Sandy homes coming down

From DNA Info:

Dozens of homes damaged by Hurricane Sandy in Staten Island and Queens have been slated for demolition by the city, including two abandoned homes on New Dorp Lane neighbors have complained about for months.

Homes that Department of Buildings inspectors determined were in danger of collapsing and posed a safety risk will be taken down by the city in the coming weeks, a source said.

The city did not confirm the number of homes set to be demolished, only saying a few dozen. But discussion with building owners has started and preparations are underway to tear down several already, the source said.

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Storms will bury NYC under water by the end of the century

From the Daily News:

Based on projections from the National Weather Service and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, if a storm equivalent in strength to Hurricane Sandy were to hit the five boroughs in the year 2100, vastly larger swaths of the city would be submerged.

The reason is simple. Sea levels are forecast to rise by as much as six feet before the end of the century, making low lying cities like New York all but defenseless to the wrath of powerful storms.

Unfortunately, over the past decade, scientific projections on sea level rise have grown rapidly as more data on climate change has continued to be analyzed.

Six years ago. the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimate that by 2100 sea level would rise by a maximum of 23 inches. In a draft of this year’s report, the final version of which is to be released this fall, the IPCC revised that outlook to a maximum of six feet.

But not to fear! The City has opened a water-resistant park at the edge of LIC, which is the only neighborhood in Queens that matters anymore.

From Curbed:

In a post-Sandy city, the first question that comes to mind with new waterfront developments is "how did it fare during the storm?" Hunters Point South, it turns out, fared very well. "We were surprised at how well the water drained," said Manfredi. "We always anticipated that there would be a major storm." Every part of the park is design to take on water. After Hurricane Sandy, all of the major surfaces were undamaged and intact, and most of the trees survived because all grades in the park were calibrated to accommodate storms, so the tree roots were protected.

No mention of the contaminated river and creek water that bathed Hunters Point.

Oh, and the trees survived because they weren't there yet. In fact, none of it was there on October 31, 2012. The satellite imagery proves it.

We'll see how well this area fares after the next 100 year storm, which, according to past experience, should be happening any day now...

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More people dumping house trash in city bins

From the Daily News:

Home trash in city litter bins is really piling up — and this year, scofflaws have been largely getting off scot-free.

The number of $100 fines issued for illegal dumping of residential garbage in street bins dropped by 78% in fiscal year 2013, which ended June 30, city records show.

The number of trash tickets doled out declined to 922 from 4,185 in fiscal 2012.

The Sanitation Department said the huge drop happened because the agency’s cadre of enforcement officers were transferred to traffic duty for weeks after Hurricane Sandy.

While fewer tickets were issued, illegal trash dumping at the city’s 25,000 litter baskets is on the rise, local authorities say.

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Breezy Point still struggles to recover

From the Brooklyn Eagle:

On a desolate stretch of sand and concrete rubble in a beachfront community, a lone home is rising amid the ruins of nearly 130 houses that burned to ashes during Superstorm Sandy.

Nine months after the fire tore through Breezy Point, a neighborhood of tightly packed homes in New York City, this house is the only one under construction in the burn zone, the swath of homes that went up like tinderboxes during the storm.

Rows of rectangular boxes sunk into the sand form a graveyard of wrecked homes. American flags waving feebly from the ground help mark where a street once existed.

"That fire zone is the one scar out of all of this that won't go away," said Kieran Burke, a firefighter whose home was destroyed in the blaze. "These aren't just beach homes. These are people's lives. This is a way of life."

A perfect storm of government inefficiency, cumbersome permit laws and general confusion has hampered the recovery effort in Breezy Point, which became a symbol of the storm's devastation after images of the charred neighborhood were broadcast to the rest of the world.

About 350 of the nearly 3,000 homes in Breezy Point were wrecked beyond repair from flood or fire during the storm. But while many of the flooded homes began repairs months ago, the people who once lived in the fire zone are stuck in no-man's land.

Some homeowners have filed plans to rebuild, but few have been approved by the city or by the Breezy Point Cooperative, which runs the neighborhood.

Some people are battling with insurance companies. Others waited months for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to finalize its newly updated flood maps, which put Breezy Point in a more stringent flood zone with higher elevation requirements. And still more are waiting for the government and the cooperative to approve a long list of permits and plans that stand in the way of starting construction.

If the city can give millions of dollars in tax breaks to developers to build along the shore, then why not these folks? This is true affordable housing.

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Hoidy toidy fountain breaks yet again

From DNA Info:

Long Island City parents got a burst of relief Monday when the children's sprinklers at Gantry Plaza State Park turned on for the first time this summer — but then the spray showers were closed off again the next day.

The waterfront "sprayground" had been closed since last fall, when it was damaged by saltwater that flooded the park during Hurricane Sandy. The problem appeared to be fixed earlier this week when the sprinklers were finally spouting water again and open to frolicking kids.

But on Tuesday, though the spray showers were still flowing, they were blocked off with barricades, to the disappointment of neighborhood parents.

The high-tech spray showers first debuted at the Gantry Park playground last summer, complete with an on-duty lifeguard and a button that allows children to control the sprinklers' water pressure.

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Foundations not actually stronger than the storm

From the Brooklyn Paper:

Retreating floodwaters from the superstorm created underground air pockets just waiting to become sinkholes beneath streets, buildings and backyards across Southern Brooklyn, and most people aren’t aware of the danger under their feet, say local architects and companies specializing in subterranean scans.

