I want to speak today about storms (near) past, present, and (near) future, how they change us, how they must change us, and what we need to do now in light of this 'new normal.'
Even while we brace for Irma even while the waters of Harvey are still receding, we are fast approaching the fifth anniversary of Sandy. We’d just moved back to Long Island to raise our family. I’d been ‘away’ for 35 years. Off to college, then off to the world. But finally, I’d come home. The bay I’d grown up on, The Great South Bay, had in the meantime collapsed. Overdevelopment and a lack of modern waste water infrastructure was the culprit. With all the nitrogen from 500,000 septic tanks leaching into the groundwater and into all our bays, we stood in danger of losing all our bays, marshes and fisheries by 2030 due to massive algal blooms ‘fertilized’ by that nitrogen.
So it was that twelve weeks before Sandy, I co-founded Save The Great South Bay at my 35th High School reunion. Two weeks without power. Many thousands of homes damaged or destroyed, the storm exposing just how vulnerable we’d become. Were Long Island a separate country, it would be the 4th most densely populated in the world, tied with Bangladesh, and that is excluding Queens and Brooklyn. We’d built on our marshes, spent billions of federal dollars to shore up the barrier beaches around us and to insure homes along our shorelines. $60 billion dollars of damage later, we are still fishing out boats that were sunk in the storm, and are about as unprepared for such a storm as we were then.
We were told that the storm was a 300 year storm in Staten Island, a 150 year storm at Point Lookout, a beach community on The South Shore, a 100 year storm here, a 75 year storm there. I asked The Army Corps of Engineers how current the data was for such assessments. It turned out data they were using was from 1992 and previous. In other words, all the subsequent sea rise and ocean temperature rise was not at all factored in. Today, that data still needs updating. Thousands of homes that were within the “hundred year flood plain” were either ‘raised’ or ‘razed.’ But again, was this the ‘hundred year floodplain’ of 1992 and previous, an estimate 20 years out of date.
So when it is said that Sandy or Katrina or Harvey or now Irma are historic storms, I can only say we are in a new normal, and in regard to that, we need to completely rethink how we build our shoreline cities to prepare for this new age. Some of the Sandy money is being allocated to build coastal resilience — the restoration of marshes and shellfish beds, modern wastewater infrastructure so that our water is clean enough to support those efforts, and a ‘retreat from the sea’ so that people are no longer living on floodplains where the cost of protecting their homes has become too great.
To live on Long Island has been to live in a place that is tied to the water. Fishing, sailing, beach going, swimming, surfing, paddle boarding. It has a multibillion dollar tourist industry; until recently, its fishing and shellfishing industries were billion dollar industries as well. Now we fight to save it. I call it ‘the biggest environmental crisis no one has heard of.’
My experience with Sandy brought me back to what I’d witnessed in New Orleans post-Katrina. In 2010, my wife and I were invited down to New Orleans for a week’s tour of the city by Friends of New Orleans. We visited ten of the city’s 72 wards, a representative cross-section of the city. The Lower 9th, almost five years later, was still a checkerboard of abandoned houses. Citywide, there were still 60,000 of them. We toured Broadmoor, a community that had suffered severe flooding. Ten weeks after Katrina, residents were allowed back in, and they began rebuilding. The community self-organized, with residents taking on different responsibilities according to their interests and passions. Imagine how they felt when the city council decided in the dead of night that Broadmoor would be no more. Imagine one Sunday morning opening the front door to see the front page of The Times-Picayune staring back at you with a map showing open green space where your neighborhood was. The city, without consult, had decided that Broadmoor would be no more, to be replaced with open space. With this, the community rose up to defend its very existence. School teachers, nurses, firemen, the people of Broadmoor became something else. They became leaders.
