The Works

NYC Passes Meatier Building Resilience Measures

The Urban Green Council checks off three points on its post-Sandy wishlist.

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This past June, the Urban Green Council, New York City’s chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council, issued a series of 33 recommendations to boost the resilience of the city’s buildings, with the specter of another storm like Hurricane Sandy haunting local officials.

Late last month, the New York City Council passed five bills acting on the Urban Green Council’s recommendations, but they were relatively tepid stuff — like writing a manual on flood-proof construction and doing an analysis of wind damage to buildings and construction sites (looking at you, One57!), plus some more concrete things like mandating plumbing that works when the power goes out and prevents backflow of sewage.

But yesterday the City Council, in the waning days of Speaker (and failed Democratic mayoral contender) Christine Quinn’s term, moved on much more substantial building, mechanical and fire code reforms, passing four laws and checking off three items on the Urban Green Council’s building resilience wish list.

The meatiest of the two laws amend city codes to require that builders in flood-prone areas put their building systems — from fire alarms and fuel oil storage tanks to pipe vents and fresh air intakes — above the base flood elevation. (In April, the Federal Emergency Management Agency made similar recommendations involving fuel tanks.) The bills also enact new standard for preventing wind damage, with lots of fun uses of the term “missiles.”

Finally, one bill mandates something more minor, and which doesn’t borrow from the Urban Green Council: It directs the city to develop standards for posting information in apartment buildings during inclement weather. Leaving the precise details up to city government, it suggests things like instructions for securing window air conditioning units, whether a building is located in a hurricane evacuation zone, and “whether during the utility outage, services such as potable water, corridor, egress, and common area lighting, fire safety and fire protection, elevators, charging locations for cellular telephones” — stop to catch your breath! — “domestic hot water, or heating and cooling will be provided.”

As for the rest of the Urban Green Council’s wish list, a number of recommendations have been introduced but have not yet passed, such as removing barriers to sidewalk flood protection. There are a number of recommendations that City Council has yet to act upon at all, like ensuring operable windows in residential buildings, planting flood- and wind-resistant trees and preventing storm damage to single-family homes — requirements that politicians are always more loathe to implement than those on apartment buildings, but crucial to preventing the sort of damage that large swaths of more suburban parts of the city, like the Rockaways and Staten Island, experienced during Hurricane Sandy.

The Works is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation.

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Stephen J. Smith is a reporter based in New York. He has written about transportation, infrastructure and real estate for a variety of publications including New York Yimby, where he is currently an editor, Next City, City Lab and the New York Observer.

Tags: new york cityinfrastructureresilient citiesclimate changethe workshurricane sandy

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