[ad_1]
October 29th marks the 10th anniversary of Superstorm Sandy. Labeled the most devastating storm to hit New Jersey, the tempest resulted in 38 deaths and estimated damages of $37 million. In its entirety, Sandy passed through 21 states, creating more than $70 billion in damages, and killing more than 125 people.
In looking back at the catastrophic event, government leaders who were responsible for making sure the state’s infrastructure systems, such as water treatment facilities and electrical systems, were up and running, as well as leaders from the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), who were responsible for getting billions of gallons of water out of flooded transportation tunnels, removing destroyed homes and other debris from shorelines and back bays, and who immediately began rebuilding beaches along the coast, tell their stories of devastation, quick action, recovery and lessons learned.
The state, as well as USACE, thought they were somewhat prepared to face the storm, due to systems put in place in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene the prior year. However, Sandy was different. What started as a tropical depression off the coast of Nicaragua on October 22, turned into a “Frankenstorm” as the hurricane, heading north to our region, collided with a cold front heading east and a high-pressure storm heading south, making Sandy linger in the New Jersey/New York area. Its hurricane status was reduced to a tropical storm when it combined with the cold front, but nevertheless, wind gusts of 90 miles per hour were hitting the state by Monday, October 29. Add a full moon to this cocktail mix and Sandy was creating 14-foot-high storm surges.
“A week before the storm, we were already holding planning sessions with the governor and all other cabinet department members at the Regional Operations Intelligence Center (ROIC),” recalls former New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Bob Martin. “We knew the storm was going to be big and extremely slow moving, but we didn’t know how pervasive the water was going to be in the tidally driven areas of the state.”
Martin and his staff were hunkered down at the ROIC while the storm was wreaking havoc not only on the coastline, harbors and inland waterways, but deep into the state as winds were knocking down trees and power lines, resulting in more than 2.6 million homes and businesses without energy (power was out for days in some towns, while others experienced outages of a week or more).
As Martin was getting reports of the devastation, he says his first responsibility was to make sure the state’s water infrastructure, including wastewater treatment facilities, were operating.
Assisting Martin in this mission was New Jersey Business & Industry Association President and CEO Michele Siekerka who, at that time, was assistant commissioner for water resources at the DEP (she would later become a deputy commissioner at the department).
The DEP had to deal with some 70 water supply facilities and 100 wastewater treatment facilities that were in distress. The biggest problem was at the Passaic Valley Sewer Commission’s (PSVSC) 140-acre plant, situated near the confluence of the Passaic River and Newark Bay, which was completely underwater. Rather than have existing wastewater flow into city streets or backup into people’s homes, the DEP made the difficult decision to release the waste into the river.
For the entire first week immediately after the storm, Siekerka was on the phone contacting all of the regulated water systems to see if they had or needed generators and diesel fuel in order to continue operations and avoid more situations similar to PVSC.
She recalls a point in time at the ROIC when Commissioner Martin was up in Governor Christie’s “war room” while Siekerka was elsewhere in the facility. “The commissioner asked me via text message how many gallons of diesel fuel I thought the state needed because the governor was about to get on the phone with President Obama to make the request. Literally, I hunkered down in the corner of a hallway and the commissioner and I arbitrarily came up with a number based on what we could gather from all the information we were collecting. … That was the intensity of the moment,” Siekerka recalls.
[ad_2]
Source link