From the Wall St. Journal: New York Mayor Pledges to Fix City’s Sandy Recovery Programs. Some excerpts:

At least 500 New York City homes damaged by superstorm Sandy would be rebuilt and 500 reimbursement checks would be issued to storm victims by the end of this summer, under a new recovery plan outlined by Mayor Bill de Blasio on Thursday.

“We want to put forward clear, strong goals, and we want to be held to them,” Mr. de Blasio said at a news conference on Staten Island. “I’m holding myself accountable, and the whole team accountable…. If we’re not reaching people tangibly, we’re not doing our job.”

Mr. de Blasio released a 33-page report that his aides described as an overhaul of the city’s Sandy recovery programs. They see it as an official reset in the wake of complaints from frustrated storm victims and elected officials who say City Hall has been heavy on promises and short on results.

To date, the city has been awarded $3.22 billion in federal “community development block grant disaster relief” funding, including $1.45 billion specifically for the city’s Build it Back program, which serves homeowners, owners of rental buildings and low-income renters.

Aides to the mayor said all of the new initiatives are fully funded, but the city is seeking an additional $1 billion from the federal government for other Sandy-related needs.

Note that his plans include another major cash infusion from the federal government.

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Additional articles about H. Sandy recovery are available from this HSDL site.

It is always good to see that tragic events can result in positive outcomes and better readiness for the future. See: A year after marathon bombs, Boston hospitals apply lessons learned

Two more sources of info:

Podcast: Response to Boston Marathon Bombing from the National Association of County & City Health Officials. In NACCHO’S latest podcast, staff member Ian Goldstein interviews Director for the Office of Public Health Preparedness at the Boston Public Health Commission Atyia Martin. Listen as they discuss the health response to the Boston Marathon Bombing.

Strong Medicine: the Healing Response to the 2013 Marathon Bombing. Harvard University Center for the History of Medicine is collecting and sharing images, stories and more from the medical community’s experience of the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing. They are currently seeking content that will be held by the Center, as well as shared on their website.

Prof. Rob Olshansky wrote in to provide some context for landslides and mudslides. He has been studying them for years and has published several papers on the topic. In reviewing the issues over the years he said:

*** there are two main points to all of this. First, landslide insurance does not exist (except for the “mudslide” provision in NFIP, a curiosity which is explained in my longer law review paper). This means that when a landslide occurs, everyone sues everyone (of course, it’s worse if deaths are involved). For local governments, it ends up being distracting and expensive, whether or not they are at fault. Hence, my message to local governments is: do everything you can to avoid damaging landslides in your jurisdiction. The Oso landslide would be my illustration of what I mean by this.

Second, if a landslide affects an existing subdivision, there are very few options. It’s hard to prevent others from building on lots in the subdivision. And it’s hard to fix the slide: everyone thinks that someone else should pay. My paper on landslide hazard mitigation looks at several possible financing structures (with estimates of dollar amounts at the time), including some ways to lure the insurers back into the game.  But landslides are too infrequent to attract sustained policy attention or the sustained attention of insurers, so nothing changes.

A special thanks to Rob Olshansky, who is Head of the Dept. of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Note: He send the Diva copies of 3 of his published papers. To avoid copyright violations, I have not uploaded them to this site. But I can share them with a selected no. of interested persons, if the intended use is for educational purposes. Contact me directly if you want to see them.

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Another Note:  For those who want some basic information about landslides, as well as links to additional resources, check out the US Geological Survey and its Landslides 101 page.