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Cuomo Expands Sandy Buyouts to 600 on Long Island
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is expanding his Sandy buyout program to more storm-damaged homes—this time to Long Island.The state has sent out several hundred letters to homeowners in six clusters,...
View Article1 in 10 New Yorkers Might Be at Risk in Case of Evacuation
Hours before Sandy hit on Oct. 28, 2012, Mayor Michael Bloomberg stood in an evacuation shelter on the lower east side and urged residents of Zone A — the area most in danger of flooding — to get...
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Sandy Minute-by-Minute: At 7 AM, Living Without a Boardwalk
Life changed for thousands in our region almost a year ago when Sandy blew in. For John Cori, a resident of Rockaway Beach, that change is most evident when he steps out his front door every morning...
View ArticleSandy Minute-by-Minute: What Has Changed for You?
Thousands of people in New York and New Jersey found their daily routines changed after Sandy. One year after the storm, let us know what you do differently because that newsstand on the corner is no...
View ArticleIn Public Housing, Temporary Boilers Are Here To Stay (For A While)
Nearly a year after Sandy devastated some public housing projects, thousands of people at those developments still depend on temporary, mobile boilers for heat and hot water. Residents say these...
View ArticleSandy Survivors Still Grappling with Memories of Those They Lost
Until last October, Santo and Gale Lisa had spent 30 dry years in their house in Ocean Breeze, Staten Island. No wave had ever come close to cresting the raised boulevard that lies between them and the...
View ArticleOne Year Since Sandy, Little has Changed on Fielder Avenue, Ortley Beach
One year since Sandy washed away whole houses, knocked out boardwalks and flooded roadways, pockets of the Jersey Shore remain dead zones, with few residents back at home and little progress on damaged...
View ArticleIn Limbo, Long After the Waters Rose
On Oct. 29 of last year, Cherell Manuel and her kids escaped Sandy's rising flood waters on Beach Channel Drive in Far Rockaway. The storm demolished their rented apartment and ruined their...
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Life After Sandy: One Year Later
Early on Oct. 29, 2012, tropical storm Sandy, churning through Atlantic Ocean waters in an easterly direction along America's Eastern Seaboard, hit a high pressure cold front and curved...
View ArticleSeaport Merchants Unite for a Comeback One Year After Sandy
A year after Sandy flooded the South Street Seaport with eight feet of water, some small businesses are still closed, but many have re-opened over the past few weeks and there's a spirit of...
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Rebuilding in the Flood Zone, the Same Way as Before
Midland Beach, Staten Island, is a working-class neighborhood on the eastern shore of Staten Island that sits just a few feet above sea level. It is exactly the kind of neighborhood where, according to...
View ArticleLife After Sandy: Minute by Minute
Thousands of people in New York and New Jersey found their daily routines changed after Sandy. One year after the storm, here's what some people experience today as a result.Browse and listen to the...
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Sandy Minute-by-Minute: Commuting by Sea at 6:30 AM
Life changed for thousands in our region almost a year ago when Sandy blew in. For Raul Romero, a resident of Rockaway Beach, that change is most evident every morning when he boards the Sea-Streak...
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6 Things That Changed Since Sandy—And 5 That Haven't
A year after Sandy, maybe the most that the region has accomplished is plans—lots of them: From government commissions, utility companies, architects and planners, about what to do and how to do it.It...
View ArticleOne Year After Sandy: Lessons Learned, Challenges Ahead
It's one year since Hurricane Sandy battered the region. WNYC editor Matthew Schuerman and reporter Janet Babin discuss where we've been over the last year, including things that have changed and...
View ArticleBuilding Human Infrastructure in the Rockaways
In the year since Sandy, affected neighborhoods have started to rebuild, but also prepare for their response to the next storm. Jaime Jordan, one of the founders of Rockaway Help, talks about the work...
View ArticleCuomo's Sandy Charity Benefits Private Equity Investors
While Sandy victims in New York wait anxiously for government assistance to rebuild their homes, a charity organized by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the wake of the storm to aid homeowners has steered millions...
