Public Employee Press

Recovering from Sandy
Union team restored heat and light to thousands

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

Nearly a dozen years ago, Construction Project Manager Michael Kenny worked on the city team at Ground Zero after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

Since Hurricane Sandy, he has shined as a disaster relief expert who helped coordinate a joint federal-city program to help residents recover from the superstorm. Sandy's impact was more far-reaching than 9/11, Keny noted, saying, "9/11 was basically contained within 16 acres. "Sandy hit people all over the five boroughs."

The 9/11 workers called the destroyed World Trade Center site a "war zone," and Kenny used the same words to describe Sandy's devastation in neighborhoods throughout the city. "People were shell-shocked," he said, recalling a visit to Staten Island shortly after the superstorm hit on Oct. 29.

Kenny, the 2nd vice president of Civil Service Technical Guild Local 375, was part of the team that planned Rapid Repairs, a federally funded project run by the city that restored electric power, heat and hot water to thousands of homes damaged by Sandy. From his office at 250 Broadway in Manhattan, he coordinated the work of a team of Local 375 members who were in charge of contractors in the field.

"The hurricane came so late in the year and there was so much destruction in the outer boroughs that we were scared if we didn't move quickly, people in their homes would get ill or even freeze to death," Kenny said. "Our top concern was to get people's heat and hot water working so that they could start to deal with renovations as soon as possible."

The Federal Emergency Management Administration and city officials were mindful of the flawed response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, where thousands of people were warehoused in trailers for a long time and neighborhoods were abandoned. They concluded that putting people in trailers and hotels was inappropriate and too costly for a city as densely populated as New York.

A model program

"This program is a model for the future," Kenny said. "Some neighborhoods in New Orleans are still devastated. We got people back in their homes as soon as possible and prevented possible urban decay."

Associate Program Manager Frank Morizio monitored the work of the Guileane Building Co. on 3,000 homes in Far Rockaway, from the Marine Park Bridge to the Nassau County line, where the basements and first floors had been flooded with 10 to 12 feet of water.

"I had never handled anything of this scope," said Morizio, who regularly worked 16-hour days, six to seven days a week through February. "This program helped people get on the right track and move back in, and it helped get the neighborhood back to where it used to be."

Rapid Repairs covered boilers, furnaces, meters, electrical wiring and outlets - and it didn't cost homeowners a dime.

"It was very fulfilling to see people get their heat, hot water and electricity restored," Morizio said. "The best thing was seeing the people's faces when the job was done. There was a lot of hugging and crying."

Associate Project Manager 2 Colin Johnson worked in Coney Island, where the city and Skanska Construction used trailers in a parking lot at MCU Park as a staging ground where people met in the morning to review work, made plans for the day and went into the field. The team - 300 crafts laborers, 60 supervisors and a quality-of-work unit - covered 2,800 homes in Gerritsen Beach, Red Hook, Manhattan Beach and Sheepshead Bay.

"The idea was to get in there and get it done. We figured out how on the fly,'" Johnson said. "Everybody was a priority. You would hear about one person with cancer and another that was elderly and infirm. Whose home do you deal with first?"

With people uprooted from their homes and workers under pressure, homeowners occasionally got irate and tempers sometimes flared. Johnson acknowledged that he would sometimes "butt heads" with the contractor.

"It was brutal fun," he said, calling the work highly stressful but ultimately very satisfying.

"Now we are dealing with all the paperwork," Johnson told PEP in mid-April as the program was winding down. "I can't wait to get my wife and my weekends back. But I wouldn't know what to do with two days off in a row, since I'm no longer used to it."

City Project Manager Dorrit Blakeslee monitored repairs on 500 homes in Broad Channel, Queens, by contractor Sullivan Land Services. She often found herself mediating between homeowners and the contractor. For instance, an owner might have been upset over the contractor's refusal to replace a damaged boiler or install more electrical wiring. "I would have to go out to the home to resolve things." She said.

"This was a very ambitious program that had never been done before," said Blakeslee, who enjoyed the challenge of responding to an emergency. "This was the first program to try to keep people in their homes while repairs were being made. That kept the pressure on us to get the work done."

Sr. Construction Project Manager Gulshan Malik supervised Navillus Construction, which employed up to 350 workers to restore heat, water and electricity to more than 1,500 homes around the Breezy Point and Roxbury communities on the Rockaway Peninsula.

"Nobody had ever worked on this type of program before, so we had a lot of hiccups," he said. "There was no time for planning properly. It was perpetual pressure. We kept pushing the contractor to get things done."

Consoling homeowners

Malik faced constant challenges. In the initial weeks, he had no Internet access for his laptop. The contractor didn't coordinate its work well, and homeowners complained. He had to worry about gas leaks, petty theft, unsafe working conditions, garbage accumulation and code enforcement, and even ensuring that the city had the serial numbers of the thousands of new appliances.

The bottom line was to help people whose lives had been turned upside down by the hurricane. "People needed help and we did everything we could. We tried to console them and help them get through this situation."

NYC Rapid Repairs is said to be the first program in which a city has responded to an emergency by roviding homeowners with free repairs. All told, 20,000 families and 54,000 individuals benefitted from the program.

A city employee since 1986, Kenny said his experience coordinating the program has deepened his commitment to government service.

"It really changed my feeling about how powerful government can be for the people," Kenny said. "We were helping our own people. And we came through for them."