Sandy bore down on the coast, hitting New Jersey and New York City especially hard. It killed at least 43 in the city, left 30,000 to 40,000 homeless and caused an estimated $83 billion in damage. The damage estimates from early December left Sandy at second or third on the list of costliest natural disasters in U.S. history.
Many are calling Sandy a watershed event, one of those disasters that sets in motion new best practices and offers lessons learned. Many of the lessons have been observed before, and without casting blame, responsibility is shared by residents who didn’t heed evacuation orders, by community leaders who should act as liaisons between government and citizens, and by government leaders.
We saw that social media was big during Sandy. As you’ll read in the feature story, Black Hole of Communication, New York City Fire Department’s Social Media Manager Emily Rahimi spent a day and a half straight comforting frantic citizens and giving out critical information over Twitter. She said the experience will change the way the department uses social media during disasters.
In addition, social media proved to be a good way to mitigate the “disaster after the disaster.” That is the flood of goods provided by a caring public that oftentimes becomes more of a nuisance than a help.
And as you’ll read in Black Hole, some communities felt out of the loop and didn’t know where to turn for information, despite the efforts of city leaders to alert communities. Emergency Management has written much about communication among emergency managers, city leaders and community leaders, and the efforts that need to take place prior to a disaster that lead to better preparedness. Sandy showed that those efforts need to continue and be strengthened.
Sandy could change the way disasters are funded — for better or worse. Some have said it could put an increased emphasis on mitigation and mitigation planning and thus elevate funding for everyone and possibly reduce the amount of red tape in such matters. On the flip side, Sandy, along with so many other extremely costly disasters of late, may facilitate a raised threshold for FEMA funding, making it more difficult to get a presidential disaster declaration.
As funding becomes harder to get, emergency managers will have to think increasingly about how to streamline processes, reduce overhead, share responsibilities and find ways to improve recovery efforts. These are a few of the lessons from Hurricane Sandy. There will be more, and we will outline them in future editions of the magazine.
