Ask the Mayor: Deadly Flooding, Storm Preparedness, Back to School

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Here's a little behind-the-scenes story about our weekly Ask the Mayor segment. There wasn't supposed to be one this week because the Mayor was taking a long Labor Day weekend, fair enough, until we got hit as hard as we did by Hurricane Ida, and the Mayor came back to work. Guess what? Now it's time as usual on Fridays and the 11 o'clock hour for our weekly Ask the Mayor call in.

My questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio at 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, or you can tweet a question, just use the #AsktheMayor. We usually take some of our questions from Twitter. Just use the #AsktheMayor. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Thanks for adding us back to your calendar once you realized you had to work. Welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Of course, Brian. Thank you. We've all been through a lot the last few days, but New Yorkers, once again, really, really showed the extraordinary strength and resiliency dealing with yet another challenge on top of COVID, it's almost unbelievable how many things have been thrown at us, but people keep fighting through. I hope everyone's going to get a break this weekend because all New Yorkers deserve it.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have any update on the immediate recovery from the storm, including people who've lost their homes or their homes have become uninhabitable or anything else?

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Here's the broad strokes, the most important and the saddest part, we've lost 13 New Yorkers. The storm has shown us a ferocity and a speed that is just absolutely breathtaking. It's made very clear we're going to have to change a lot of things we do. In terms of folks displaced, we've actually had a very small number of people. Last number I have is fewer than a hundred families had requested housing because they were displaced.

What we've seen is a lot of property damage, particularly to basements, both homes and stores. That's been the thing that we're getting the most, and folks are digging out right now. Our Department of Sanitation is making extraordinary effort, yesterday today and they'll go all through next week to ensure that folks get extra support, to just want to get all the refuse out of the way so people don't have to deal with it and they can get in the practice-- in the process, I should say, of getting back on their feet.

Another really important fact for all your listeners, Brian, alternate side parking is suspended all the way until Thursday, September 9th. The next time it's back is Thursday, September 9th, because of the crisis for the storm, and then, of course, Labor Day in Rosh Hashanah.

Brian Lehrer: For those people who are having housing problems, even if it's a relatively small number, will FEMA funds, Federal Emergency Management Funds be available to renters or homeowners without flood insurance? If so, how can people get that relief if you know?

Mayor Bill de Blasio: First of all, for anyone in the immediate situation that they don't have a place to stay, the city works with the American Red Cross to get people to hotels if their home has been knocked out. That help is available immediately our emergency management office coordinates that with the Red Cross. Anyone in that situation should call 311 right away.

Now, we're working right now with FEMA. Of course, the FEMA Administrator, Dan Criswell, was our own Emergency Management Commissioner until just a few months ago. She's been very, very helpful. We're working with FEMA to maximize relief. There is relief available for store owners that we want them to be able to access, there is relief available for homeowners.

I need to get better answers on renters, but anyone with those questions can call 311. As we're getting updates from the federal government about what they will make available, we will be able to guide people and help them, and particularly for any store owners, our Small Business Services Department is helping them with everything from accessing the federal funds to getting their insurance claims in, getting legal help, whatever they need.

Brian Lehrer: For people who've had flood damage, and obviously that's a lot more people than those who've actually become temporarily homeless as a result, for people who have had flood damage, but don't have flood insurance, you're saying start by calling 311?

Mayor Bill de Blasio: That's right. The federal aid that-- again, we've had a declaration from The White House, which is crucial. We now have to ensure that everyone who can get access to it, gets it. The best way to start is by calling 311, and then they'll connect you to the folks who are working. The money is not available instantly, but we want to get it to people as quickly as possible, obviously.

That's the best route to register that your need, we have, again, a lot of homeowners who had a basement's flooded, a lot of stores that lost inventory in their basements because is the only place they have to store anything. We want to try and help each of them to get the maximum available support available to them.

Brian Lehrer: Here is Laura calling from Texas, but said she worked with NYCHA developing a storm plan after Sandy. Laura, you're on WNYC with Mayor de Blasio. Hi.

