Jul 24
"And then you take a look at something like the South Ferry Subway Station, which was built for $540 million and opened in 2009 or 2010 and it flooded floor to ceiling like a fish tank. So, how do we prevent against that in the future and how do we make it more resilient?"
Jul 24
" I can’t see any problems. I mean, you have to find people who lives on the first floor. Because that’s what they have really problems, you know because my gentleman he lives on the 6th floor and the lady lives on the-- I don’t, she lives on the second floor. They didn’t suffer a lot. But her friend, she’s 91 or 92 she lives on the first floor, she was flooded, I don’t know how she didn’t have powder dust, you know."
Jul 24
"As a result of the hurricane we had cracks in the walls. FEMA didn’t pay too much attention to that, they said it’s personal, but it’s Projects here so they (management of building) need to take care of it and FEMA isn’t responsible. And we were registered and my daughter signed us up."
Jul 24
"And then I was asked what can I do and they had orientation so I went -- there’s this one guy that was there that told us if you’re going to go out into the field this is the way you should behave because these people where they live has been destroyed and be considerate and think about them and don’t take pictures, be considerate this is their space, you’re coming there to help them not -- it’s what do they need you know? Not like what you want to do. Yeah it was pretty cool. One guy from comms came down and said to my group of people that I was going through the orientation with and he said "does anybody here have a cell phone or a laptop" and I said "I have a cell phone" and he’s like "can you come with me we need someone to answer the hotline.""
Jul 24
"Well there’s several levels of building resilience. So one thing that our current code handles very comprehensively is that a building be resilient enough that after an event, people can get out of it safely. They can safely evacuate. So generally that’s defined as 90 minutes, maybe two hours. What makes the resiliency effort different for New York City is that we’re trying to lengthen the amount of time that the building could be habitable so that people are not forced to evacuate. And this is important for a couple of reasons. One is people do not like to leave their homes—they’re worried about looting, they’re worried about safety, they don’t have places to go. So they like to stay home. And we saw after Sandy, a lot of people living in unsafe conditions because they did not want to leave. Second, the city only has limited capability to actually shelter people—you know, at shelters—and so the more people you can keep in a building, you know, the easier it is for the city to handle the people that really don’t have any option. So one level is just the emergency egress and just getting out safely. Another level might be what we call survivability."
Jul 24
"When I first started, I thought it was going to be a couple of weeks. Now it's more feeling it's going to be over a year at least. I'd like to see people getting back into their houses feeling more comfortable coming and getting the services that we're offering. But the numbers are increasing, not decreasing. And that's kind of eye opening...we are not back to normal and everyone thinks we are. They think that the storm is past and the damage should be over. And there's houses in this community that haven't even been touched yet. And there's, you know, people just starting the cleaning process. And it's six months later, so now they're tackling mold and mildew and a lot of other issues that we didn't think existed prior."
Jul 24
"I think it was a testament to New Yorkers’ perseverance that folks who could make it through and try to get on with their daily lives really did and it's also, I think it was a great example of the diversity of transportation choices in the city that makes the city great. Because New York has so many ways of getting from A to B it makes the city more resilient which is a great lesson from the storm that we're not just wed to a car or to the subways, that when something goes down we have a backup plan."
Jul 24
" I'm trying to remember from social media my perception at the time. The only thing that comes to mind specifically is the sort of the needs hashtag that had come up that I think was effective at both highlighting needs and also getting people to respond to those needs. And I think I was surprised by the effectiveness of the hashtag in doing that because a hashtag can be a pretty blunt tool given that anybody can use it for any purpose that has nothing to do with the hashtag itself. And it's also very limited in terms of how much data it can contain in a tweet, for example. But I was pretty impressed with how that was able to manage so much of the communication load in a very informal way."
Jul 24
"We have the Verrazano Center Rotary Club is working with us. We have the Red Cross was able to give us a couple -- a truck full of assistants. City Harvest is going to work with us also bringing us material and food, a lot of food for the families. Last -- we have been providing food at an average of 100 families per day. And we do give on a weekend, you know like, on a Saturday easily we could give 250, 300 boxes of food to the people. And interestingly enough people are still learning that we are here so we are still getting a lot of new people that didn’t know that we were here."
