Community Led Disaster Planning: Lessons Learned in Red Hook, Brooklyn Post Superstorm Sandy

New York City has long operated under the perceived low risk of severe hurricanes impacting the major city. In late October of 2012, Superstorm Sandy struck with ferocious intensity and exposed many weaknesses on multiple levels, from city to the federal government. As far back as 2007, New York City has been publishing groundbreaking and forward thinking long-term sustainability reports to deal with the threat of climate change on the city, and the impact it will have on various stakeholders. This thesis will examine the key points of three of the major reports, and identify to what extent areas in which vulnerable community stakeholders were involved. PlaNYC, A Stronger, More Resilient New York, and the Hazard Mitigation Plan all have attempted to plan for the long term across numerous hazards and risks that the city faces. The destruction that Sandy caused in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook epitomized the failures on multiple levels of city's response. At the same time, it became a case study for community led disaster response in the face of great neglect for some of New York's most geographically and socially vulnerable population

Disaster Med Public Health Prep

ObjectiveWe evaluated the usefulness and accuracy of media-reported data for active disaster-related mortality surveillance.MethodsFrom October 29 through November 5, 2012, epidemiologists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tracked online media reports for Hurricane Sandy\u2013related deaths by use of a keyword search. To evaluate the media-reported data, vital statistics records of Sandy-related deaths were compared to corresponding media-reported deaths and assessed for percentage match. Sensitivity, positive predictive value (PPV), and timeliness of the media reports for detecting Sandy-related deaths were calculated.ResultsNinety-nine media-reported deaths were identified and compared with the 90 vital statistics death records sent to the CDC by New York City (NYC) and the 5 states that agreed to participate in this study. Seventy-five (76%) of the media reports matched with vital statistics records. Only NYC was able to actively track Sandy-related deaths during the event. Moderate sensitivity (83%) and PPV (83%) were calculated for the matching media-reported deaths for NYC.ConclusionsDuring Hurricane Sandy, the media-reported information was moderately sensitive, and percentage match with vital statistics records was also moderate. The results indicate that online media-reported deaths can be useful as a supplemental source of information for situational awareness and immediate public health decision-making during the initial response stage of a disaster.20162018-08-01T00:00:00ZCC999999/ImCDC/Intramural CDC HHS/United States28031073PMC571072

The influence of urban development dynamics on community resilience practice in New York City after Superstorm Sandy: Experiences from the Lower East Side and the Rockaways

While (urban) resilience has become an increasingly popular concept, especially in the areas of disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA), it is often still used as an abstract metaphor, with much debate centered on definitions, differences in approaches, and epistemological consider- ations. Empirical studies examining how community-based organizations (CBOs) “practice” resilience on the ground and what enables these CBOs to organize and mobilize around resilience are lacking. Moreover, in the growing context of competitive and entrepreneurial urbanism and conflicting priorities about urban (re)development, it is unclear how urban development dynamics influence community- based resilience actions. Through empirical research conducted on the Lower East Side, a gentrifying neighborhood in Manhattan, and in Rockaway, a socio-spatially isolated neighborhood in Queens, we investigate community organizing of low-income residents for (climate) resilience in a post-disaster context. Results show that both the operationalization of resilience – how resilience is “practiced” – and the community capacity to organize for the improved resilience of low-income residents are strongly influenced by pre-existing urban development dynamics and civic infrastructure – the socio-spatial networks of community-based organizations – in each neighborhood. The Lower East Side, with its long history of community activism and awareness of gentrification threats, was better able to mobilize broadly and collectively around resilience needs while the more socio-spatially isolated neighborhoods on the Rockaway peninsula were more constrained

Developing a Framework for Stigmergic Human Collaboration with Technology Tools: Cases in Emergency Response

Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), particularly social media and geographic information systems (GIS), have become a transformational force in emergency response. Social media enables ad hoc collaboration, providing timely, useful information dissemination and sharing, and helping to overcome limitations of time and place. Geographic information systems increase the level of situation awareness, serving geospatial data using interactive maps, animations, and computer generated imagery derived from sophisticated global remote sensing systems. Digital workspaces bring these technologies together and contribute to meeting ad hoc and formal emergency response challenges through their affordances of situation awareness and mass collaboration. Distributed ICTs that enable ad hoc emergency response via digital workspaces have arguably made traditional top-down system deployments less relevant in certain situations, including emergency response (Merrill, 2009; Heylighen, 2007a, b). Heylighen (2014, 2007a, b) theorizes that human cognitive stigmergy explains some self-organizing characteristics of ad hoc systems. Elliott (2007) identifies cognitive stigmergy as a factor in mass collaborations supported by digital workspaces. Stigmergy, a term from biology, refers to the phenomenon of self-organizing systems with agents that coordinate via perceived changes in the environment rather than direct communication. In the present research, ad hoc emergency response is examined through the lens of human cognitive stigmergy. The basic assertion is that ICTs and stigmergy together make possible highly effective ad hoc collaborations in circumstances where more typical collaborative methods break down. The research is organized into three essays: an in-depth analysis of the development and deployment of the Ushahidi emergency response software platform, a comparison of the emergency response ICTs used for emergency response during Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and a process model developed from the case studies and relevant academic literature is described

Measuring the State of Disaster Philanthropy 2014: Data to Drive Decisions

This report is the most comprehensive analysis to date on disaster-focused philanthropy Published by Foundation Center and the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, the report provides a snapshot of funding for disasters by the largest U.S. foundations. This analysis focuses on 2012 data to establish a baseline and is the beginning of a longerterm effort to collect and aggregate data -- from multiple streams -- in order to track disaster giving globally. As these data collection efforts move forward, subsequent reports will feature more current and comprehensive trends on disaster-related giving

Storm Surges, Disaster Planning, and Vulnerable Populations at the Urban Periphery: Imagining a Resilient New York after Superstorm Sandy

In the aftermath of Sandy, the destructive superstorm that had a devastating impact in New York City and other parts of the Northeastern U.S. in 2012, ideas and data proliferate about how coastal cities, such as New York, can pursue strategies of resilience to help withstand the next weather-related onslaught. This article argues that whether the city in fact acts resiliently must take into account the extent to which its proposals respond to the needs of vulnerable people housed along its coastline. Superstorm Sandy put a face to vulnerability, including 6,800 evacuees assigned to shelters, 1,800 of whom were residents of chronic care facilities located in flood zones. The vulnerable also included countless numbers of elderly and disabled people, and non-English speakers, who were stranded in New York City Housing Authority-owned buildings without electricity, heat, and hot water for weeks as a consequence of storm surges that flooded basement-level heating and electrical systems. Crucially, forty-five percent of the Housing AuthorityÕs buildings are located in evacuation zones near the waterfront; the siting of these buildings, and particularly their high- rise, tower-in-the-park design, reflect key features of mid-century housing policies informed by slum clearance goals, a post-World War II housing shortage, and considerations of cost

Call to action for global access to and harmonization of quality information of individual earth science datasets

Knowledge about the quality of data and metadata is important to support informed decisions on the (re)use of individual datasets and is an essential part of the ecosystem that supports open science. Quality assessments reflect the reliability and usability of data. They need to be consistently curated, fully traceable, and adequately documented, as these are crucial for sound decision- and policy-making efforts that rely on data. Quality assessments also need to be consistently represented and readily integrated across systems and tools to allow for improved sharing of information on quality at the dataset level for individual quality attribute or dimension. Although the need for assessing the quality of data and associated information is well recognized, methodologies for an evaluation framework and presentation of resultant quality information to end users may not have been comprehensively addressed within and across disciplines. Global interdisciplinary domain experts have come together to systematically explore needs, challenges and impacts of consistently curating and representing quality information through the entire lifecycle of a dataset. This paper describes the findings of that effort, argues the importance of sharing dataset quality information, calls for community action to develop practical guidelines, and outlines community recommendations for developing such guidelines. Practical guidelines will allow for global access to and harmonization of quality information at the level of individual Earth science datasets, which in turn will support open science