When the Ocean Met the Bay: A Journalistic Innovation to Superstorm Sandy Recovery
Understanding the Rockaways, the recovery experience and what’s next with TheRockawayProject.org.
On the night of October 29, 2012, Sonia Moise watched her car float out of her driveway into the surging waters of Jamaica Bay as Hurricane Sandy blew across the Rockaways.
“Then I heard this gush of water. I looked out the window — all these waves kept coming, kept coming, kept coming and the water just kept rising. I have a six foot fence around my house, and I couldn’t see the fences.”
Waves from the Atlantic Ocean crashed into the flood waters of the Jamaica bay, completely sweeping through the first floor of Sonia’s three level home. The storm nearly wiped the peninsula off the map before finally dissipating.
But for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, Hurricane Sandy never left.
Lakshmi and I are social journalism students at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. We are working to provide the residents of the Rockaways with the information and resources they need to recover from Sandy, to understand the problems inflicted by the city’s recovery response and to be ready for the next climate change disaster by bringing transparency to the resiliency efforts for the entire peninsula.
“Not to say I know what it’s like to be a refugee, but, my goodness.” — Sonia Moise, Edgemere resident.
We learned about this community through active listening and effective engagement strategies with New York City’s environmental activists. As second-semester graduate students, we attended protests and rallies and interviewed community organizers. We uncovered the issues surrounding the Williams pipeline, a fracked gas delivery system, to be installed off the Rockaway peninsula, and the problems around the city’s Hurricane Sandy response.
For six months, we traveled to the Rockaways to gather direct concerns from affected residents. We explored the peninsula with locals and created an evolving community profile to better understand the Rockaway’s various stakeholders.
The original idea focused on creating a resource guide with pre and post storm disaster information, as responses from online and offline surveys showed that residents didn’t know where to get help in the immediate aftermath of the storm. The information has been shared on a digital platform called therockawayproject.org
Additionally, we learned that residents on the eastern end of the peninsula, a lower-income population with more public housing and senior living facilities, felt that the west end, a wealthier, less racially diverse area, received higher quality services more rapidly due to the socioeconomic differences.
“Not to say I know what it’s like to be a refugee, but, my goodness. I honestly believe there could’ve been more done for us,” said Moise, a resident of Edgemere in Far Rockaway.
“They could’ve provided some sort of electricity, street lights. Every 5–6–7 blocks or so you would have lights. But you couldn’t walk the streets.”
Armed with direct feedback, we refined the resource guide solution to include an anecdote-powered profile that outlined how the city responded across the peninsula, organized by zip code. We further narrowed long-term recovery concerns to experiences with the Build It Back program.
Structured as an immediate reconstruction plan to the devastating damage caused by Sandy, Build It Back, in its six year existence and $2.2 billion in federal aid, left residents with more horror stories than success stories, as the journalism students are beginning to gather.
With upcoming interviews with Build It Back homeowners, we will capture how different each experience with the program has been, and highlight where its failed.
Since the Rockaway peninsula has some of the lowest median income levels in all five boroughs, Lakshmi and I adjusted our original revenue opportunity from crowd-funding and community donations to cooperative actions with local news and academic institutions, NGO and philanthropic grants and publishing content with larger media outlets that focus on climate resiliency and adaptation.
Partnering with established journalistic and academic organizations will also generate marketing across the city and other coastal regions that need to consider resiliency in their storm preparedness and urban planning.
We will also build on the relationships they’ve built with climate and environmental justice groups we engaged with early on in the program’s community listening and reporting phase to effectively share this content, such as WEACT for Environmental Justice and New York Communities for Change.
“They had to build this corporation overnight, with hundreds of employees. It was just an organizational nightmare.” — Thaddeus Pawlowski, Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes
To market the website to the community while spotlighting storm recovery disparity, we are considering showcasing Rockaway residents experiences with data visualization of quantitative information from west to east. While still a work in progress, displaying peninsula resiliency progress through photos, and sharing portions of audio-recorded testimonials with an interactive digital component will add to the city’s, as well as local newsrooms, ability to see the long-term recovery disparity.
