor de Blasio pledged Friday that evacuations and travel bans will be the city’s first line of defense for future storms, but struggled to explain why his administration didn’t take more aggressive precautions before remnants of Hurricane Ida devastated the five boroughs and killed more than a dozen New Yorkers.
As cleanup efforts continued across the state after the catastrophic Wednesday night storm, de Blasio unveiled a three-pronged plan that he said will allow for a more “muscular approach” to extreme weather events going forward.
The first part is focused on preemptive travel bans, under which public transit will shutter and residents will largely be prohibited from going outside when word comes in of an approaching storm, de Blasio said.
The second tier, de Blasio continued, is developing rigorous evacuation protocols, whereby first responders will go “door-todoor” to get New Yorkers out of dwellings that could be at risk of severe flooding. There will be a particular focus on basement apartments, de Blasio added, noting that 11 of the city’s 13 Ida victims died in such units after they rapidly flooded.
The last component is an “extreme weather response task force” that de Blasio said will deliver findings to him within 30 days on how to beef up emergency preparedness, including quick fixes to drainage and sewer infrastructure systems, which was overwhelmed within hours as Ida
bore down.
“Tragically, these extreme incidents are now the new norm,” de Blasio said, “and so we are going to have to have an entirely different set of tools, but also profoundly different sets of responses when we see these kinds of incidents coming.”
De Blasio was less forthcoming when it came to why the city didn’t take Ida more seriously beforehand.
Asked why he didn’t declare a state of emergency for the city until shortly before midnight Wednesday — hours after Ida started battering the boroughs — de Blasio pointed fingers at meteorologists.
“We did not get an alert that said, ‘You’re going to have massive unprecedented rain on
Wednesday night.’ We obviously would have answered that with a whole different approach,” he said.
But the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center warned several hours before Ida began taking a toll that the storm could bring “locally life-threatening flash flooding” in the city.
In addition, de Blasio’s own administration released a “Stormwater Resiliency Plan” in May that warned of the increased likelihood of severe flash floods as storms grow more destructive due to climate change.
That plan called for several updates in how the city deals with flash flood mitigation by 2023. De Blasio acknowledged the timeline for that plan needs to be moved up.
“Clearly, we have to change that,” he said.
Top members of the City Council did not appear convinced by de Blasio’s Ida explanations and announced Friday that they will investigate why the administration wasn’t “better prepared for an anticipated storm,” starting with an oversight hearing on Sept. 14.
“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,” Speaker Corey Johnson said in a joint statement with the chairs of the Council’s committees on transportation, environmental protection and resiliency and waterfronts.
There also appears to be a hole in de Blasio’s new storm response
plan as it relates to basement apartments.
He acknowledged the city does not have a full tally of basement apartments, many of which are illegal and inhabited by undocumented immigrants, making the evacuations of such units complicated.
“There’s more to put together, which is one of the things this task force needs to work on,” he said. “We need to have an absolute accounting of all of them.”
“This is a really, really tough problem,” he added. “It’s a really tough one. It’s going to take a while to sort out.”
In the long run, de Blasio said the city needs to overhaul its drainage and street infrastructure on a massive scale to make it more resilient against flooding.