Laura: Hi, thanks for taking my call today. Hi, Mayor. I worked with the New York City Housing Authority after Sandy, and we developed a really amazing plan in conjunction with the city, looking at massive stormwater management that was designed to handle and accommodate an [unintelligible 00:05:49] event, similar to the one that has devastated the city. I'm wondering, Mayor, what your thoughts are about the opportunity to implement a project like this, now that the extreme rain events are becoming more frequent and have impacted the city in this way.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Laura, thank you. Thank you for the work you did to help us. I think you're pointing us in the right direction. It's very important to make the juxtaposition with Sandy because in Sandy, as you fo know, and all New Yorkers know, that was an event that really hurt people in coastal areas. Since then, we have been implementing a twenty-billion-dollar resiliency plan with a lot of features that are already in place.

Brian, you do know some of them well, like the Rockaway Boardwalk 5.5 miles that is also a resiliency barrier now. A lot of that's in place, a lot of is being built. What's so striking about what happened on Wednesday night, not only was it the record rainfall in the entire history of New York City, the entire recorded history, that one hour was the most rainfall we ever had an hour by a lot.

The impact was not primarily in the coastal areas. The folks who suffered the most, the folks we lost were far from the coastal areas. This is a different reality. I think the fact is it calls upon us now to start adapting to much more extreme weather. I hate to have to say this, but now the extreme weather is becoming the norm. We set two records in less than a month for the most rainfall in one hour, and the first record was bad. The second record was astoundingly bad.

I think it's going to come down to a combination of a huge amount of change in infrastructure. Hopefully, it's finally getting the federal support to do it on a massive scale. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars over time. The second, what I talked about this morning in my press conference, we're going to have to orient people to much different approaches to storms, things like mandatory evacuations and travel bans that are enforced.

Those have been rarities in the past, but I fear now they're going to become more normal and we're going to have to say at the beginning of an incident like this, to prepare for something like that. Then the second, we see-- God forbid the turn in the weather to activate those kinds of plans, because the weather now is so unpredictable. We just had in some cases, do not have the big long-term structural solution that we can reach right now, but at least we can get people out of harm's way in a very aggressive fashion.

Brian Lehrer: When you talk about travel bans, are you talking about shutting down the subways earlier on a more frequent basis than has been done in the past, because certainly, people are reluctant to run the MTA for good reason to lock people out of getting home or wherever they have to get unless it's absolutely necessary. Do you think we've been conservative about that?

Mayor Bill de Blasio: I fear we have for the very good reason. I've been through a couple of these, and let's hasten to add the state runs the MTA. They make that call. Like so many of us for decades, assume the subways would keep going no matter what. We've had now, of course, in one way with Sandy, but a whole different reality now we're seeing with this very sudden weather where we have to think about when are those times now, I would never do it lightly, I'm sure that the state would never do it lightly, but what is clear with the scenario at night, unprecedented rain that overwhelmed the MTA system.

Had we had more of a projection of it, we could have said, 'We know at this hour, we're going to stop everyone, make your plans, get ready." Again, you're hearing immediately, Brian, some of this is just the unknown and the sudden shifts in weather the kind of raging weather we're seeing lately. I think if we say to people the day before the morning of, "Prepare for a travel ban potential. Know that at any moment we may need to shut the subways", and we need to tell people to get off the roads. Adjust to the best of your ability, your schedule knowing it could be as early as whatever time and equally with evacuation.

If we're saying to people, in this case, let's not just talk about the traditional evacuation routes with coastal areas, but in this case we now know we have a different problem with basement apartments. We know some of the areas where they're predominant. For saying to people early, including with cell phone alerts, which are very effective, "Prepare for the possibility of evacuation from this point on".

Everyone is hearing that we may order them out and then we would send, if God forbid it came to that moment, first responders out to go door-to-door, literally get people out. It's a paradigm shift, we're going to have to communicate a kind of urgency and a kind of rigor that has generally not been the case in the past, but now I think is going to be much more the norm.

Brian Lehrer: Question via Twitter from a listener on Staten Island, [unintelligible 00:11:12] writes, "Does the Mayor still support the development of the store BJ's on Staten Island on wetlands after this week storm?