Most importantly, the more attention the community trauma with the Build It Back program receives, the more likely the city will do more to address the program’s serious problems with unqualified contractor work, poor communication and misinformation.
In the early days of the Build It Back program, “there was very little room for criticism. Like, we were going to fix it all,” said Thaddeus Pawlowski, the Managing Director of the Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes at Columbia University.
He planned for disasters at the New York City Office of Emergency Management. Later, his work focused on reducing the likelihood and impact of disasters with the New York City Department of City Planning. During Hurricane Sandy, Pawlowski helped New York City recover at the Office of the Mayor.
“For the first few months [leadership] said ‘we’re going to get all 20,000 of these displaced people back into a permanent housing solution by the end of the year.’ That was the mission.” But as of October 2019, the Mayor’s Office of Housing Recovery Operations, which administers the Build It Back program helped 12,500 families from across all five boroughs repair, rebuild, and/or elevate their homes, or even relocate for some residents in Staten Island.
“But that’s the other thing,” continued Pawlowski. “The other major design component with Build It Back, which is different from any other recovery program in the U.S. The city decided to do all the work itself. They had to build this corporation overnight, with hundreds of employees. It was just an organizational nightmare.”
And that nightmare was lived by hundreds of homeowners in the Rockaways.
“I was out of my home for about a year and seven months,” said Moise. “When I got home, we did a walkthrough. I had at least twenty items on the list that needed to be addressed. There was mold, there were things inside that were broken….They kept telling me, oh that’s not part of the Build It Back program — you can’t have this done, you can’t have that done.”
Mapping out the phases of trauma residents have experienced has taken over two months. The community was devastated by Hurricane Sandy and the city’s promise of rebuilding a “stronger, more resilient” city fell short for tens of thousands of New Yorkers.
Many residents were exhausted by the ‘parachuting media’ outlets that would make requests for Sandy-related interviews. Lakshmi, a reporter and producer for five years prior to enrolling at the Newmark J-School, and I elected to move at a pace our connections in the community feel most comfortable with, rather than push these individuals for more information more quickly.
The final steps for us moving forward revolve around proving our hypothesis that the city’s hurricane rebuilding program was and currently is unevenly distributed across the region.
The answer will unveil itself in upcoming interviews with Build It Back homeowner applicants, scheduled for the first few weeks of November. The experiences we gather there, alongside the data from their Build it Back applications, will allow us to compare experiences both qualitatively and quantitatively.
As the resource guides, resident recovery experiences and statistical analysis come together, we hope the community finds that theRockawayProject.org website centralizes storm recovery information, addresses resource disparity concerns and builds social cohesion in a region with varying socioeconomic backgrounds.
While dozens of locals shared that therockawayproject.org platform will likely make the storm preparedness and recovery process smoother than with Sandy, we understand and recognize that the website will not be accessible to all Rockaway residents.
Lakshmi and I hope to create printable PDF versions of the resource guides to share with civic association groups, elected leaders, and the librarians we’ve built relationships with to help distribute this content more broadly.
We also recognize the need to connect with residents in public housing, senior living facilities, in Jewish and the non-English speaking communities.
As the ten-week course surrounding the formation and development of therockawayproject.org website comes to an end, Lakshmi and I learned a few things about the process that we will take with us beyond the classroom.
Pivoting happens at many stages of product or service development. There should always be room to accept feedback and make changes as appropriate to better match the needs the product or service is addressing.
If there are market alternatives present, such as Sandy Storyline, research is key to understanding how the product or service is both similar and different, and adjusting our idea. as necessary.
And finally, one of the most important takeaways from this course, was learning that sometimes the solution may no longer fit the problem, and its okay to go back to the drawing board to re-evaluate the community’s needs through more listening and engagement. There’s no point in creating something no one has a need for or will use.
The concerns of the Rockaways should be the concerns for all coastal cities. With rising sea levels and intensifying storms, recovery and resiliency must become priorities.
“For me it didn’t rain too long,” shared Moise. “It was just that flooding. It was something else. When they said it was going to be a superstorm, they were not lying.”
If you’e a resident of the Rockaways or want to learn more about the recovery and resiliency projects that came about as a result of Hurricane Sandy, please visit:
TheRockawayProject.org