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It Really Does Take a Village to Rebuild After Sandy
It is one thing to get 30 of your neighbors to decide to throw a block party together. Or to all put your trinkets out of the sidewalk for a rummage sale on the same Saturday. But imagine getting them...
View ArticleZero Homes Repaired. 19,920 to Go
If Tolstoy were alive today, he might say: Every unhappy Build it Back family is unhappy in its own way.Build it Back is the city’s program for Sandy-damaged homes, and it has drawn numerous...
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Fed Up With Rebuilding Delays, One Sandy Homeowner Sells
Around the time of the first anniversary of Sandy, back in October of 2013, Victor Dolan gave up; he and his wife sold the property on Staten Island where they had lived together for decades.It was an...
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Flood-Resistant Neighborhood Would Be 80 Years in the Making
A team of architects and consultants is proposing to build a new neighborhood of residential towers and office buildings on landfill in the East River as part of a counter-intuitive plan to make the...
View ArticleSeaport City Pits Odds of Flooding Against Odds of Ever Being Built
The proposed Seaport City project would be built to withstand a 100-year-storm and make a generous allowance for sea level rise, according to a just-released feasibility report. But that still would...
View ArticleIs the Jersey Shore Ready for Summer?
Memorial Day marks the beginning of the all-important summer tourism season at the Jersey Shore, an area that’s still rebuilding after Sandy. The popular narrative from political leaders last summer —...
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Summer Is Construction Season in the Rockaways
Backhoes and bathhouses. Sand pumping and suntan oil.Welcome to the new beach season in the Rockaways.As the second summer begins since Sandy hit the Northeast, residents along the peninsula in Queens...
View ArticleSandy Repair Program Designed to Protect Homeowners Frustrates at Least One
After months of delays in the city’s Build it Back program, Eleni Stavrakos-Ocampo thought she was lucky. She learned in March that she would be the second person to see repairs begin on a...
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Out of Sandy Misery Come a Berm and Better Park for the Lower East Side
A high-minded international design competition came down to earth Monday when the federal government committed $335 million to build a 19-foot high berm that would stretch 1.5 miles along the FDR Drive...
View ArticleCreator of NYC's Build It Back Says, 'Everybody's Mad'
Lost paperwork, extensive delays, contradictory instructions: New York City’s program to help owners of Sandy-damaged properties became a bureaucratic nightmare for many of the people it was supposed...
View ArticleSandy Recovery Costs Up 50% and City Calls That a Victory
The costs of pushing papers in the name of Sandy rebuilding have increased by more than 50 percent over the city's initial expectations.Yet, the strangest thing about this story may be that the de...
View ArticleIn Case of Hurricane, Take the R or the G Lines to Work
The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority sustained $4.7 billion in damage after Sandy — two years ago to the day this Wednesday. And it will take much more than that to protect the nation's...
View ArticleAfter Sandy: Rebuilding a Home, Then Letting It Go
Stephen Drimalas, a 48-year-old city worker, barely escaped Sandy's floodwater with his life. "I had to speed out of here," he recalled. "Another minute or two and I wasn't getting out — that's how...
View ArticleLearning to Love the Entirely Inadequate but Completely Indispensable...
Disasters are causing more and more damage, and the federal government is spending more and more money to rebuild afterwards.But before the construction crew can begin repairs, homeowners face...
View ArticleOrganic Kale Salad with a Side of Hope
Every Wednesday evening, the parking lot fills with cars and dozens of people crowd into a dining room in Union Beach. Waiters and waitresses take their orders and bring out gourmet-quality food, made...
View ArticleBuild it Back Makes Strides, Three Years After Sandy
More than half of the active applicants to the city's Build it Back recovery program have been helped so far, according to the figures released Thursday, a week before Sandy's third anniversary.Build...
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Three Years After Sandy, a Peninsula Scattered with Broken Toilets and...
Cecil Lloyd-Bei lives in the Arverne section of the Rockaways in a two-story home that hasn’t had running water in the bathroom since Sandy struck.“It’s like I'm living in a third world country,"...
