Part 2: As North Carolina struggles to build back after Hurricane Helene, NPR correspondent Laura Sullivan travels to New York and New Jersey years after Superstorm Sandy to find how recovery efforts fell short. And we learn special interests are shaping how we put communities back together.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Full Episode
Build it stronger, build it safer, build it back fast. Welcome back to the Sunday Story and part two of our series on how badly we as a nation do at rebuilding after a big storm knocks us down. Laura Sullivan and the crew at Frontline have been following along as North Carolina struggles to bounce back after Helene. In Houston, they learned you can't always engineer your way out of danger.
Now they're looking for answers in another storm-prone area, New York and New Jersey's seacoast, to see how they've done in the years since Superstorm Sandy. The idea there? Get out of the way of the water.
In 2012, Superstorm Sandy sent more than 12 feet of water over communities along the coast of New York and New Jersey. It was one of the worst flooding events in New York's history. Recently, we headed back to some of the neighborhoods we first visited in the aftermath of Sandy.
And even though 13 years had passed since the storm, it almost felt like they were trapped in time, midway through a recovery. Here on Staten Island's seacoast, the community used to be tight-knit, with families living in little bungalows. Now it feels desolate. After the storm, some residents used recovery money to elevate their homes really high. Others took a buyout from the federal government.
Their homes were leveled. And some did nothing. Their houses sit right as they were the night of the storm. It's kind of sad. Resident James Sinagra calls it the jack-o'-lantern effect. Imagine the teeth, jagged and irregularly spaced.
I mean, they should either make it into wetlands, like you can see down the road there, that's all wetlands, or they should at least give more of an incentive for a community to be built back up like these houses are built up.
It was hard to find people who thought the recovery had turned out well, even people who decided not to rebuild at all, like Joe Tyrone. He's a local realtor known for organizing one of the nation's first large-scale home buyout programs in Staten Island's Oakwood Beach neighborhood.
all they talked about when we were mucking out the houses, how much they loved the neighborhood. So I said, there's no way they're going to want to leave. But the reality is, first there was Isaac. That was bad. And then Irene came, put him back on their heels. And when Sandy came, that was a knockout punch. They were like, that's it. People died on the street. And they all knew each other.
He took me out to see the old neighborhood.
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