S3 E1: “It's one thing understanding that intellectually... it's another thing actually seeing what happened.” In September of 2023, heavy rainfall led to flooding in New York City. Images of cars covered in water were all over the news and reminded people of one of New York’s most harrowing weather events: Superstorm Sandy. To kick off this season of A Little Green, host Christina Thompson sets out on a mission to find the upside. She asks local experts what the city’s learned in the years since Sandy, and what’s been done to make New York more a resilient, climate solutions-oriented place to live – for everybody.
S3 E1: “It's one thing understanding that intellectually... it's another thing actually seeing what happened.”
In September of 2023, heavy rainfall led to flooding in New York City. Images of cars covered in water were all over the news and reminded people of one of New York’s most harrowing weather events: Superstorm Sandy. To kick off this season of A Little Green, host Christina Thompson sets out on a mission to find the upside. She asks local experts what the city’s learned in the years since Sandy, and what’s been done to make New York more a resilient, climate solutions-oriented place to live – for everybody.
Featured in this episode:
[00:00:43] Christina Thompson: Welcome back to A Little Green Podcast, an Avocado Green Brands production, and easily one of my most favorite things about my job. I'm Christina Thompson, and I'm a producer here at Avocado Green Brands. If you're new here, welcome. We've been on a mission the last three-ish years making this happy little podcast to become more informed, better prepared, and, frankly, the ultimate climate advocates in our own backyard, which, for me, is still Brooklyn, New York. We've talked to a lot of people over the last two seasons. All right. Can you hear me? Our friends, families...
[00:01:22] VOX POP: ...Okay, Christina...
[00:01:23] VOX POP: ...Hey, CT...
[00:01:24] VOX POP: ...Hey, CT...
[00:01:24] Christina Thompson: Frontliners. Activists...
[00:01:26] VOX POP: ...christina, that's where the most radical stuff is happening...
[00:01:29] Christina Thompson: I feel like I could ask you a billion questions. Storytellers, change-makers...
[00:01:32] VOX POP: Change doesn't happen overnight...
[00:01:34] Christina Thompson: And hey, even a kindergartner or two.
[00:01:36] VOX POP: What? I don't know...
[00:01:40] Christina Thompson: So, 2023. It was quite a year. I saw this headline the other day. "How do you maintain hope in an age of catastrophe?" Great question, New Yorker. Tell us. Give us the answer, because we need it. On this season of A Little Green, let's go find some of that hope, because after a year of unprecedented news and climate events, I want to know the upside. What are we up to now in terms of progress on climate solutions? Okay, that's a huge, broad question. Okay. More specifically, I want to talk about my own backyard: New York City.
[00:02:20] VOX POP: I live in the East Village...
[00:02:21] VOX POP: ...I live in the Bronx...
[00:02:21] VOX POP: ...Chelsea...
[00:02:22] VOX POP: ...Long Island...
[00:02:23] VOX POP: ...in Jamaica, Queens...
[00:02:24] VOX POP: ...Manhattan...
[00:02:24] VOX POP: ...45th Street, actually....
[00:02:27] Christina Thompson: Where are we with resiliency and mitigation? So to start, let's take it back to a little storm from this past fall that swept through much of my Brooklyn waterfront neighborhood, September, 2023...
[00:02:40] VOICEMAIL: Hi, you've reached Christina. Leave a message and I'll call back. Thanks. At the tone, please record your message. When you've finished recording, you may hang up or press one for more options. [Voicemail beeps]
[00:02:52] Anna McClain: Hey, it's Anna. Um, I just saw all the news about the flooding that's happening, specifically in Red Hook. Just wanted to call and make sure you're okay. So yeah, gimme a call back when, when you can. [Rain sounds]
[00:03:07] Christina Thompson: So when this storm rolled in, no joke, the streets looked like rivers; cars disappeared into them. Boats on wheels according to one bystander, and water poured into the subways. [News theme song. Television click]
[00:03:26] NEWS CLIPS: A state of emergency has been declared in New York City as strong storms bring flash flooding...
[00:03:35] NEWS CLIPS: ...Record rain in New York City has caused life-threatening flooding, overwhelming streets and subwa-- [Television click]
[00:03:40] VOX POP: The flooding took me completely by surprise...
[00:03:45] VOX POP: ...It was awesome. Not necessarily in a good way, just awesome to see this neighborhood so flooded...
[00:03:51] VOX POP: ...Streets looked like canals. Uh, yeah. It was, it was, uh, pretty crazy...
[00:04:01] Christina Thompson: So, if we're on a journey to find the hope, this news feels pretty grim. But I think we need to understand how this fits in -- into the bigger picture of extreme weather in New York. Let's establish a bit of a benchmark in terms of these events, how things are now, versus before. And I think, for most of us New Yorkers, the unanimous "before" weather event is an easy call.
[00:04:25] VOX POP: ...Hurricane Sandy...
[00:04:25] VOX POP: ...Hurricane Sandy...
[00:04:26] VOX POP: ...Hurricane Sandy...
[00:04:26] VOX POP: ...Hurricane Sandy...
[00:04:27] VOX POP: ...Superstorm Sandy...
[00:04:28] VOX POP: ...Sandy...
[00:04:28] Dr. Alison Branco: Superstorm Sandy, of course. [Television clicks]
[00:04:30] NEWS CLIPS: ...Hurricane Sandy crashing on shore... [Television clicks]
[00:04:33] NEWS CLIPS: ...Throughout the day, Sandy was breaking records-- [Television clicks]
[00:04:35] NEWS CLIPS: ...And now this water is rushing over the edge of lower Manhattan... [Television clicks]
[00:04:39] VOX POP: ...Hurricane Sandy was wild. Uh...
[00:04:41] VOX POP: ...When the storm started, all the windows were shaking...
[00:04:45] VOX POP: ...There was a building that collapsed not too far from where we were...
[00:04:47] VOX POP: ...Water surrounded my house...
[00:04:48] VOX POP: ...Thank God I own a generator. First time I learned how to siphon gas out of a boat... during Sandy... that's it.
[00:04:56] Dr. Anthony Broccoli: As the storm was approaching, I realized, and a lot of other people working in weather and climate realized how serious the impacts could be.
[00:05:06] Christina Thompson: That's Dr. Anthony Broccoli. He's the co-director of the Rutgers Climate Institute in New Jersey.
[00:05:12] Dr. Anthony Broccoli: It's one thing understanding that intellectually. It's another thing actually seeing what happened, and I think that was, uh, certainly a very memorable experience and something that I will never forget.
[00:05:30] VOX POP: ...I remember that everything uptown, um, was functional, but everything downtown was, um, was underwater...
[00:05:37] VOX POP: ...I saw the broadwalk upside down. Um, like, um a, a future dystopian science fiction movie, so...
[00:05:45] VOX POP: ...That was something I had never seen since I've lived here in New York for 37 years...
[00:05:51] VOX POP: ...We had a lot of damage. A lot of damage...
[00:05:53] VOX POP: ...So that was basically a hard time for me and my family. We lost a lot...
[00:06:00] Louise Yeung: There was about $19 billion of damages to facilities, infrastructure, people's homes. People lived without power for weeks and 43 New Yorkers tragically lost their lives during Sandy. It was a really big point in our climate history.
[00:06:22] Gita Nandan: My name's Gita Nandan. I am in Red Hook, Brooklyn in New York City.
[00:06:28] Christina Thompson: What is it that makes your -- our -- neighborhood special? Like, what do you love about it?
[00:06:36] Gita Nandan: Um, I mean, I'm just a very watery person, so, for me, being around the water, near the water, smelling the water, you know, the sea, um, just makes it an incredibly special place.
[00:06:50] Christina Thompson: Gita is the founder of the R.E.T.I. Center, the Resilience, Education, Training and Innovation Center.
[00:06:56] Gita Nandan: A very long name for something that-- you know, basically our, our focus is that we build climate solutions. Um...
[00:07:07] Christina Thompson: She's lived right around the corner from me in Red Hook for almost 20 years. To her, and many New Yorkers, there's before Sandy and there's after Sandy.
[00:07:16] Gita Nandan: Um, so it being just like this tear, you know, in the timesheet of New York City, and that's partly because it was an event that both created this awareness and understanding of where New York City is in the world of climate, and climate change, and sea level rise and storm conditions, and also, you know, it was a moment when the community came together and supported each other through probably one of the toughest times that our community went through.
[00:07:56] Dr. Alison Branco: That was really my first taste of what it's like to sort of live through a disaster and, and see how much it affected my community and all the communities around me.
[00:08:04] Christina Thompson: Dr. Alison Branco is the Climate Adaptation Director at the Nature Conservancy in New York. She was living on Long Island when Sandy hit.
[00:08:12] Dr. Alison Branco: You know, there were fires and a lot of people died, but the aftermath of that has been so interesting because it really got people to wake up to this whole issue that this is not a problem far away, either in space or time, but it's something that's really starting to affect us here on Long Island. And since then, you know, people's day-to-day experience with flooding has only gotten worse.