Jul 24
"Because I learned from my mother to make the light with olive oil and water, the transformers were going boom, boom, boom. My granddaughter said to me, grandma, grandma put your bathing suit on, put your bathing suit on. She said we’re gonna go swimming grandma -- I said I am praying, I am praying. You know and then I applied for FEMA and they said because I have high blood pressure and I have -- I was diagnosed with -- I was in the hospital I was going crazy, I don’t have no -- I didn’t have no medication I couldn’t do anything."
Jul 24
"Spaces where it was free reign, where the community could organize what it needed, as it needed, seem to create the opportunity for resiliency and health. Here with the Church of St. Luke and St. Matthew, there with churches -- mostly churches and like a couple of businesses. I've never thought so well of churches. ... The thing that the churches gave to us was space to organize and assess our needs and then deliver upon them. And there are no other spaces like that, no other spaces like that."
Jul 24
"One of the things we've been starting to explore is helping to develop worker cooperatives because there are so many unemployed people with skills ... I'm really excited about the opportunity to give- to create jobs for people, to create a livelihood that doesn't involve the existing system and doesn't involve people being exploited by people, people making opportunities for themselves."
Jul 24
"And it was pretty frightening, because a disaster takes place and an inevitable outcome is that a lot of organizations that don’t normally communicate with each other are going to communicate with each other, which is abide by the nature of a disaster."
Jul 23
"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."
Jul 23
"My job specifically was to deal with the email address that everyone emailed for questions. So I was working, like, from seven in the morning--I'm not kidding--seven in the morning to, like, two in the morning every night for two weeks. Like I didn't leave my house. …So the emails that were coming in were like anywhere from “how can I help” to “you guys aren't doing enough,” to [laughter]…to “I have a truck load of shit from Ohio; how can I get it to you?” But also we would get these frantic emails from people, like “my uncle's in a wheelchair on the twenty-fifth floor in Chinatown, and I'm worried about him, and I can't get down there because I have kids.'"
SRL is comprised of twelve researchers from different universities working to change the way research is done by using a mutual aid model.
Jul 9
The Metropolitan Center of SUNY Empire State College is looking for
adjunct instructors to teach seminar-style, introductory or
intermediate classes on topics in disaster studies in the January
(Jan. 21-May 2, 2014) or later terms. Instructors will design their
own syllabi. We expect increased interest in disaster studies in the
aftermath of Sandy, but courses need not be explicitly about Sandy.
Jul 9
Poster Submission deadline: August 2nd, 2013
CTSI Community Engagement Key Function
Community Engagement in Research Conference: Advancing Communities’ Disaster Resilience
Conference Date: Wednesday, September 18, 2013 The Harley Davidson Museum, 400 W. Canal St., Milwaukee, WI.
Milwaukee flood, July 22, 2010.
SAVE THE DATE
The Clinical & Translational Science Institute of Southeast Wisconsin Community Engagement Key Function in collaboration with Department of Emergency Medicine, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the City of Milwaukee Department of Public Health are hosting a one-day conference to expand dialogue on advancing community resilience in preparation for possible future disasters which have been common in this region and state.
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. By attending the conference, participants will explore the following questions;
· What are current approaches and trends in Disaster Management practice and science?
· What are the community and academic perspectives and experiences on major local disasters and risks which can enhance a shared awareness and align for resilience during future events?
· How can existing community-academic partnerships reveal potential and existing community assets available for “in-place” preparedness and disaster/emergency response?
· What are potential next steps for establishing a “whole community disaster response”?
The event will be held on Wednesday, September 18, 2013 from 8:00-4:00 pm in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at the Harley Davidson Museum, 400 W. Canal St., Milwaukee WI. If you are interested in attending please e-mail Anne Kissack at akissack@mcw.edu and you will be placed on a mailing list to receive periodic updates on the event. In the future, online registration will be posted on the CTSI website www.ctsi.mcw.edu.
Jun 25
From Urban Green:
We CAN be Ready.
Our Building Resiliency Task Force Report provides 33 actionable proposals for making New York buildings and residents safer and better prepared for the next extreme weather event.
