The Bloomberg administration announced on Friday that it would double to six the number of evacuation zones along New York City's coast and expand them to include an additional 640,000 residents, saying that the new map would provide more flexibility when major storms hit.
The changes to the city's coastal storm plan were the most visible initiative to emerge from a report on the response to Hurricane Sandy prepared at Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's request.
The report repeatedly praises city agencies and their state and federal counterparts, and acknowledges few if any significant missteps as government officials scrambled to respond to and recover from the severity of Hurricane Sandy, which killed 43 city residents and damaged thousands of homes.
"Over all, the response was very strong," said Caswell F. Holloway, the deputy mayor for operations, who oversaw the preparation of the report with Linda I. Gibbs, deputy mayor for health and human services. He said the point was to identify ways the city could do better, not to find fault.
"We were certainly not in a self-flagellation mode," Mr. Holloway said.
The new evacuation zones will bring to nearly three million the number of New Yorkers living in these areas. The city has roughly eight million residents.
Mr. Holloway declined to provide details on the new map until it is finished in June, but a preliminary version was included in the report released on Friday.
He and Ms. Gibbs said the city had to work on making evacuation orders more persuasive to residents who resist calls to leave their homes.
The extra evacuation zones should help with that, Mr. Holloway said, by making it possible to "only dislocate the people who truly need to be dislocated, and ultimately give everybody even more confidence that the data they're getting, they should be acting upon."
Many lessons learned from Hurricane Sandy will be set down in new "playbooks" for city agencies that had to learn on the fly how to deal with a major storm's aftermath: how to request waivers and extensions from federal school-lunch and food-stamp programs to serve a deluge of needy families; how to muster economic development programs to help battered businesses get back up to speed faster.
Others issues will be left to future task forces to interpret.
A number of smaller recommendations are already being acted on, like the purchase of more emergency lights, generators and small boats for firefighters.
The report also calls for new regulations for hospitals, nursing homes and adult homes during evacuations. It recommends the creation of a patient tracking system, better communication equipment and guidelines for the return of patients.
The report defends the city's decision not to evacuate health centers before Hurricane Sandy, emphasizing that the risks of evacuation were high and had to be weighed against the risks of the storm, which no one expected to be so severe.
The city and the state helped evacuate approximately 6,300 patients from 37 health care centers without a fatality, according to the report.
But it does not address the harrowing details of many of those evacuations, which were widely reported after the storm.
Two hospitals voluntarily evacuated before the storm. But NYU Langone Medical Center, Bellevue and Coney Island hospitals were forced to evacuate as the floodwaters rose and power faltered or failed.
At NYU Langone and Bellevue, gravely ill patients, including babies, had to be carried down darkened flights of stairs. Two patients remained at Bellevue for days in the flickering gloom of backup power because they were too ill to be evacuated with the rest.
Many nursing and adult homes were flooded and lost power, stranding residents without enough food or clothing, or waiting in buses while there was a scramble to find places that would accept them. Some families could not immediately find relatives. Some homes did not reopen for months.
While the report acknowledges that many hospitals, nursing and adult homes are in coastal areas where the flooding was worst, it does not directly address that geographic problem as a planning issue for the future.
City officials said they planned to issue a future report on infrastructure planning.
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
New York City to Double Number of Storm Evacuation Zones
Dengan url
https://scienceteko.blogspot.com/2013/05/new-york-city-to-double-number-of-storm_5.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
New York City to Double Number of Storm Evacuation Zones
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
New York City to Double Number of Storm Evacuation Zones
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar