The destruction of Staten Island’s Great Kills Marina after Super Storm Sandy.

By Robert Lewis, Special to ProPublica, and Al Shaw, ProPublica

This story is being co-published with New York public radio's WNYC.

If Staten Island's Great Kills Marina Café is able to reopen this spring after Sandy ripped apart its interior 2013 blowing out windows and punching through walls 2013 it will be thanks to assistance from the federal government.

The Small Business Administration has approved the restaurant for a disaster loan of almost $1 million.

There's just one problem: Newly drawn FEMA flood maps show the cafe is at high risk of flooding again, raising the question of whether it makes sense to rebuild there or move elsewhere.

The cafe is not alone.

A WNYC and ProPublica analysis of federal data shows at least 10,500 home and business owners have been approved for $766 million in SBA disaster loans to rebuild in areas that the government now says could flood again in the next big storm. The data, which shows loans approved through mid-February, was obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request.

More loans could be going to flood-prone areas. The analysis did not cover Long Island or Connecticut.

The loans require borrowers to get flood insurance, which in turn could encourage some to rebuild properties to be more flood-resistant. However, for many owners there's no requirement they raise their properties to the heights FEMA recommends.

The result: the federal government is helping people rebuild despite the risk that flooding will again destroy the properties.

The SBA says it's not their job to assess whether it's smart to build in flood-prone areas.

"Our mission is to help these homeowners and business become whole again," said Carol Chastang, an SBA spokeswoman. "We really aren't in a position to tell people where or where not to rebuild."

Such a hands-off approach worries a diverse coalition of advocates -- including conservative groups, environmental organizations, insurance associations and housing coalitions. These groups are urging government at all levels to change the way it builds in disaster-prone areas and insures such properties.

Environmental groups like the National Wildlife Federation say the best flood protection are wetlands and to leave stretches of the coast undeveloped.

"Ideally we're going to help people move away from the flood zone and not give them assistance to rebuild exactly as is," said Joshua Saks, the federation's legislative director. "But we recognize it's a very personal decision, it's a local decision."

For Sam Corigliano, the decision is obvious. Corigliano opened the Great Kills Marina Café in 1980 and built it into a neighborhood fixture over the years.

"We've been here 32 years, had 32 years of good luck, and good fortune and laughs. We've had parties here, christenings, family events, a lot of happy times. We had one bad day," Corigliano said. "You don't walk away from one bad day."

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Sandy Survivors Day of Action and Citywide Convergence #D15 - Rebuild the City: Restore Power to the People!

FEMA ISN’T LISTENING. THE MAYOR ISN’T LISTENING. WHERE ARE THEY? PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE SHOULD SERVE THE PEOPLE.

#ReclaimNYC – #D15 – Facebook Event
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 15th – POST-SANDY CALL TO ACTION
12pm actions in affected communities
5pm convergence in Manhattan @ Bloomberg’s house

Two months after Superstorm Sandy the disaster is not over and relief needs are still great. Homes are uninhabitable with black mold taking hold, heat and sanitation are still absent in many places. Yet the government response has been glaringly absent. As with Katrina and other recent disaster-and-recovery events city, state and federal agencies have handed off reconstruction resources and responsibility to corporations and markets.

That hand-off has pushed affected people further out of their communities, further into crisis and vulnerability, and further from the decision-making tables that allocate public resources. Where government has failed, Occupy and other groups stepped in.

But we now understand that climate change has turned a corner: we will be hard hit again by extreme weather events. And so we ask whose interests our government serves? Is it polluters, predatory lenders, and disaster profiteers? Or can we build a stronger, better, resilient New York where all of us, regardless of race, class or power, can weather future storms?

12PM COMMUNITY RALLIES

Staten Island
1128 Olympia Boulevard
Across from St. Margaret Mary’s Church

Rockaways
Parking Lot on Mott Av. And 21st Street

5PM CITYWIDE RALLY

Mayor Bloomberg’s home
17 East 79th
btw 5th Ave & Madison Ave
Manhattan

[Via OWS]

Diane Sawyer and ABC News report as Hurricane Sandy hits the eastern coast of the United States.