Convened at the request of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Speaker Christine Quinn following Superstorm Sandy, the 200-plus Task Force members led by Urban Green were charged with making recommendations to improve building resiliency and maximize preparedness for future weather emergencies.
VIEW the Summary Report
DOWNLOAD the Summary Report
VIEW the Full Report
DOWNLOAD the Full Report
ATTEND A BRTF EVENT:
June 25: Building Resiliency Revealed
July 11: Emergency Operating Procedures
July 18: Build Your Own “Bathtub”
July 23: The New World of Backup Generators
September 30: Fall Conference – Sea Change: Shifting Relationships between Sustainability and Resilience
Jun 24
The Institute for Public Knowledge is partnering with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the President’s Hurricane Sandy Task Force to organize REBUILD BY DESIGN, a multi-stage regional design competition to promote resilience for the Sandy-affected region. IPK will serve as Lead Partner for Stage Two, which will provide an analysis of the region through a collaborative process with local communities, regional stakeholders and international experts.
The goal of the competition is two-fold: to promote innovation by developing regionally-scalable but locally-contextual solutions that increase resilience in the region, and to implement selected proposals with both public and private funding dedicated to this effort. The competition also represents a policy innovation by setting aside HUD Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) funding specifically to incentivize implementation of winning projects and proposals. Examples of design solutions are expected to range in scope and scale – from large-scale green infrastructure to small-scale residential resiliency retrofits. The competition process will also strengthen our understanding of regional interdependencies, fostering coordination and resilience both at the local level and across the US.
For more detail on the competition, including information on how to apply and an initial survey of available data sets, please follow the below links:
The Task Force issued a Request for Qualifications (see page 8 of the Rebuild By Design Brief) on Thursday, June 20, 2013. Responses must be sent to rebuildbydesign@hud.gov no later than 5:00 pm on Friday, July 19, 2013.
August – October 2013
Process: Applicants selected to proceed to Stage Two as Design Teams will receive $100,000 USD for all their efforts in Stage Two. The selected Design Teams will participate in an intense participatory process organized by New York University’s Institute of Public Knowledge (IPK) in close collaboration with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and other partners in the region. This process will include engagement with a wide-range of stakeholders (including state and local government) and experts to develop a comprehensive understanding of the region, its interdependencies, key vulnerabilities, and areas that warrant integrated design thinking and solutions. Teams will be expected to participate in the following over the three-month analysis stage:
NOTE: Content from this facilitated analysis process, being collaborative in nature and involving a wide-range of stakeholders, will be public, meaning that it can be used by all teams and will be collected throughout the process and presented by NYU IPK through a variety of mediums.
This iterative research process will underpin the analysis conducted by each of the Design Teams in their chosen focus area, and inform each Design Team’s production of a research report and public presentation.
As part of the research and analysis stage, Design Teams must also identify at least 3-5 design opportunities resulting from their research. Design opportunities are defined as key opportunities or key projects that have the potential for maximum impact on the region’s strengths and vulnerabilities. These opportunities can be both site-specific and/or representative of a typology that is regionally replicable.
Through a collaborative process with the Design Teams, Competition Jury, and other stakeholders, each Design Team will end up with one design opportunity for development and refinement in Stage Three in collaboration with state and local communities.
By defining the design questions through the competition process, this competition will incorporate the regional scale and perspective and will reflect the insight and interests of state and local stakeholders. Design Teams will then select one design opportunity to focus on in Stage 3.
Timeline:
Mid-August, 2013 Opening Conference
August – October Ongoing Seminars and Team Symposia
August – October Six Regional Site Visits (exact sites TBD)
Late October, 2013 Closing Conference
Deliverables: Each Design Team must submit a highly-accessible digital research report that includes visual and non-visual analysis, and identification of at least 3-5 design opportunities within their focus area. Design Teams will publicly present their research at a conference in October 2013. These analyses will be compiled by NYU IPK into a public catalog of submissions and synthesis document that could be used by a wide variety of stakeholders. NOTE: At the start of Stage Two, selected Design Teams will meet with NYU IPK to identify an agreed-upon format for each of the Stage Two deliverables.
Please direct any questions to rebuildbydesign@hud.gov.
Superstorm Research Lab 