Zach Iscol: ‘It’s my job to be concerned about everything’

A decorated Marine Corps combat veteran, Zach Iscol is now the lead general in combating emergencies facing New York City. As commissioner of New York City Emergency Management, Iscol has been overseeing the city’s response to this year’s growing number of weather emergencies, including extreme heat and flooding caused by large rain events. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This summer New York City has been dealing with a number of extreme weather events, including heat and rain. How is the city preparing for the rise in these events?

Municipalities, jurisdictions that receive funding (have) to have a hazard mitigation plan. The two that you’re talking about heat and flash flooding, they’re very much related. So every year we’ve seen record high temperatures. … I think in the last few years, each one has set a global record in terms of global heat. It’s five heat activations already this year. And yes, we have significant rainfall events. A warmer climate means that there’s more moisture in the air. More moisture in the air means you have more rainfall, and it also means you have higher rates of rain. And our infrastructure was designed decades ago to handle rainfall rates of 1.7 inches of rain an hour. We’re now seeing storms, and multiple storms a year, where we get rainfall rates of over 2 inches, 2 to 3 inches an hour for a prolonged period of time, and that can cause flash flooding. So there’s a lot that the city does to prepare for those types of events.

What programs does the city have in place regarding rising temperatures?

There’s a lot of work that the city’s done to green spaces around the city. I think the Parks Department last year planted 18,000 trees. There’s a huge program where we’ve been painting roofs white, which reduces energy consumption. There’s a lot that we do. We open up hundreds of cooling centers every time there’s a heat event. We do a lot of work to educate New Yorkers about (the Home Energy Assistance Program), which is a great federal program that can help folks afford air conditioners in the summer and helping with paying the bills in the winter. And so we really encourage people to sign up to be able to get those systems in place. There’s a lot that we do on the public education front as well around heat, so that people are aware that it is one of the biggest killers of New York. They have the information they need to keep themselves and their loved ones safe.

How does the city prepare for extreme rain events?

One of the problems that we have with these rain events is unlike coastal storms and coastal flooding, we have really good models of that water, right? We know that when there’s a big storm offshore, we know that water is going to get pushed into New York Harbor, into Jamaica Bay, and we’re able to model based on topography and the built environment where that water is going to go. The problem with these rainfall events is the entire city is susceptible to flooding from rainfall. We know that there are certain areas that are more susceptible to others, but anywhere in the city is susceptible based on where the storm cells line up, based on where they linger. If a storm cell stalls over a certain location for a period of time, if multiple storm cells line up and hit the same area during a storm, that’s much, much, much more difficult to forecast and predict than coastal storms, than coastal flooding. It’s a real challenge to predict where that stuff is going to go. Another big thing that we’re doing on the flash flooding is … working with community groups, educating, especially the most vulnerable non-English speaking communities, doing flood sensor distributions, education campaigns, especially to people who live in below grade apartments, giving them flood sensors.

How is the city preparing for any federal cuts to emergency management funding?

Fifty percent of our funding at this agency comes from federal funds. I think about 60% of our staff lines are funded by federal funds. What we have been doing is working with City Hall to figure out if some of these federal cuts go through, and we’re still analyzing what is and what is not happening with FEMA and some of these federal cuts, there’s sort of a lot of back and forth and whiplash. Based on some of the information coming out of Washington, D.C., we know there have been some programs that have been cut, like (the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program). Those are mostly mitigation and infrastructure funding grant programs that fund the agency. There’s still a lot of work that’s going on to figure out exactly what is happening with those grants, but ideally what happens is that we find other sources of funding to displace those cuts, either from city tax dollars or state revenues.

There have already been cases where members of Congress from red states have voted against disaster funding for blue states. Do you have any fear that there’s any more politicalization of disaster management?

It’s my job to be concerned about everything, right? That’s the nature of my job. With that said, you know, I’ve now done two trips in the last month to Washington, D.C. I’ve met with both Democrats and Republicans, and at least on the Hill, disaster relief and emergency management remains a somewhat nonpartisan, bipartisan concern. The hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, acts of terrorism, cyber incidents, they don’t respect borders. They impact red states, blue states, purple states and and there’s an understanding, at least in my conversation with Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill, how critical our national emergency management apparatus is, and the critical role that the federal government plays in that.

What steps can be taken to prevent the basement apartment deaths that occurred when the remnants of Hurricane Ida hit the city?

I actually read all of the casualty reports from Ida for the 13 people that died in New York City. A lot of the information about how people died is information that we’re providing to the public. There’s still a lot more work that needs to be done. We’ve been a big advocate here at the agency around legalizing apartment dwellings in the same way that we have a fire code, basically having a code for flood proofing basements. Doors should open inward, not outward. There were people who got trapped in their basements because they couldn’t open their front doors. (There were) bars on windows, and … people who got trapped in their basements because they couldn't open the bars, (which was) protecting them from burglars. It ended up meaning that they couldn’t escape the basement, having a point of egress. Having flood sensors, flood proofing your drains so that water can flow out, but not in. There are a number of things that could be done through legislation that, until basement apartments are legalized, will be hard to pass. We’ve been trying to do that through education campaigns, educating people about what is important if you are going to … have somebody live in your basement, or if you’re going to live in a basement, what are the safeguards and measures that you should have in place.

What has New York City Emergency Management learned from the influx of asylum-seekers that can be adapted to future unpredictable situations?

So first off, I mean, I’m insanely proud of the work that our team here did and our team across the city did in responding to that event. You know, our coastal storm sheltering program is designed to house people for 48 to 72 hours, and now we’re housing people for six to 12 months. We have contracts that were in place to do construction after a coastal storm that we’re now using to design facilities. We have a logistics plan that was designed to do commodity distribution that we’re now tapping into to be able to support hundreds of sites across the city and serve tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, in our care across the city. I think on one hand, it sort of proved the benefit of having that all hazards plan model and having plans that we could tap into and that were sort of modular and flexible.