The day before Superstorm Sandy struck the Northeast last fall, Sarah Romulo and her family left their home in Rockaway Beach, N.Y. They did not feel comfortable sitting tight, blocks from the boardwalk that faces the Atlantic — not with the warnings they were hearing and with their two kids, a 15-year-old and 2-year-old. With an evacuation order in place, they went to stay with Sarah’s mother-in-law in Queens Village, about 20 kilometers inland.
From there, Sandy felt like “just a little windstorm, it seemed like nothing,” Romulo recalls. But television news showed the unfolding devastation, as the storm made landfall on Oct. 30. “We felt so helpless, not knowing what was happening” with the family’s home and business, a martial arts gym a few blocks from their house. When they got back to their property a few days after the storm, they found that the basement in their house had flooded; meanwhile, their gym had been filled with at least two meters of water.
Despite the warnings, Romulo and her family had considered staying put — and many others did remain at home. Hurricane Irene, which struck in August 2011, had not been so bad. So it’s understandable that some people thought they might be able to ride out Sandy. Unfortunately, Sandy was about to become one of the most devastating storms in decades to strike the U.S., let alone the Northeast.
Somehow, the warnings issued by federal agencies that Sandy would be worse than Irene, worse than anything the Northeast had seen since 1962, seemingly were missed. What went wrong? And how can the responsible federal agencies avoid a repeat?