Mayor Bill de Blasio: There's folks that when I was out, we had the City Hall in your Borough in Staten Island last week. Actually, some of the folks from the community came over and had a conversation with me and some of our commissioners. Let's be clear, this is a private application, it's not about something the city is sponsoring. I don't support it or reject it. It's something that was put forward privately.

So far, our experts have looked at it and said they don't see from that project, a threat of flooding. I asked him to go back and reassess and obviously these events now add another thing to assess to see if there is something there that has to be handled. Previous environmental impact did not suggest it, but I want to make sure it's airtight.

Brian Lehrer: Eileen in Manhattan, your own WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Eileen?

Eileen: Hi, Mayor, good to talk to you. I'm sure that you agree, obviously, that New York City deserves the best resilient waterfront plan. Yet it's puzzling that an environmental justice neighborhood like the East Village and the Lower East Side has a big resilient park that protected the neighborhood, especially during the pandemic. Yet you want to ram through the [unintelligible 00:12:39] Plan, which is a flood wall, and floodwalls have been widely criticized because they will do such things as send the water to Brooklyn and floodwalls will trap the water in the park.

The East River Park is resilient and in two days after Sandy, it was clean of water and people could use it again. [unintelligible 00:13:01] bad plan, environmental experts have testified against it, the neighborhood is against it, NYCHA is against it, and Scott Stringer even sent the contract back to you. We really want to have an oversight review in the City Council looking at [unintelligible 00:13:18], it's not been looked at since the pandemic and we're going to lose green space for 10 years.

We're New Yorkers and we know how long it takes for the city to do something. Meanwhile, they're going to pull up 1,000 trees and the only green space in Lower Manhattan is two longs, Central Park and East River Park. You're going to take away one of our lungs and put up this very flawed flood plan. We need to look at the plan after the pandemic and in light of the new thoughts about floodwalls. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. I tell you Manhattan has three lungs, by the way, because you left out the one in The Heights near me. Wonderful greenery up here.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: I think it might be. I think folks in the West Side would say Riverside Park and say four lungs, we can talk about many lungs.

Brian Lehrer: Fair enough. To her point about floodwalls, would know they're controversial.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Yes, but I want to go-- I appreciate both the passion in Eileen's voice, but also she's rising real concerns. For example, yes, when you work on a park, the park won't be fully available to the public for that period of time. Yes, it's true and it's painful that some trees are coming down, but let's go back to why we're even doing this. We're doing this because of what happened in Sandy and we're doing this because of rising sea levels globally and the threat of these storms. That whole area was hit so hard in Sandy.

Everyone remembers the images of what happened in NYU Hospital, Bellevue, so many parts of the community that were hit so hard. The current state of affairs in that broader community is not acceptable, and a huge amount of Public Housing Developments are vulnerable. That was Sandy and now we know we could be seeing storms worse than Sandy combined with rising sea levels, which no one doubts anymore. We have to take intensive measures to protect that part of Manhattan. This plan is much stronger in terms of protecting the community. I understand people love the park, I really do, but we're talking about protecting the people who live there, hundreds of thousands of people and hostels, everything in harm's way.

This plan does it better than the previous plan, we are going to rotate the work so that part of the park is open at all times. We're going to replace the trees. It's not perfect, but again, we are dealing with weather dynamics beyond anything we could previously imagine we have to respond to them. There's been a huge amount of review and oversight on this, it's been debated, we've got to get moving to protect that community.

Brian Lehrer: I want to ask you about the basement apartments. You mentioned this before and the latest stat I saw anyway was that at least 11 people died in flooded basement apartments in Queens. I guess from the ways that this storm was different from Sandy, more inland and from different infrastructure. What do you think the policy response to this should be since basement apartments? Some of them illegal conversions were already controversial for other reasons?

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Look, Brian, this is one of the thorniest toughest issues that I've seen. Not only are we talking about basement apartments, let's talk about the illegal ones that would need a huge amount of work to be brought up to code, a lot of expense. I don't like the fact that there's health and safety dangers there, is profoundly troubling. Then on top of that, you're talking in many cases, the folks that live in them having to be undocumented immigrants who are fearful in many cases to turn to government for help. It's like so many factors on top of each other, but then take about the alternative we talked about this morning.

Our estimate is at minimum. At minimum it's 50,000 apartments at minimum, it's 100,000 people, probably higher, substantially higher in both cases. We do not have a way to suddenly say to 100,000 or more people, "Here's a new place for you to live." If we say to people, "You can't live there anymore, they'd rightfully be entirely dislocated and their world would be thrown off in every way." What we need to do is try and protect people the best we can in the current situation while trying to figure out a long-term solution. The only way we'll do it is with a long-term solution, not a fast one.

I think things like identifying all the apartments, coming up with a way to canvas them with community groups, so they have trusted voices in the community talking to them, particularly when there's dangerous events like this coming. Using the cell phone alerts, using mandatory evacuation door-to-door with first responders. We can protect people from the worst situations while trying somehow to find a bigger solution to the situation.

Brian Lehrer: Changing topics. Liz in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Liz.

Liz: Hi, thanks for taking my call. My thoughts are with everyone who is suffering right now due to the flood damage, but I'm going to change the topic a little bit to talk about schools. Mr. Mayor +5,000 parents have signed a petition asking for a remote option for any family who wants it, which is what LA offers families. Why do we need this? Many kids can't get vaccinated and there are other reasons. Two, schools weren't prioritized in the decision to relax the mass mandate and restrictions on capacity.

Rather than increase mitigation layers because of Delta and 700,000 more bodies being funneled back into school, you're not doing weekly testing and so many districts are in studies, and studies tell us that this actual loan might cut cases in half. The plan to only quarantine close contacts in middle school and high school is very risky because COVID is like smoke. It floats to all parts of the room, the whole classroom needs to close. Other districts have CO2 monitors in every room to make sure their air is safe. Again, we are failing to provide the best we can.

Parents are very concerned and we shouldn't have to choose between our children's health and their education. Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times looked at the science in New York city's plan and concluded my family's chance of getting through this fall without either of our kids coming down with COVID is almost a coin flip. 85% of the 6,900--

Brian Lehrer: Liz, I'm going to leave it there. I know you're reading a long statement and I'll let you go on for a while and you've got a lot of important points in there, but let's have a conversation. Mr. Mayor, you hear that she's asking for a remote option?

Mayor Bill de Blasio: I respect the request and I respect the concerns that were raised. I listened to them and I, again will say it's never abstract for me. My kids went to New York City public schools from pre-K all the way to 12th grade both of them. I would not hesitate for a second to send my kids to school if they were that age right now. Why? Because we proved last year that we could have the most stringent health and safety standards in the country and get COVID down to almost nothing in our schools. Then we proved it again during summarizing. Anyone who wants to say, "Wait, that was June. That was before Delta was as prevalent." We proceeded to do the same thing again with summarizing with hundreds of thousands of kids.

We had a grand total of two school closures in the course of the summer. Why was that possible? Because of the level of vaccination. I want to keep bringing it back to facts and science and what our healthcare leaders say. This is crucial. I respect Liz and every other parent voice, but our health care leadership adamantly, and they spent a year and a half fighting this pandemic, adamantly believe that our kids need to be back in school for a thousand reasons including all health, mental health, physical health, educational social development, all these reasons.

As a city right now, 5.5 million people have gotten at least one dose. Almost 78% of adults have gotten at least one dose. We're close to two-thirds of kids, 12 to 17-year-olds who have gotten at least one dose. This is why we can do it safely. All the health and safety standards we put in place before that worked, and now a much higher level of vaccination that we've ever had before, and on top of that requiring all adults in the building to be vaccinated. That is by far the best way to protect kids here. We do not believe in remote education. It didn't work as well as in-person by any estimation. We know we can keep kids safe. What we're seeing that massive vaccination is fighting back the Delta variant. You can see it here and you can see where there isn't massive vaccination what happens, but in this city it's actually working.

