Sandy 5 years later: Is the northeast closer to grid resilience?

By Emma Foehringer Merchant

In the immediate aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, Northeastern states published resilience reports, action plans and infrastructure goals galore. The storm was devastating, but next time, they said, they’d do better.

Five years later, the recovery effort shows rebuilding takes serious time. After Sandy, "resilience" became a buzzword and a promise to ensure the grid could stand up to nature’s perils. But with recent disasters in the Caribbean, the Southeast and California, it’s becoming even clearer how much work remains to build that newer, sturdier grid.

“The whole hardening arena becomes a lot more complicated and a lot more important going forward,” said Miki Deric, managing director of utilities, transmission and distribution at Accenture, who worked with utilities on post-Sandy recovery in Connecticut. “With the increased frequency of these large events, there’s a constant reminder that there’s a need to do this.”

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“The reality of it, when we look at infrastructure projects, is that we’ve hardly had any infrastructure projects completed,” said Ceci Pineda, resiliency training and policy coordinator at Good Old Lower East Side, a community housing organization. “When you look at the Lower East Side, a third of the buildings are in construction, a third are in procurement, another third are in the design phase.”

But Pineda notes that after Sandy, GOLES has been able to build relationships and networks with city agencies to prepare for the next storm. In that sense, governments have come to a different understanding on collaboration and what it means to rebuild after a disaster.

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