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Brigid Bergin: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergin, senior politics reporter in the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom, filling in for Brian who's off today. The Northeast Atlantic hurricane season kicked off in earnest on Sunday. The slow-moving weather system known as Henri was downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm before making landfall in Rhode Island early Sunday afternoon, and continued to weaken as it moved inland. By 9:00 PM it was downgraded again, this time to a tropical depression status. Still, millions in the Tri-State Area and New England were affected by the storm, which dumped heavy rains that flooded roads and low-lying buildings, brought high winds that caused power outages in more than 140,000 homes, and compelled state officials to close bridges, cancel flights, and shut down public transportation. Here in New York City, Central Park received a record-breaking 1.94 inches of rain in a single hour Saturday night as Henri lurked off Long island. The Homecoming Concert on the Great Lawn was cut short due to lightning before Bruce Springsteen and Paul Simon were slated to perform.

Flash floods swamped the streets of Central Brooklyn neighborhoods such as Park Slope, Gowanus, and Prospect Heights, and the MTA suspended much of its Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road service. While Henri might not have been the devastating weather event it could have been, it could have been worse than everyone should be prepared. With me now to discuss the rest of this hurricane season and beyond, and lessons we may or may have not learned since superstorm Sandy, is New York City Emergency Management Department Commissioner John Scrivani. Good morning, John, and welcome to WNYC.

John Scrivani: Thank you, Brigid. I appreciate it.

Brigid: Commissioner, as Henri fizzles out, it seems we've managed to escape a full-scale disaster this time around pretty much through luck. Are there any specific measures your office has put in place that you think helped minimize this storm's impact?

John Scrivani: I'm glad you started with the word luck because what I've told my team, and I stole a line from a children's movie with my kids, is "Luck favors the prepared." We spend a lot of time all year round preparing for all kinds of different emergencies, and the lead-up to Henri, even though the storm gave us a little bit of a compressed timeline that we were able to react to, we were prepared for whatever it was going to throw at us. We were ready, we were prepared, so I'm glad you started with luck. I'm sorry. I just have to ask you to repeat the second part of that question because I sidetracked myself.

Brigid: No problem. What are some of the measures that OEM has put in place, particularly since Sandy, to mitigate storm impacts?

John Scrivani: I appreciate that. We have changed a few things. Obviously Sandy presented us with a lot of challenges. 12 to 14 feet of storm surge is very difficult to handle in the midst of the storm plus in the recovery. One of the main things we

changed is our evacuation zones. Before Sandy, we had three evacuation zones here in the city. We compressed that with better data and better modeling to go to six zones so we can evacuate a more targeted area. We really focused on updating our plans.

Sandy was one of the worst storms we had ever seen here in the city. We realized that we did have some gaps in our planning, specifically around, and a part I got to work on, was our debris removal process. We did a lot of work to make that program better. Obviously, we updated a lot of our messaging so we know how to reach New Yorkers better. Some of our preparedness efforts are better. We have developed a flood protection measure program around the city as part of our mitigation programs, working with the federal government, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the state to put flood protection in certain neighborhoods around the city that we saw were most heavily impacted during Sandy.

There's been a lot that's gone into it. We've also put up new coastal storm signage around the city just to get people to higher ground quicker and get them to our evacuation centers if needed

Brigid: Listeners, we want to hear about your experience with Tropical Storm Henri over the weekend. Did your neighborhood flood? Did you try to go to that concert in Central Park? If you live outside the metro area, how bad was the storm where you live? Call us at (646) 435-7280. Did Henri bring back memories of Sandy? Did you feel better prepared nearly a decade later,? How will you prepare for future storms knowing that there are still three months left of 2021's hurricane season, and that weather events will only be getting more extreme in the years to come? The number, (646) 436-7280.

Commissioner, I think a lot of people were surprised by Henri because it felt so early in the Atlantic hurricane season. Technically of course the season stretches from June 1st to November 30th, but the peak is generally from August-October. Still, for New Yorkers an August storm, it felt startling. Does the department have any sense of the forecast and what the rest of the season might look like?

John Scrivani: The National Hurricane Center has put forward that this would be a higher than active hurricane season, but the key for us is it only takes one storm. It doesn't really matter how many storms we have coming through the Atlantic, we watch and prepare every day to see what's coming our way. We're in very close contact with the National Weather Service and the Hurricane Center, and for us every storm that potentially pops up in the Atlantic, we're watching it very closely. It really does only take one.

With climate change and with the intensity of these storms coming at us all over the east coast of the United States with more ferocity, we just have to, as you mentioned, be more prepared for them.

Brigid: Listeners, I misspoke the number, unbelievably. Of course, if you want to call in and share your stories both of this weekend, how you were thinking about extreme weather in our region going forward, whether you were trying to go to that Central

Park concert or you were trying to drive through Court Street in Brooklyn, that number is (646) 435-7280. That's (646) 435-7280. Thank you for catching that, my kind producer, Mary.

