Preparing New York for hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, 7-foot snowstorms

State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services Commissioner Jackie Bray oversees the state’s emergency management services, including working with local and county governments. This work includes flood response, fires, blizzards and hurricanes in a state that has some of the most diverse weather in the country. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What are the top emergency management priorities for the state?

The No. 1 risk in New York state is flooding, and that’s been true for a long time for New York, and so we take flood preparedness really seriously. We’ve seen time and time again that New York has the most diverse weather of any state in the nation. We can have a landfall hurricane, and a couple weeks later a 7-foot snowstorm. We have wildfires, we have tornadoes, we have severe storms, we have historic blizzards. Part of our job is to stay ready for anything. But the most frequent emergency here in New York is flooding, and so we’ve put a particular focus on flood response. 

What steps has the Hochul administration taken to address flood prevention?

The first thing we did about a year after both the governor and I arrived, is we founded the state Weather Risk Communications Center. That center takes the federal forecast and it helps translate those forecasts into actionable information that decision-makers need to take action to keep people safe, and they customize their product to the thresholds that already exist. For example, in New York City, many of the sewers can handle about 1.75 inches of rain an hour. And so this center creates products for us that tell us how many hours … (a) neighborhood (and) their sewers can handle. On the New York State Thruway we can keep the road clear until it snows harder than 3 inches an hour. So they create products for us to understand when that threshold will be met. The second thing we did is we increased our staff at the Office of Emergency Management (by) 50%, including doubling our field staff, so that we can better help our cities and our counties be prepared and respond. Two years ago, we got the funding from Gov. (Kathy) Hochul to purchase $50 million of flood response equipment: generators, pumps, flood, and temporary flood barriers, and we’re pushing those out to pre-position them in communities that see recurrent flooding.

How does your agency balance the diverse nature and weather systems statewide? 

We are a big state with lots of different topographical and societal diversity. On Long Island and in New York City, you see significant, major coastal flooding. Upstate, particularly in the Hudson Valley and the Southern Tier and the Mohawk Valley, you see really intense, inland flooding caused by intense rain, river flooding and the runoff from those storms.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is studying the future of FEMA along with cuts to federal emergency management funding. What impact will this have on New York and can the state cover any funding reductions?

If we did not have federal support and emergency management, it would have a significant negative impact on the safety of New Yorkers. And as the governor said over and over again about the really cruel and drastic Trump cuts, there is no state in the nation that could fully backfill the level of disinvestment that the federal government is wreaking on the states. If they really make the decision that emergency management is no longer a federal responsibility, there is no way any state could keep their people as safe as we need to be, and it is absolutely to me, and I think to most Americans, the completely wrong moment to decide to stop investing in emergency preparedness, disaster response and disaster recovery. I mean, look at what’s happened in the last month around this country: a gut-wrenching catastrophe in Texas, historic flooding in New Mexico and North Carolina and Maryland and yes, here in New York. We have seen ginormous fires burning in Alaska and in the Pacific Northwest, and the idea that this is the moment that our federal partners would say we’re going to pull back is so counter to the last 20 to 30 years of emergency management in this country. For New York, it will have two really specific impacts. The first is in preparedness. The federal government resources a significant amount of the work that the state and that the counties and that cities like New York do to stay prepared, to stay ready. Whether that’s equipment to do radiological detection, bomb squads, canine teams, training for how you respond to a major hazardous chemical leak, all of these things and the people behind them are paid for by the federal government. The second thing that it will do for New York is it will put our recovery at risk. We had three major floods last year in the state of New York. We had a Suffolk County flood, which was really a sort of freak. Ten inches of rain fell in only a couple hours very, very early one morning. Late one night, we had the remnants of Hurricanes Beryl and Debbie come through, which really impacted Lewis County, Lowville in the North Country and then Steuben County.

How much of the governor's strategy and interest in these areas was formed by the fact that she was a town board member in Hamburg, a part of Erie County that sees blizzards more often than not, and has flooding issues?My very first storm when I took this job was a storm in Hamburg. I sort of thought, “What a coincidence that it's the governor's hometown.” And then I learned it's no coincidence at all that we are. I've probably been to Hamburg, certainly to Erie County, responding to weather events more than anywhere else in this state. I think that the fact that she prioritizes this, certainly is informed by her time as a local official. Absolutely, I think that it's also because she knows. She says all the time that her top priority is to keep New Yorkers safe, and this is a big part of how we keep New Yorkers safe.

Emergency managers have been asked to step up in other areas besides extreme weather over the last several years. Could you discuss those roles?

Over the last decade, we've really asked much more of emergency managers. Extreme weather has become the norm. So, an event that we might have seen once a decade, we're now seeing several times a year, if not a couple times a month. We've been asked to respond to a once in a century global pandemic. We've asked emergency managers to step up and respond to the arrival of over 200,000 migrants from around the country, who needed shelter, food and clothing. Just this past winter and spring, my team helped our colleagues at the Department of Correction and Community Supervision respond to a once in 50-year strike of correction officers. We ask emergency managers to step in when a crisis in government overwhelms our normal systems, and we're asking more and more of our emergency managers at the local level and the state level every single year. And so I think that one thing we try to do here in New York is to get really good at the unpredictable.