Displaced by Hurricane Sandy, and Living in Limbo. Some excerpts: 

More than a year after one of the country’s largest-ever disaster recovery efforts began, Ms. Fitzgerald is among the more than 30,000 residents of New York and New Jersey who remain displaced by the storm, mired in a bureaucratic and financial limbo.The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it had provided $1.4 billion in direct aid to victims of the storm and $7.9 billion in flood insurance payouts, and that the Small Business Administration had made $2.4 billion in low-interest loans to homeowners and businesses.

What it did not announce was that less than half of the people who sought emergency money received any, as an analysis by The New York Times of FEMA data shows, or that in many cases flood insurance covered only a fraction of the losses.

 According to the analysis by The Times, in the areas in and around New York City that were hit hardest by the storm, almost half of the people who received assistance from FEMA got less than $5,000. Most of that money was intended to cover housing and other emergency costs immediately after the storm.

Flood Maps:

 Federal Flood Maps Left New York Unprepared for Sandy, and FEMA Knew It. FEMA missed chances to make changes that could have protected city dwellers from some of the worst of Sandy’s destruction

See this related chart: http://projects.propublica.org/fema-nynj/

Article from local newspaper in NJ re the Pluses and Minuses of Home Rule.

Proponents of home rule say the practice puts decisions in the hands of those most intimately familiar with a town’s needs — the town itself. But critics contend the practice leads to higher costs and results in some towns making decisions to the detriment of their neighbor.

“Home rule was nice when we could afford it,” said former Gov. Thomas Kean, who battled legislators and local officials on the issue when he was in office in the 1980s, even launching the first effort for a coastal commission that would have broad power over shore development. “Now it raises property taxes, increases the cost of everything we do and makes it very hard to make decisions affecting more than one town at a time.”
“On a simple planning level, the kind of impacts we’re talking about with sea level rise and climate change, they’re bigger system impacts and they don’t respect political boundaries,” said Peter Kasabach, executive director of New Jersey Future, a planning-advocacy group,

In the current issue (Nov./Dec. 2013) of Emergency Management Magazine, the Diva has an article assessing the Sandy Rebuilding Task Force Report. See: Hurricane Sandy Task Force Issues Recommendations for Long-Term Recovery.

Related articles

• One Year After Hurricane Sandy – What We Learned and Changed (shoretelsky.com)

From the HuffPost/Canada: Climate Change Refugees: Coming Soon to a Country Near You. An excerpt:

The world will face a significant humanitarian challenge in coming years. The United Nations Refugee Agency says there are currently 45 million people forcibly displaced by conflict, persecution or natural disaster. According to the International Organization for Migration, the number of people who need new homes, food supplies and livelihoods will increase by at least half, due to climate change. And the international organization, which has studied the implications of environmental migration, says large increases in forced migration will lead to increased conflict, and greater environmental destruction, as migrants burden host communities and their resources.

This is the first time I have seen the term “forced migration.”

In recent years, a greater no. of universities have created emergency management units and acquired dedicated staff to manage them.  This example of Rutgers’ experience after Hurricane Sandy is instructive: Hurricane Sandy exposes flaws in Rutgers’ emergency response, report says.

In the teeth of the fiercest hurricane to hit New Jersey in generations, Rutgers University secured its campuses, safely evacuated thousands of students, managed large shelters without incident and maintained crucial data on its vast computer networks.

But Hurricane Sandy also exposed critical weaknesses in the university’s emergency response, including a failure to communicate well with students and staff, a shortage of personnel at the emergency nerve center and, perhaps most importantly, a lack of backup power, resulting in the loss of decades-old scientific research samples.