Brian Lehrer: You're placing a bet on a much lower infection rate in the schools than some other people, I guess as reflected by Michelle Goldberg's column quote there from the caller, think are likely to happen.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: I respect Michelle Goldberg, who I think is a very smart commentator, but I respect our healthcare leadership in particular who have been fighting this battle. Any commentator, any citizen, anybody with a viewpoint I'm going to listen to, but the health leadership of the city have been fighting this battle for a year and a half and they're saying all our kids need to be in school. Our top educators are saying all our kids need to be in school. There's not even a hint of disagreement of all the leadership have looked at this and fought this battle saying, "We need our kids back".

We can keep them safe in a way that goes far beyond what most parts of this country can do because we have vaccination at an extraordinarily high level and all the other health and safety measures. We keep adding health and safety measures and every adult in the building vaccinated. Brian we're going to keep getting kids vaccinated over these next weeks. That number that we're at now with the 12 to 17-year-olds, almost two-thirds already, that's going to keep going up. Then we expect the five to 11 vaccines as early as November.

Brian Lehrer: Follow-up, a listener on Twitter writes, "Could you ask the mayor if he's looked into the HEPA purifier situation. He last stated last time you were on the show that he didn't know anything about this topic." That's the air purifiers that were purchased by the city for the public scores that are not HEPA, which is generally considered the highest standard and we're not the highest-rated. He's asking that and I'll add that Gothamist has an article on several thousand classrooms not having much in the way of ventilation other than openable windows, so on either of those things.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Yes, sure. Fairness, I know plenty about ventilation writ large. I don't want you to suggest to your listeners otherwise because I've been working with a whole team of people for a year and a half on this but on the specific thing you raised, Brian, I want you to be accurate, my friend. You raised a specific company and a specific product which I hadn't heard of. Went back with our team and said, "Where does that stand compared to HEPA?" They said this product is actually regarded as more rigorous than HEPA. We'll get you all of the facts on why that was chosen and the impact it has, but the other Gothamist article, and I would really urge people to be careful about their facts was also inaccurate.

The standard has been held and has been proven effective because we had a year in the nation's largest school system to prove it. Is the one we continue to use. Open window is a very big deal for fighting COVID, and the ventilation units we're using have worked and we're doing in many cases both at once and we're even adding additional units now. The problem with the critique is it ignores a year of evidence of what worked, and you saw the COVID levels in schools and you saw how low they got particularly toward the end when Delta was already present. The ventilation in our schools in real-life conditions, like battlefield conditions, worked and repeating the same formula again this year.

Brian Lehrer: Let's end on a politics question. I had seen the reports in The Times and Politico that you hired a pollster and contacted unions to gauge interest in a potential run for governor. We have a listener on Twitter, now I've lost it. Let's see if I can find it. there it is. "Please, ask mayor DeBlasio why is he running for governor in 2022? I got a call from a pollster a couple of days ago. Please give Kathy Hochul a chance and don't primary her." What do you say to that caller or those reports in the press?

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Look as you can hear from the passion in my voice on your previous questions, honestly, what I focus on every single day, fighting COVID and bringing the city back. I've got four more months to do that in this office. I'm going to hand off this office to Eric Adams and I'm quite convinced he will do great work going forward. That's my focus. Now I want to keep serving. I've done public service my whole life. I care deeply about education. I care deeply about healthcare. I want to keep serving. I'm going to look at the best way to do that. That's a decision I'll make in the future.

I can hear your music coming, so I also want to say to all your listeners have a very safe and I hope restful Labor Day weekend and in advance for folks, Shaná Tová for the new year, and we all keep fighting COVID together.

Brian Lehrer: Same to you about Labor Day and we'll keep fighting COVID and the aftermath of the fights together. You're keeping the door open to primary and Kathy Hochul it sounds like from that answer fair.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: I want to figure out the best way to serve going forward. I don't know what that is yet, but when I know, I'm certainly going to let people know. Right now, again, I've got a mission I'm working on every day for the people right here.

Brian Lehrer: Thanks as always, Mr. Mayor talk to you next week.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Thank you, Brian.

 

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