[00:08:41] Christina Thompson: Superstorm Sandy lives in our collective minds as a turning point, for sure -- a catalyst. And for good reason. It felt like something like this had never happened before.
[00:08:52] VOX POP: ...You know, living in New York all my life, I've never seen Manhattan flood....
[00:08:56] VOX POP: ...I've never seen anything...
[00:08:57] VOX POP: ...I've never seen anything like that before...
[00:08:58] VOX POP: ...like that in New York City, or...
[00:09:00] Christina Thompson: It was unprecedented.
[00:09:01] Dr. Anthony Broccoli: I think it's very easy for people to say, and not without justification, that we probably won't see a storm like this again in our lifetimes. Meteorologically, that may be true, but with sea level rise, it won't take something as unusual as Sandy to produce the same amount of damage in the future.
[00:09:23] Christina Thompson: I think we can all agree that unprecedented weather events have quickly become pretty precedented these days.
[00:09:31] Dr. Alison Branco: And so what has happened is that our whole water cycle has just gotten kind of supercharged. So, we've had hurricanes long ago, and we will continue to have them long into the future, but storms like that, while their mere existence is not caused by climate change, what is happening is those storms are getting more frequent and more severe.
[00:09:52] Christina Thompson: So, quick science refresher, the earth gets warmer because of greenhouse gas emissions. That also warms the ocean, and that creates a ton of energy. And this supercharged water cycle isn't our only issue.
[00:10:05] Dr. Alison Branco: We have this more slow-moving disaster of sea level rise. And so that just means that our baseline water level is getting higher and higher. So when a storm surge does come through and raises it even greater, it just has more and more impacts.
[00:10:20] Christina Thompson: Sea levels in New York City have already risen a foot over the last century.
[00:10:25] Dr. Alison Branco: A lot of communities, especially low lying areas like Long Island, where I live, are experiencing chronic flooding. Even on sunny days, even when there's nothing happening in the weather, if it's high tide, they're starting to experience a lot of chronic flooding. Streets, front yards, backyards, that sort of thing.
[00:10:52] Christina Thompson: Look, we're still committed to the hope side of things on this podcast, I promise. But New York does have a water problem, and it's a problem that's so in our faces that we can't ignore it. And September's flooding proved that, while there are some events that we're managing, there are others that seem well out of our current control. But, if there's one thing I know about New York, it's that our city does not give up.
[00:11:17] VOX POP: ...It's without any doubt, New York City is one of the strongest cities here in the United States...
[00:11:21] VOX POP: ...People are really willing to come together and to fight for things they care about and...
[00:11:25] VOX POP: ...A mix of people of different ages, different ethnicities, different stages of life. It seems like...
[00:11:31] VOX POP: ...The past few years, there's been this sort of, like, cultural awakening...
[00:11:34] VOX POP: ...People are building and understanding that we, we have to be resilient going into the future.
[00:11:41] Dr. Alison Branco: We've seen a tremendous shift in people's willingness to accept that flooding is a problem. A problem that's here already, not a problem of the future, and a problem that's affecting us. Those events, as awful as they are, are really important for getting people to wake up and pay attention. That awareness is really the most important first step.
[00:12:09] Christina Thompson: If many of us New Yorkers are at step one, what's step two? What are we going to do to ensure that our city doesn't sink? Or, better yet, that it's a resilient place where everyone can thrive? What have we learned since Sandy? Have we learned anything? Are we going to be okay? Where's the hope?
[00:12:34] Christina Thompson: Sally, I didn't bring my wellies… On this season of A Little Green... Is this g oing to be a problem?
[00:12:39] Kara Schlichting: What if the rebuilding of the city in the face of a climate crisis is a moment to build a more just and a more environmentally flexible city?
[00:12:48] Damaris Reyes: The city came back with a different plan. And that just made everybody go bananas.
[00:12:55] Lonnie Portis: People are talking about this, like, it's, it's, it is becoming more so kitchen table conversation.
[00:13:00] Damaris Reyes: People on the ground really have a lot of answers and know firsthand the impacts.
[00:13:07] Christina Thompson: Oh my God.
[00:13:08] Sally Connolly: Isn't it fabulous?
[00:13:09] Christina Thompson: This is beautiful. A Little Green is an Avocado Green Brands podcast. To learn more about all of the organizations and topics we chatted about on today's episode, check out alittlegreenpodcast.com or head to avocadomattress.com to read more on our online magazine.
[00:13:28] Christina Thompson: This podcast was written and produced by Anna McClain and myself, Christina Thompson. The music you heard is by Aaron Levison. And special thanks to Megan Hattie Stahl for additional production support.