Commissioner, I think one of the things that people are trying to understand is how should they prepare for the rest of the storm season? What type of protective measures should we be taking that we might not be aware of because generally, we haven't dealt with hurricanes on a seasonal or regular basis. What's the advice that you give from OEM about how to deal with preparing for major storms that might be a little bit different than just having your go-bag ready?

John Scrivani: I think that's the most important question that you could have asked me. The first part is be informed and have a plan. The go-bag is a part of your plan, but you really need to take a holistic approach to this. Not just to tropical storms and hurricanes, but just to the day-to-day emergencies that might happen. We have a host of programs to help New Yorkers be prepared. We have already New York guides which you can get from 311 or from our NYCEM website, which is nyc.gov/emergencymanagement. Within the ready New York guides, we have a My Emergency Plan. I have one sitting here on my desk, and it's a fill-in-the-blanks type document that takes you through how to build your own family emergency plan. That includes not just yourself, your loved ones, but also your pets, how to prepare your home, and truly be ready for anything that might happen.

Specific to hurricane preparedness, which is what this segment is focusing on, we did have changes this year to the Know Your Zone program. We want to make sure people go in and check and understand what hurricane evacuation zone they may possibly live in. You could do that by going to nyc.gov/knowyourzone, or by calling 311, and understand that if you knew what your hurricane evacuation zone was last year, it might have changed. We had better data come in this year so we were able to make some adjustments, but there were about a million people that had their zones changed this year.

We did mailings to those folks to make sure that they were aware of which zone they were in, but we really need people to take a holistic approach to preparedness.

Brigid: Anna in Chelsea, welcome to WNYC. I think you have an important suggestion for some of our listeners.

Anna: Yes. I run a health [unintelligible 00:09:57] non-profit, and we did a lot of work after Hurricane Sandy on emergency preparedness for people who are managing a chronic health condition or illness. We just want to say that if you're out there in this audience, make sure you make a plan with your care providers or your care provider team so that you can have the medications that you need, so you can evacuate if you have to. That may be a personal decision, not a city-wide decision, to even have ongoing continuous care. If you have medication that needs to be refrigerated you need to have electricity, so get out if you need those things ongoing.

Again, it was complicated by the COVID, so obviously make sure that the people

who you're evacuating too [laughs] consistently test and maintain strong mitigation processes so you'll be safe in that event. Any kind of emergency or natural disaster, for somebody managing a health condition, can go bad quickly, so definitely prepare.

Brigid: Anna, thank you so much. Some great tips there. Let's go to Catherine in Brooklyn. Catherine, I think you are raising something that's really important, particularly when you have a storm like Henri that doesn't have the devastating impact certainly in our region that it's having in other regions. Can you talk a little bit about your concerns around preparedness?

Catherine: Sure, absolutely, and thank you for taking my call. Of course, one of the keywords early in the segment was luck. I think we can all agree that most people in the metro area were quite lucky with this storm. Leading up to the storm, of course I'm seeing things about being prepared and people taking that seriously. Particularly on social media following the storm, there's been a great deal of post-storm cynicism which I think is what we're dealing with on a larger scale.

Anyway, I wanted to ask whether there are any thoughts about mitigating that very cynical outlook following a storm like this, where we maybe did not see that devastating outcome that hopefully we were all collectively preparing for.

Brigid: Catherine, thank you so much. I do think you're raising an issue that several of our callers are pointing at, and Commissioner, I'm sure as someone who works in this space day in and day out, you have to deal with on a regular basis. You are the guy that talks about emergencies all the time. What do you do to combat potentially the cynicism or even maybe this sense of exhaustion you might get from people who think that people are overdramatizing something?

John Scrivani: That is a great question, and both Anna and Catherine brought up great topics specifically to what we try to call message fatigue, where we know that over-communicating, sometimes people will start to tune you out. Specific to Henri, we sent out 55 Notify NYC messages to try and keep people informed. The National Weather Service sent out multiple wireless emergency alerts related to flooding and storm surge alerts. We know that after Irene the reason why the people did not evacuate for Sandy was because we evacuated for Irene and then the storm turned on us.

The challenge for me and my team and the city as a whole is we have to react to the information that's given to us as the disaster and the weather approaches. If the information is pointing us to calling for an evacuation, we need to make sure we take the proper steps to give people the appropriate amount of time to get to a safe place. It's a challenging balance of how much information do we send out, how much information do we share, and then if the impacts don't equal what we messaged there is that fatigue or making people cynical about the information we're sharing. It's a constant battle that we have to continue to fight.

With our preparedness messages we have to make sure that we put out there, pay attention to our messaging, please. Don't ignore it. We know we're not going to be right 100% of the time, but we have to err on the side of caution to make sure that

people are reacting appropriately to our messaging.

Brigid: We're going to have to leave it there. I'm sure we will talk more this fall. That's New York City Emergency Management Department Commissioner John Scrivani, and I'm Brigid Bergin. You've been listening to The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Thanks so much. Tune in again tomorrow.

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