"We just clean up the mess"

In January 2014, my wife was scheduled to be in a choir performance where she would sing at Carnegie Hall in New York. When I heard that she was going, I said, “I would love to join you.” I had never been to New York and really wanted to see the city.

We were in New York for a week. The choir had to rehearse for the performance in a few days. In addition to the places that we visited with some of the choir members, including the 9/11 Memorial, I was able to go to a number of places that I also wanted to see when the choir was rehearsing in New York. One of them was Coney Island where hurricane Sandy had made landfall. I wanted to see the damage from the flooding.

With the underground I was easy to reach Coney Island. I walked at the boulevard and in the neighbourhood, but I didn't really see any signs of the flooding. I did see that houses or buildings had been demolished in a few places. At the above-ground station of the underground someone was sweeping the platform clean. I asked him if he was also working there when Sandy came ashore. He confirms with: "Yes sir". I asked him how high the flooding was. He indicated that it was about two metres high at the station, just behind the boulevard. Armed with this information I looked at a few places again. Everything had been neatly cleaned and the traces of the demolition have been removed. After that, life apparently continued as before.

The next day I visited a museum in Manhattan where there was also damage from the flooding. They had also set up a small exhibition about the flooding. I spoke to a guard and told him that I was from the Netherlands and that I was interested in the flooding caused by Hurricane Sandy and its consequences. I asked him if he had also been there during Sandy. He also confirmed it. When I asked him if he knows anything about plans to start with the protection of the flood-prone parts of New York, he looked at me with a smile and says:

“You Dutch would do it, but we just clean up the mess.”

These visits and conversations make it clear to me that in America, people think differently about these kinds of things than we do in the Netherlands. In fact, you see that with the damage after a tornado. The mess is cleaned up, the damage is repaired and people continue as before. In New Orleans, that was not possible after Hurricane Katrina, because large parts of the area are below mean sea level, but New York is still high enough by American standards to get by with just cleaning and repairing.

About four years later, at a meeting on flooding in the world, I met an American colleague who is well informed about the situation in New York. I asked her whether New York is not planning to take more measures for protection against flooding. She told  me that they certainly are not planning to do so and that in fact, they have started building again in a number of the affected areas. This confirms for me the impression I had from the previous conversations. The future will have to show how long this attitude will last.