We saw the steely look of determination in people’s eyes. The storm and its aftermath had changed them. The city’s motto “Let The Good Times Roll” seemingly became “Let’s Roll.” We’d learned that in New Orleans they called Katrina “The Federal Flood.” The levees, shoddily constructed, had failed. In New Orleans, well over 1000 died. The people of New Orleans had been failed at every level — Federal, state, and local. So they took it upon themselves to take charge. In the aftermath of Sandy, I saw — and now felt — this same determination. We would rebuild. We would restore the bay we’d grown up on, become advocates for policies that would help to restore Long Island for our children and grandchildren. As with those in New Orleans, Long Islanders know how to have a good time, but now we knew pain and loss as well. We’d come to know that how we had done things would not work going forward.
So it is that those who suffered in Sandy and in Katrina are now helping those in Houston as best they can; We’ve heard the stories of The Cajun Navy, of all the trucks that have been loaded for the trip from the Northeast to the Southwest, of neighbor helping neighbor, of heroic rescues. That is one thing we learn again and again from these storms. For all that forces that seek to divide us, we are by and large a good and kind people. These disasters really bring that home.
As I write this, Hurricane Irma, the most powerful hurricane ever measured in the Atlantic, is tearing through the Caribbean on the way towards Florida, bearing down on Florida. This is but one week after Harvey, one that was labeled a “500 year storm.’ At this point, I believe we need to throw away all our models and do the science: What is our new reality in fact?
As we look at these four superstorms, the bad policy and poor leadership seem almost a given; so much that happened with Katrina, Sandy, and Harvey, and very soon with Irma and perhaps even now Jose, could have been mitigated had we built in anticipation of such violent storms. We crowd along our coasts, in floodplains, then are inevitably flooded. How do we build for the future? Post Andrew, which hit Florida in 1992, building codes were changed. Post Sandy, New York City established The Office of Recovery and Resiliency, while former Mayor Mike Bloomberg just this July launched The American Cities Initiative with $200 million in funding so that we can begin to plan our futures. There are organizations like The Sustainable Cities Institute and The Center For An Urban Future. There are books like the late Benjamin Barber’s Cool Cities: Urban Sovereignty and the Fix for Global Warming, which argues that cities — not nation-states — can and must take the lead in building viable, sustainable cities, and The New Grand Strategy, which argues, similarly, that our future must be driven by urban and regional planning, that politics is crippling our ability to build what we must build if we are to create a future we can live in.
As we have seen with Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, and as we are about to witness in Florida with Irma is the fact the locals, the people in the towns and the cities ravaged by the storm must step up and demand that the rebuilding efforts are informed by an understanding that we are in a new normal, that we can’t merely restore what was there in this ‘new normal.’ On Long Island, and in New York, Sandy transformed us. We know what we must do. It will take many billions and many years to build the infrastructure we need, but we have no choice.
As the oceans have warmed, the storms have intensified. At this point, that ought to be apparent to everyone. The question for every community, for every coastal city worldwide, is how we can build so as to mitigate the inevitable damage that will come with each storm. No one community singlehandedly lower CO2 gas in the atmosphere, or stem the rise of the oceans, or halt ocean acidification. But each community needs to have a plan for its long term sustainability. Can a community feed itself, generate its own power, preserve and restore its marshes and marine habitats, become local stewards of the environment for future generations?
We have destroyed much of the natural world over the last 50 years, both here and globally. This all happened in a relative eye blink. The consequences of our actions could not be clearer now. We offer our ‘hopes and prayers’ again and again, but we can no longer sin against what our Creator has given to us. We are now feeling the wrath for our blasphemy, our arrogance. We need to make amends — to the earth and to each other. ISIS or of Kim Jong-un are not our greatest threats. We are, all of us.
I have faith that we are smart enough to fix this, and that we are loving enough to embrace each other in this grand task. Man must be kind. We grieve for Houston while praying for Florida. As the waters recede, let us remake the earth as a place we’d all want to live on, whatever creed or color. We do that, and we will grasp the greatest opportunity mankind has ever faced — a world preserved in perpetuity for the countless many who can then follow.
