Residents of a dozen New Jersey shore cities planned to light up the coast with flashlights to mark superstorm Sandy’s one-year anniversary yesterday, while recovering from the hurricane that ravaged the East Coast and left 159 people dead.
Many shore residents in storm-hit states, including New York and Connecticut, are still coping with damaged homes and waiting for $48 billion in federal aid pledged for rebuilding. The rare, late-season tropical storm damaged more than 650,000 homes, prompting evacuations and closing businesses for weeks.
Sandy hit with almost hurricane-strength winds and extended over a massive 1,600 kilometres, causing a storm surge that flooded downtown Manhattan and long stretches of the New Jersey shore, leaving millions in the dark, some for weeks.
The floodwaters breached New York City’s subway system, which was partially out of commission for much of the following week, and left many area residents struggling for weeks to find adequate supplies of gasoline, as power outages left homes dark and cold and filling stations closed.
Federal officials on Monday unveiled plans to release a second $5 billion round of funding from the Sandy relief fund, for New York State and City, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland and Rhode Island. The money is aimed at rebuilding and repairing homes damaged by the storm.
US Senator Chuck Schumer said the relief money has been slow to come so far – less than a quarter of the $48 billion authorised had been allocated by the end of August but said the flow of funds would pick up.
“The spigot is now open,” Schumer told a press conference.
Congress initially authorised $50 billion for Sandy recovery, but the automatic spending cuts that kicked in earlier this year reduced that target to about $47.9 billion.
Private money has also flowed into communities. Bloomberg’s Mayors Fund for emergency response said it had received more than $60 million in contributions to a fund to help cover restoration.Sandy also prompted local officials to rethink storm preparedness. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg in June proposed a $20 billion plan to prepare the city to better handle future storms, with measures ranging from new flood walls to building up beaches, which can be natural barriers.
A year on, the memory of the storm remains fresh in the hardest-hit communities.
On Staten Island, a borough of New York City in the harbour that faced the brunt of the storm surge, 46-year-old Christine Cina’s house survived floodwaters two metres high, so much water that Cina and her family were rescued by boat. While her home remains habitable, a guest bungalow where her sister lived is a pile of rubble.
“My kids have to look at this every day and be reminded of the terrible things that happened,” Cina, 46, recalled.