ICC Serves on Response to Hurricane Sandy Expert Safety Panel
Panelists agreed code compliance prevented further damage and even injury during Hurricane Sandy. The group also discussed response and how to mitigate future super storms.
 The response to Superstorm Sandy contains numerous stories of heroism — firefighters pulling residents from flooded homes; hospital workers carrying patients to safety. New Yorkers may want to add building code inspectors to the list of heroes, according to a group of flood recovery and mitigation experts.
"They are kind of the unsung heroes," said Dottie Harris, vice president of the International Code Council, an organization that oversees building codes. "Nobody walks out of their house and says 'I'm so glad the building didn't collapse today.'"
She and others said relatively tough enforcement of building codes in and around New York City likely prevented further damage and even injury during Superstorm Sandy. That consensus came March 11 in New York during a panel discussion that included experts from across the country, including top officials from the National Wildlife Federation, Nation Housing Conference, Federal Alliance for Safe Homes and International Code Council.
The panel explored how to recover from Superstorm Sandy and determined how limited federal funds could best be allocated. The group provided valuable input about responses that have worked following other natural disasters around the country, even those that may prove controversial or costly in the short-term.
"What we're trying to do is to have a dialogue with state officials regarding a cost-effective and a more resilient and sustainable recovery and how we smartly use the dollars, those very limited dollars that we have to make the area more sustainable and more resilient," said Association of State Floodplain Managers Executive Director Chad Berginnis. "One example would be a laser-like focus on critical facilities, those facilities which, if they were impacted or shut down during a disaster like a Sandy event, would cause even more difficulty, inconvenience or even real harm to the community—so things like your wastewater plants, medical centers. You need to repair and also mitigate or make that structure more resilient to events."
"What we should be doing more in the future, and we're doing it in places like New Orleans after Katrina, is we need to start thinking not just like engineers, but also like ecologists," said National Wildlife Federation Staff Scientist Dr. Hector Galbraith."What does that mean? It means taking advantages of opportunities to preserve, restore and create coastal ecosystems which will protect human communities. One reason Katrina was so bad was because we destroyed all the coastal salt marshes. It just comes thundering in off the coast, it was bad news. We saw in Sandy that some of the dune ecosystems that were still in place protected the human communities that were on the landing site of those systems." |
