FIVE YEARS LATER
IVE YEARS after the wild night Hurricane Sandy roared into town and tore up large swaths of the city, the fix is not yet in.
Billions of taxpayer dollars worth of rebuilding projects are still slogging along, with expected completion dates one, two or — in some cases — even five years away.
Many projects have yet to begin.
The flood-proofing of some public housing developments is months and even years behind schedule. Upgrades to 17 of 42 public school buildings that were flooded during the storm are incomplete. Construction of floodwalls to protect Bellevue, Coler Memorial and Metropolitan hospitals from the East River won’t start until next year.
Four of 12 moving bridges scheduled to have their electrical systems flood-proofed by year’s end are months behind.
A waterfront greenway project in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to rebuild storm sewers and water mains was supposed to wrap up by year’s end but “extensive subsurface work” pushed the deadline to June 2018, city officials said.
The Mayor’s Office of Recovery & Resilience lists dozens of projects still under construction that have already passed their completion dates. And many other projects have yet to start.
That is the landscape five years after the night of Oct. 29, 2012, when a stunned city began experiencing the wrath of Sandy. When it was over, there were 44 deaths, 2 million people without power and $19 billion in property and infrastructure damage. Storm swell and howling winds destroyed huge sections of the Rockaways in Queens, cut a path of destruction across the outer edges of Brooklyn, and swamped Lower Manhattan.
The struggle to return to normalcy began immediately, coupled with a universally embraced demand that any recovery must include measures to rebuild a city that will withstand the next monster storm.
Most of this proposed renaissance was to be funded by the federal government, and by spring 2015, the Federal Emergency Management Administration had committed $13.5 billion to the state of New York. New York City got $5.8 billion of that.
Two and a half years after that agreement, work is underway — but much of this money has yet to be spent, a review by the Daily News has found.
FEMA awards this money with the agreement that the amounts are more or less set in stone and repairs must be completed within a set time period.
The city has twice appealed a FEMA decision that required that administrative costs connected to the repairs must be counted as part of the effort. A second appeal is pending, although city officials say FEMA has committed to working with them going forward.
Some big projects have wrapped up. The $341 million FEMA-funded replacement of Rockaway Beach’s wooden boardwalk with a concrete update is complete. So is the floodproofing of the massive E. 13th St. Con Edison substation that blew out during the storm. And the city last year activated a $250 million drinking water tunnel connecting Brooklyn and Staten Island to ensure supply is not interrupted in the event of another deluge.
But many more projects have fallen significantly behind schedule.
The reasons for delays of specific projects are varied. Sometimes the city made unrealistic estimates about when projects would be finished. Sometimes bureaucratic obstacles slowed things down. Sometimes unexpected circumstances surfaced during the design or construction phases.
Take the city Housing Authority. In March 2015, FEMA handed NYCHA its biggest single award ever — $3 billion to repair and flood-proof buildings in 33 developments whacked by Sandy.
Most of these developments are located in low-lying areas of Brooklyn such as Red Hook and Coney Island, in the Rockaways in Queens, and along the East River in Manhattan. Post-Sandy, tenants went for weeks without electricity, hot water, elevators and working toilets.
As of today, the renovation of exactly one development is complete: the Lower East Side Rehab, one of NYCHA’s smallest projects with just two sixstory buildings.
Seventeen developments are in various stages of construction, but 15 more have yet to begin. All 15 were originally supposed to start construction in late 2015 or early 2016, internal NYCHA records obtained by The News show.
NYCHA has spent $623 million of the $3 billion, or about 20%. At the Red Hook projects, which were badly flooded and where tenants went nearly a month without electricity, NYCHA has so far spent $29 million of what will eventually be a $549 million upgrade.
The delays started with the nine months it took FEMA to actually release the money it had promised. Then one by one the estimated start dates fell by the wayside.
Joy Sinderbrand, NYCHA vice president for recovery and resiliency, says the preliminary estimates were based on incomplete plans that changed due to unforeseen obstacles. She expects the speed of the repairs will accelerate as NYCHA learns from its earliest forays into relocating infrastructure and flood-proofing buildings.
Ocean Bay Oceanside, for example, was originally supposed