Disaster Research Ethics

As Hurricane Harvey hits the United States, research will be important to understand what people need, as well as the underlying social, political, economic, infrastructural, and power dynamics at play. This is particularly important for...Read more

New Publication: “Disaster Data, Data Activism: Grassroots Responses to Representations of Superstorm Sandy”

Based on her work with Superstorm Research Lab, SRL member Max Liboiron has published a chapter on "Disaster Data, Data Activism: Grassroots Responses to Representations of Superstorm Sandy" in an edited volume on Extreme Weather and Global Media.

Call for Papers: Resilience and the Anthropocene

This special issue of Resilience: Policies, Practices and Discourses will explore the indeterminate political ecologies opened by the Anthropocene and resilience.

“New York’s Two Sandys” published for two-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy

SRL members Daniel Aldana Cohen & Max Liboiron have published a summary and update of The Tale of Two Sandys in the latest edition of Metropoltics in time for the three year anniversary of Sandy's landfall in the region. We summarize the two Sandy framework, and then move on to describe the second Sandy based on recent research by community- and advocacy-based organizations.

Data activism: Occupy Sandy’s canvassing practices after Hurricane Sandy

If activism is about changing the relations, assumptions, and contests pertaining to power, then data activism is about using data as a central tactic to make these changes. ...Read more

Announcing the National Disaster Resilience Competition

Responding to demand from state, local and tribal leaders who are working to increase the safety and security of their communities, the nearly $1 billion competition will invite communities that have experienced natural disasters to compete for funds to help them rebuild and increase their resilience to future disasters.

New report on the roles of activists and community-based organizations after disasters.

The North Star Fund has released, "From the Edge of Disaster: How Activists and Insiders Can Use the Lessons of Hurricane Sandy to Make the City Safer," a research and recommendation report drawing on 30 interviews with community-based organizations (CBOs) and participation in dozens of meetings and conferences across the city over the past two years.

“Fighting for Retreat after Sandy: The Ocean Breeze Buyout Tent on Staten Island”

SRL member Liz Koslov has published an article on "Fighting for Retreat after Sandy: The Ocean Breeze Buyout Tent on Staten Island" in Metropolitics. Ocean Breeze residents are part of a movement for post-Sandy home...Read more

Public Bibliography on Occupy Sandy

We've created a public bibliography on Occupy Sandy that includes a mix of academic literature, journalism, websites, graphics, documentaries, presentations, and even some internal documents from Occupy Sandy.

The temporality of disaster

Rather than a teleological climb back to normalcy, there are two ways that many on-the-ground experiences of Sandy create a different temporal pattern. First, people who were relatively resilient and able to deal with adversity before the storm are now vulnerable. Secondly, for populations that were already vulnerable due to poverty, lack of access to health care and education, and precarious employment or housing, not only are they in increasingly dire situations, but a return to "predisaster" normalcy can hardly be called a recovery.

Alliance for a Just Rebuilding Releases Report on Rebuilding & Inequity

Alliance for a Just Rebuilding has just released a public report entitled, "How Sandy Rebuilding Can Reduce Inequity in New York City-- A Plan of Action for Mayor de Blasio from Sandy Survivors."

Trash, debris, or neither? The Nature of Waste During Disaster

Not only do natural (and unnatural) disasters produce a lot of waste, they are also extreme but oddly quintessential events where practices, behavior, and cultures around waste and wasting, as well as their inverse--repairing, fixing, and rebuilding--move to the fore. The waste produced by disaster comes in all shapes, scales, and degrees of danger. In New York City after Hurricane Sandy, there were four million cubic yards of what is called "disaster debris."

SRL on “The Fantasy of Disaster Response: Governance and Social Action During Hurricane Sandy”

SRL members Max Liboiron and David Wachsmuth have recently published an article on “The Fantasy of Disaster Response: Governance and Social Action During Hurricane Sandy,” in the Sandy-themed issue of Social Text Periscope: "Governments make disaster plans. Between municipal, state, and federal level agencies, the amount of planning for potential disasters is enormous. But during Hurricane Sandy, plans that took several years and millions of dollars to produce were thrown out almost immediately. In fact, discarding disaster plans is entirely normal, and may even be desirable....."

SRL on “Housing and mental health from Katrina to Sandy”

Home damage is known to lead to emotional distress, yet it was not until recently that researchers began to understand the complexity of this relationship in disaster-impacted communities. One might assume that as the amount of housing damage increases, so too does the emotional distress of its owner or occupant. In post-Katrina New Orleans, however, we found that residents whose homes were badly damaged but remained standing had higher levels of emotional distress than those whose homes were completely destroyed.

