Improve Communication and Preparedness for NYC Climate Emergencies!

My message to you is two-fold. First, I am asking that you prioritize communication with New Yorkers, particularly in the event of a state of emergency. Second, you prioritize NYC’s preparedness for its climate risks. I implore you to pay more attention to the city’s environmental crises. It took more than 24 hours to hear from you when the sky turned orange this summer. However, waiting until almost noon to hear from you after all boroughs and public transit faltered due to intense rainfall last Friday, 9/29, was unconscionable. There was NO reason for your delay. Also, telling any citizen unprepared for this storm that we “must have been living under a rock” is tremendously insulting. In fact, “thousands of New Yorkers were caught off guard. The pounding rain quickly overwhelmed the city’s aging mass transit infrastructure, stalling subway lines in Brooklyn and across the five boroughs. City residents waited on platforms, sat stuck in subway cars, or were stalled on roadways flood waters had rendered impassable.” (Daily News 9/29) And over 150 schools experienced some flooding - yet school was not canceled! In addition to better communication with your constituents, I urge you to prioritize intense weather preparedness. Since Sandy and Ida, not nearly enough has been done to prep our city for rainfall that will only intensify over time. We are not ready for more instances of “7 inches of rain in less than 24 hours over parts of New York City on Friday, turning streets into fast-moving rivers and grinding subway travel to a halt as water cascaded into underground transit stations.” (NYT 9/29) We need to update and modernize our aging infrastructure. According to an article in The Daily News, 9/29, ”‘the comptroller’s office has found that the city had spent only 73% of the $15 billion in federal grant funding given to the city after Hurricane Sandy as of June 2022.” 25% of the city’s capital contributions to resilience projects had gone unused! I agree with Chief Climate Officer Louise Yeung: “Let’s get planning and using this money to invest in projects like expanding green infrastructure, upgrading the storm sewer system, and investing in better real-time emergency communication that is prepared for localized flash flooding.” (NBC, 9/29)