“From Seagate to Manhattan Beach, a lot of these building’s foundations have been scoured,” said architect Walter Maffei, “and no one knows about it.”

According to Maffei, any structure that suffered severe flooding as a result of October’s hurricane is liable to have lost some of the sediment beneath its foundation as the water rapidly withdrew into the ocean, taking tons of soil with it.

“When you build a sand castle, everybody knows the water comes in relatively slowly, but when it goes out, it moves quickly and takes everything with it,” the architect explained. “A lot of scouring occurs at the foundation level, or below.”

Underground voids, or air pockets, can undermine the foundations of buildings and city infrastructure such as roadways. This means sink holes and structural stability is a big concern and potential hazard for people living in Red Hook and southern Brooklyn, according to Lou Neos, a technician at Ameriscan, which specializes in ground penetrating radar.

“It’s all over, wherever there was severe damage from Sandy,” said Neos, who has found voids underneath buildings in Sheepshead Bay and Brighton Beach. “If there’s another storm, people might lose their whole house because of a void.”

Yes, let's recall the previous Rockaway sinkhole debacle.

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Hoidy toidy fountain keeps breaking

From LIC Post:

Many Long Island City parents were excited last week when the sprinkler system at Gantry Plaza State Park was finally repaired and their children could finally run under the water keep cool.

But that initial joy that the “Rainbow Park” sprinkler provided was short lived. The sprinkler broke after 2 ½ days of operation.

“The sprinkler was damaged after Superstorm Sandy and it required a big stink for it to even come on last week,” said Kris Schrey, the head of the Long Island City Parents Group. “Now we are battling for it to be repaired yet again.”

The system’s design is the source of the problem. The designers, in a quest to be environmentally conscious, shied away from a regular system where the water would have run off into East River.

Instead they adopted a system that recycles the existing water through a filter (with chlorine), much like a swimming pool. “Unfortunately, this is an expensive, fragile and error prone system,” Schrey said.

The system also requires two employees to operate it. One employee has to monitor the chlorine levels every hour, while the other handles health & safety issues.

Translation: It takes 2 park employees to hose down yuppie spawn in LIC.

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Breezy Point homeowners suing LIPA & National Grid

From CBS New York:

Scores of Breezy Point homeowners have filed a lawsuit against the Long Island Power Authority and National Grid, CBS 2 has learned.

According to the suit filed by 120 homeowners, the utility companies failed to de-energize the power grid ahead of superstorm Sandy.

Nearly 130 homes burned to the ground in Breezy Point and in Rockaway Beach, Queens after electrical fires broke out.

Earlier this year, 17 homeowners had announced plans to sue the utilities for failing to cut power ahead of the Oct. 29 storm’s landfall.

At the time, residents argued that if LIPA had turned off the power ahead of time, all they would be facing now is flood and wind damage and not a neighborhood wiped off the map by flames. They said homeowners’ insurance will cover much of the damage, but not the loss of so many irreplaceable items.

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New Bloomberg strategy: propose things that will never happen

From the Politicker:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg outlined a nearly $20 billion master plan Tuesday to shield the city from future Hurricane Sandys, complete with levees, sand dunes, bulkheads, flood walls and a proposed “Seaport City.”

The plan calls for the installation of removable “adaptable floodwalls” in riverfront locations across the city, including Hunts Point in the Bronx, along the East Harlem waterfront, the Lower East Side and the Financial District, as well as a new levee and floodwall system along the East Shore of Staten Island, with barriers that could rise as high as 15 to 20 feet.

The proposal, which the mayor is set to outline in a major speech at Brooklyn Navy’s Yard’s Sandy-damaged Duggal Greenhouse, also calls for the construction of a new dune systems in Staten Island and the Rockaway Peninsula, with a “double dune” planned for Breezy Point.

While the mayor has less than seven months left in office, he also proposed building a new “Seaport City” on the east side of Manhattan, similar to the existing Battery Park City near the Financial District. The new development, which could stretch all the way to Brooklyn, would be built on “a multi-purpose levee with raised edge elevations,” designed to protect the East River shoreline south of the Brooklyn Bridge, while creating a new mini-neighborhood.

Mr. Bloomberg, who has previously said that a sea wall plan was “not practical,” also wants to build a storm surge barrier at Newtown Creek and along Coney Island Creek, and announced plans to work with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to study the feasibility adding “surge barriers” across the mouth of Jamaica Bay to protect communities in Queens.

Meanwhile, people are getting creamed with insurance premiums and building costs.

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Belle Harbor still shaken by storms

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If there's another hurricane, we're screwed

From NY Magazine:

There was a time, not so long ago, when hurricane season had little to do with New York City. Then Hurricane Irene hit in 2011, as did Hurricane Sandy in 2012, with devastating consequences. It's impossible to know if New York will find itself staring down another major storm this summer, but NOAA has already predicted that hurricane season — which officiallly began Saturday — will be unusually strong this year. "The outlook calls for a 70% chance of an above-normal season, a 25% chance of a near-normal season, and only a 5% chance of a below-normal season," a recent NOAA report warned.

So here's the $19 billion question: Are we ready for the next Sandy?

And here's the answer: It depends, obviously, on what aspect of storm preparedness you focus on. But in general? No. Not really.

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