Tenants: An overlooked vulnerable population in disaster research and recovery

While widespread housing damage from a disaster has happened before in the United States, never has a disaster affected an area so heavily occupied by renters. Almost 70 percent of New Yorkers – double the national average – rent their homes. Yet, they are an often overlooked vulnerable population in disaster response and research. How has this population fared in Sandy’s tumultuous aftermath? And what can we learn from the experiences of renters affected by Hurricane Katrina that can help tenants in New York City recover?

Sandy Mold Remediation

This year's International Day for Disaster Reduction theme, "Living with Disability and Disasters", focused on some one-billion people around the world living with some form of disability, representing one-fifth of the world' population who are often overlooked. In that spirit, this blog post focuses on mold remediation. Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to conduct an interview with a first responder, who later became a mold remediator, to learn about the specifics and the importance of mold remediation.

Interview with Respond and Rebuild volunteer

"We started going door to door and kind of collecting as many volunteers as we could, especially who seemed like maybe they maybe had a little know-how with construction or something that would make them feel a little more at home and not completely a fish out of water in a disaster zone, and started talking to homeowners about what they needed to do to clean up and why for health reasons and for the integrity of their building and things like that."

Interview with medical clinic volunteers

"When [canvasers] identified medical needs or homebound folks, they would give us a call and we would provide our own care to go climb the stairs and make house calls to folks. Checking on someone or going around making prescriptions. We evacuated some people to the hospital if people needed to go. The main concern when we got here was 'were people dying on the up on the 20th floor because there’s no one checking on them and they can’t get down?'"

Some Sandy-hit homeowners don’t want to “Build It Back”

Since Sandy, the dominant narrative has been that people will want to rebuild their homes regardless of future risk. On Staten Island, however, many residents tell a different story. In the neighborhood of Oakwood Beach, for instance, a group of nearly two hundred homeowners met shortly after Sandy and collectively decided they wanted to move, rather than rebuild. Together, they successfully lobbied for a government buyout of the neighborhood. Governor Cuomo declared their homes part of an “enhanced area” that the state will convert to a public park or wetlands to protect from future flooding and storm surge. Soon after Governor Cuomo’s January announcement of his intention to buy out damaged houses, hundreds of other homeowners along the South and East Shores of Staten Island formed groups to press for buyouts in their own areas.

Community Voices on the Recovery: Sandy and the Election, Part 1

Community groups have already laid out top priorities—for after-Sandy reconstruction and more general disaster preparedness—that warrant both voters’ and candidates’ attention.

What Use Is Disaster Planning? Hurricane Sandy’s “Fantasy Documents”

The sociologist Lee Clarke argues that many disaster plans should be understood primarily as “fantasy documents”. They have little probability of ever being implemented, and instead effectively serve to project confidence from the planners—to rhetorically “convince audiences that they ought to believe what an organization says” (Clark 1999: 2). The co-chair of one of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s post-Sandy commissions provided a similar perspective:

"On paper, there’s a lot of things that are written into policies that look like...we do have control over this. So we do have national and local planning documents and frameworks for making those kind of decisions and who’s in charge. I think my conclusion is that all of that is somewhat delusional.... We are basically kidding ourselves when it comes to really defining how we’re going to operate in a disaster. There are just too many conflicting interests—some of which are even constitutionally or legislatively in stone in a sense—and we can’t really adapt well when a disaster comes."

Union of Concerned Scientists: Sandy, One Year Later

One year after Superstorm Sandy made landfall, the Union of Concerned Scientists will co-host a full-day forum to discuss what we've learned and what we still need to do in order to make New Jersey more resilient and help the region plan for the future. The event will be held at Monmouth University and will be webcast live nationwide.

Interview with new resident of the Rockaways

"If you were someone who rented, or someone didn't have, who didn't work, or didn't have much, you were actually cared for, but if you actually did work, and you did, you know, have insurance, it seemed like things were, didn't necessarily work in your favor. So it's almost like, it really, it almost didn't pay to be a hard working person....because we were working, we actually lost assistance because we had flood insurance, we had homeowner's insurance, we worked, and it was because of all that, it seemed like we were limited to any assistance we could get."

