As Climate Week begins, is New York ready for the next Superstorm Sandy?

While New York marks Climate Week, the city’s push for resilience is colliding with headwinds from Washington. While storm mitigation work continues across the five boroughs, the Trump administration’s broader retreat on climate policy could slow progress. New York City Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Rohit “Rit” Aggarwala spoke with City & State about what’s been built so far, what remains vulnerable, and how the city plans to weather the next inevitable deluge. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

We're approaching the 13th anniversary of Superstorm Sandy. In more recent years, the remnants of Hurricanes Ida and Ophelia inundated New York with flash floods. What progress has been made in climate resiliency and what still needs to be done?
If we think about the 13 years since Sandy we've made a lot of progress on protecting those neighborhoods that were the hardest hit in terms of inundation. The Army Corps [of Engineers] has basically completed the Far Rockaway Beach side work to help protect part of Far Rockaway from the ocean. It has not yet made progress on the inland flooding side. We are complete at Battery Park. We are under construction at Battery Park City on the south side, and of course there’s the East Side Coastal Resiliency and the Brooklyn Bridge-Montgomery Coastal Resilience projects. Then there’s Red Hook and on the south shore of Staten Island. There's a whole set of projects that were on the drawing boards only four years ago and are now fully in construction.

The reality is if tomorrow New York City got hit with a storm that was exactly the same as Hurricane Sandy, we would still have flooding in almost all of the same neighborhoods because a half-built wall won't keep the water out. What would be very different is that the city would recover much more quickly because of all the far less visible work that's been done to harden and protect specific assets. So, you won't lose those facilities. They might kind of go into hibernation for the 12 or 24 hours when there's flooding around them, but they won't have the days and weeks of damage that they had then.

Similarly, at many NYCHA properties, you had lots of apartment buildings where once the water got into the basement the electrical equipment was ruined, the elevators were ruined, and you had residents who had been stuck on the 15th floor. They were literally trapped in their apartments for two months because the elevator wasn't working. That kind of thing probably would not happen because of the work that's been done to either waterproof or elevate the electrical equipment.

That, in a very real way, is what resilience means. Resilience does not mean in the middle of the storm we go about our business as though life is normal. Resilience means we've done everything we can, so we can hunker down, get through it and get back to normal as quickly as possible. That's what resilience is.

What work still needs to be done? 
There's a lot of work that still needs to be done. We've got to make sure that we have the institutions and the practices in place to do the operations and maintenance, because we could build a billion dollar sea wall, but if on the one night we need it, if the maintenance wasn't done and the gaskets don't fit, then the water is going to get in and the whole thing was a waste. We have to make sure we're maintaining it. That's one of the reasons we created this Bureau of Coastal Resilience at DEP, to make sure that there's an institutional home where you've got people who wake up every morning knowing my responsibility to keep these things in good functioning order.

We also have to do the work to protect the rest of the city. One of the things we have to think about is how much do we wait for the federal government to help us and how much do we have to take our future into our own hands? Former Deputy Mayor Meera Joshi and I set up a resilience finance task force that came up with some recommendations for how we eventually have a dedicated revenue system to fund this work because this is work that has to take place over decades. This task force concluded  that we need a parallel system, a resilience board and a resilience finance authority to issue bonds. And then we would probably need to go to the state for dedicated taxes akin to the kinds of dedicated taxes the MTA has. That is the kind of thing that this task force said would be the most prudent way to ensure long-term sustainability for coastal resilience investments.

In New York City, historically, city and state agencies were protective of their fiefdoms. In recent years,  there's been more cross agency collaboration in addressing climate change mitigation work. Has that culture changed in government? 
Some of it comes from leadership. Frankly, I don't think people give Mayor Adams anywhere near the credit he deserves for actually being very supportive of climate action. That's one thing. Another is that we have something like 20 city agencies where a senior official, whether it's an assistant commissioner or a deputy commissioner or an executive director, has the title of either sustainability or resilience. Every two weeks we have a climate leads call. We know we have to work together. It's also the case that no one agency can do it alone, especially when the New York City shoreline is so complex. The shoreline is one of the most interdisciplinary places we have in New York City and I think that has forced people to work together. We sometimes have some disagreements with our state partners, but I think we've enjoyed an underappreciated period of city state collaboration that's also really important on this.

Historically, there are some parts of the city that have suffered more than others. The residents of those communities still live with the inequities created by redlining in the past. How is the DEP addressing this imbalance and protecting those individuals? 
There's no question there are geographical parts of the city that have been under invested in. In southeast Queens, one thing that relatively few people appreciate is that our sewer systems were not built by the city. The reality is that the sewers in Queens are smaller in capacity than the sewers in Manhattan because of the decisions made a hundred years ago. So, some of it was redlining and some of it was actually a pro-development effort to get housing built faster. It wasn't so much the redlining, but the decision to allow developers to build houses and not require them to build storm sewers. It is why Queens is and has been receiving the vast majority of DEP's sewer budget for several years now, and will over the next 10 years. We've got $2.8 billion over the next 10 years and we've already spent more than a billion dollars in Southeast Queens to build out a storm sewer system. We've done a number of celebrations over the last several years when we make incremental progress. What's wonderful about it is every time we complete a block the residents on that block see the difference and are really appreciative of how much difference those interventions make.

In this current political era it feels like the federal government is turning back the clock on this kind of mitigation work. How is that impacting further progress? 
The federal government has gone into full climate denial mode, and unfortunately climate change is made very clear. It's going to keep reminding us that it's real. It reminded us of that in Texas when so many people died in flooding over the summer. It reminded us here in New York with the flooding we had on July 14th and July 30th. One way or another, we are going to have to address this, no matter what the federal government does. The biggest thing the federal government is doing is slowing down progress on greening the electricity supply. That's a real problem. Trying to stop wind farms and the offshore wind industry and slow down solar development, to my mind, is kind of crazy because in addition to being better for the planet, those are some of the most job creating and industrializing and energy independence initiatives you can imagine. But I think climate resilience, as we've seen every time there's a storm, no matter where it is in New York or Texas or California, people want to be protected and they're going to demand that of their government. I think the current political climate will slow us down, and unfortunately that means people will suffer more than they need to.