View ArticleA Sandy Rebuilding Program Long on Frustration, Now Short of Money
At first, the applicants in the city's program to rebuild the thousands of homes damaged by Sandy complained about lost paperwork, confusing directions, and endless delays.Now, another problem has...
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Is Public Housing Prepared for the Next Sandy?
When Sandy hit four years ago, it exposed how susceptible public housing in the city was to coastal storms. More than 200 buildings were damaged and 60,000 residents were affected in Brooklyn, Queens...
View ArticleA Sandy-Devastated Neighborhood Returns to Nature
Take a walk down Kissam Avenue on the southern shore of Staten Island and it almost feels like walking through a wildlife refuge. A marsh waving with phragmites stretches off to your right; to your...
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Four Years After Sandy, Rising Sea Levels Loom Over New Jersey Recovery
For most of the last century, modest, one-story summer bungalows lined this private strip of road that dead-ends at Vision Beach. Then Sandy made landfall here on Oct. 29, 2012, obliterating them....
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City's Sandy Repair Effort Leaves Some Applicants Behind
Patricia Sullivan lives with her mother and two daughters in a one-bedroom bungalow just a couple of feet above sea level in Midland Beach, Staten Island. When Sandy hit, the 14-foot storm tide rolled...
View ArticleWhat the Next President Will Do (or Won't) About Climate Change
Through three presidential debates and on vice-presidential one this fall, no moderator asked the candidates about climate change. But Democrats Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine made sure to sneak in some...
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Why 'The Big U' Storm Barrier Could End Up as 'Half a J'
In June 2014 — 18 months after Sandy battered the region — Mayor Bill de Blasio joined state and federal officials outside a public housing complex on the Lower East Side to announce an ambitious plan...
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Sandy Sent This Die-Hard Rockaway Resident Far Inland
A month after Sandy, the cold of winter was setting in along the Rockaways and many people still didn't have heat. The streets were piled with storm debris. And the only shops open along Beach 116th...
View ArticleCity Spends Billions on Sandy-Damaged Homes, but Leaves Many Vulnerable
To the long list of complaints that has bedeviled the city's Build it Back program, add this one: When the program concludes next year, the city will have paid billions of dollars to rehab homes...
View ArticleFive years after Sandy, Questions Remain About Whether New Jersey Is More...
When the eye of Sandy made landfall just north of Atlantic City, Fran Baronowitz’s neighborhood – which was a few miles away in Ventnor – suddenly turned into a lake. Water bubbled up through the air...
View ArticleSandy Took Her Home but Gave Her Some Perspective
After Sandy destroyed her apartment, Cherell Manuel became a problem solver and advocate for herself and thousands of other low-income New Yorkers who ended up in hotels. Today, she lives in a...
View ArticleThanks to Sandy, Wild Turkeys Roam Where Bungalows Once Stood
Bulldozed ground is distinctive: unnaturally flat and largely fallow. And it is now the must distinctive feature of a block in Staten Island that once bulged with 20 bungalows and the life of the...
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FEMA’s Broken Promise to Sandy Victims
Everything looked fine from the outside when Fran Adelson returned to her house the morning after Sandy hit in October 2012. Then she opened the front door.“Everything was in a different place,” she...
View ArticleAfter Sandy, Companies Profit from Flood Insurance Do-over
As the Federal Emergency Management Agency scrambled to right the wrongs of flood insurance companies under its watch, it was paying some two hundred workers $750 a day to do nothing.“We’d be sitting...
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Staten Islanders Brainstorm for the Next Storm
For the fifth anniversary of Sandy, WNYC published a story exploring why so many people remained in harm’s way during the storm even after an emergency evacuation was ordered. The reasons are varied,...
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Six Years Later, an Innovative Sandy Program Yields Resilience (and Lots of...
Two years ago, Angela Tenteromano Nickel thought she got a good deal when she bought a home at auction on Wiman Avenue in the Great Kills neighborhood on Staten Island for $160,000. She had two...
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