Opportunity to join HUD’s Rebuild by Design public conversation workshops: Sept 12- Oct 28

Rebuild by Design is a multi-stage regional design competition that will develop innovative approaches to enhancing resiliency in Hurricane Sandy–affected communities. The competition is looking to learn from direct experience, local perspective, and citizen insights as communities across the region begin to rebuild and renew. At each regional meeting below, we invite you to share your experiences and ideas for your community with the participating teams. Your on-the-ground perspective will help Rebuild by Design develop appropriate solutions that respond to local and regional needs.

Disaster Data and Representations of Superstorm Sandy

How data is collected influences the data received, and thus the conclusions that can be drawn about the nature and extent of the disaster. Results start, in the case of canvassing, before canvasers get to the door. While both grassroots responses such as Occupy Sandy and governing institutions such as the City of New York collected data in an effort to match immediate needs and aid, their canvasing forms and "clipboard politics" differed.

Community Engagement in Research Conference: Advancing Communities’ Disaster Resilience

This conference is tailored for academic, clinical and community researchers interested in developing a local/regional/international pathway to whole community emergency preparedness. The success of the conference will also come from equal participation of a wide variety constituents, including government officials, public health professionals, community based organizations, small and large businesses, and volunteer groups.

Interview with mold remediation volunteer

"A lot of the homes were really like disaster zones and there was no one doing any kind of site safety checks and so the first thing we tried to do was go into homes before random volunteers went into them so that we could just make sure there were no oil spills, there was no natural gas fumes, there were no serious hazards beyond what you would normally see with water damage and just kind of build a relationship with the homeowner so that they weren’t in a situation where somebody came in and did half the job but then the volunteers weren’t coming back the next day and so leaving them hanging – like there was a system and we very quickly started keeping track of who we were working for, what they needed, what the sites were like, if there were any hazards, if the stairs were broken, you know. And then we noticed that nobody knew what to do about mold. We knew that mold was going to grow. We knew that we couldn’t use bleach to get rid of it. We knew people who had done that kind of work after Katrina and we knew what needed to happen. And so, that became our focus right away just because that’s actually a really serious public health issue and, you know, can really degrade the structural integrity of a home."

Beyond Divine Wrath: How Religious Leaders on the Ground Interpreted Sandy

In the United States, we're used to media coverage of evangelical leaders who say that particular disasters reflect divine will. But what did local Christian leaders say after Superstorm Sandy hit New York City?

Interview with Carlos Menchaca, liaison to Speaker Christine Quinn

"It took two weeks for full earnest visibility from the government. The trailers started showing up and you saw FEMA in a larger way. They trickled in for sure but their ambitions and their plug into the community was not where I expected them to be. And their nimbleness is clearly not at all possible. So I would say in two weeks we finally saw some support where the first two weeks we were really battling it out as a team of volunteers. And some of the liaisons through the government were really real major government institutional support. What you also saw were people coming out of the woodwork with things that were very important. Like somebody in the community owned a warehouse near the neighborhood, instantly everyone got that information and sent everything that was coming in to that warehouse. So that became a warehouse station, the distribution spots, the churches started coming online as distribution sites happily. And so those things were all in place with volunteers and private help which is a great feeling but it wasn’t a great feeling when two weeks later the ambulances finally show up to the public housing. And we had already created a popup medical clinic in one of our locations that were servicing 200 plus home bound senior citizens and non senior citizens but mostly senior citizens. And we were doing this all within our own means."

Interview with Lisa Cowan, Board President of the Red Hook Initiative

"So they went in, they opened the doors, people immediately came in to start charging their phones and figure out what was going on, and both people who were living in the neighborhood and in the houses came in, and then volunteers, who were I think literally biking around the neighborhood looking for a place to help, found our doors being open, and so pretty quickly people started cooking, dropping off supplies, different kinds of providers showed up, and because we had this physical space, and because we had a staff that was local, and because we had a social media presence, we were pretty quickly at the—at the center of a lot of different supply and demand."

Welcome

The Superstorm Research Lab (SRL) is a mutual aid research collective working to understand the changes in how New York City policy actors, NGO leaders, activists, volunteers, and residents are thinking about social, economic and environmental issues following Hurricane Sandy. We produce traditional academic articles, but we are also pushing the boundaries of what it means to do scholarly work founded on the desire to create change.

The Superstorm Research Lab is generously supported by the Institute for Public Knowledge and the Office of Sustainability via the Green Grants Program at New York University.

Creative Commons

Superstorm Research Lab is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. This data may be shared, copied, distributed and used free of charge provided you attribute the source of the data to Superstorm Research Lab within the work you produce.If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one (Creative Commons, CopyLeft, or Open Source), meaning the work must remain free, open, and the data must be attributed to SRL.