For the last 30 years New York officials were warned of a storm of historic proportions that could flood the subways, create widespread power outages, and hit the Rockaways peninsula especially hard. A 2006 report read: “It’s not a question of whether a strong hurricane will hit New York City. It’s just a question of when.” But tight budgets meant the warnings went unheeded—and when Hurricane Sandy hit, many of the problems were dealt with on the fly. “I don’t know that anyone believed it,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told the Associated Press. “We had never seen a storm like this. So it is very hard to anticipate something that you have never experienced.”

Associated Press:

"It wasn't as if the legislative actions over the years were subtle. They all had a common, emphatic theme: Act immediately before it's too late.

The 1978 executive law required a standing state Disaster Preparedness Commission to meet at least twice a year to create and update disaster plans. It mandated the state to address temporary housing needs after a disaster, create a detailed plan to restore services, maintain sewage treatment, prevent fires, assure generators "sufficient to supply" nursing homes and other health facilities, and "protect and assure uninterrupted delivery of services, medicines, water, food, energy and fuel."

Reports in 2005, 2006 and 2010 added urgency. "It's not a question of whether a strong hurricane will hit New York City," the 2006 Assembly report warned. "It's just a question of when."

A 2010 task force report to the Legislature concluded: "The combination of rising sea level, continuing climate change, and more development in high-risk areas has raised the level of New York's vulnerability to coast storms. ... The challenge is real, and sea level rise will progress regardless of New York's response."'

New York City had taken some concrete steps, such as requiring some new developments in flood zones to be elevated, eliminating roadblocks to putting boilers and electrical equipment above the ground and restoring wetlands as natural storm-surge barriers.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a recent speech that the city wasn't expecting Sandy, and that FEMA (The Federal Emergency Management Agency) had estimated only a one percent chance that NYC would see the water levels that came in with the storm. NYC is now reassessing safety measures, including an engineering analysis to determine if levees or other structures are needed to prevent flooding in the future.

You can't possibly praise the Occupy movement enough for their response to the devastation of Hurricane Sandy. There are the volunteers who deliver food, water, and clothing to those in need, and even experienced medical professionals going door-to-door in elderly communities to provide whatever assistance is needed far quicker, and it seems they're doing it far more thoroughly than the traditional first-response groups.

Via:

Anna Lederman, a Russian-speaking nurse working with Occupy Sandy, walked up fourteen flights of a pitch-black stairwell in the Surfside Gardens housing complex in Coney Island on Monday and knocked on an apartment door, the only light coming from her small headlamp. An elderly woman wearing a babushka, walking slowly with a cane, told Lederman in Russian that she was all alone. She had her medications, but could not get down the stairs, and needed food. “This,” she said, “is like the second blockade of Leningrad.”

Many New Yorkers affected by the storm have complained about the uneven response from the city, FEMA, and Red Cross. Veterans of the Occupy movement, with experience in New Orleans at the Common Ground Clinic after Katrina, and in Zuccotti Park last year, have stepped in to fill the gap. “That’s one of the reasons we mobilized here first,” said Becca Piser, a street medic trained as a first-responder. “No one’s telling us where to go or not to go.” The Occupy crew in Coney Island also included some of Lederman's fellow nurses from Columbia University, who had been working in shelters and on the Occupy mission to Far Rockaway; a Russian and Spanish translator, who had answered the call on Facebook; Shawn Westfahl, one of the first medics at the Occupy encampment in Zuccotti Park; and Roger Benham and Jeff “Fidget” (his Occupy name), who worked together doing disaster relief in New Orleans and in Haiti after the earthquake.
...
FEMA and the NYPD have been distributing MREs — freeze-dried meals-ready-to-eat—that come in heavy plastic pouches and must be handled correctly to self-heat, have a high sodium content that is problematic for elderly people and those with hypertension, and have instructions printed only in English. A few packets lay scattered in the dark hallways. A number of residents said they did not know what to do with them.
...
It was growing dark. Piser and Westfahl left to answer one last dispatch call for a cancer patient who needed a daily dose of chemo. Fidget duct-taped a sign on the outside of the building saying that every floor had been checked by Occupy Sandy for urgent needs. “It comes down to the fact that they got these knocks,” said Lederman, the nurse. “I think it could be a psychological disaster — at the very least — if nobody at all came for six days.”

No doubt the strategy of Occupy Sandy's emergency response will be examined for some time to come, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the movement's "teach-in" sessions become even more popular and in demand.

If you're able, please visit the Occupy Sandy website and donate if you're able, or better yet -- volunteer to help.