Finalist: Newsday, by Staff

Now we find out what we're made of -- as Long Island discovers the full extent of the devastation that Sandy has wrought. This is not only a disaster, it's a challenge.

 

The sun rose yesterday on a torn and darkened region, with a small but tragic number of fatalities, uncounted injuries and physical damage -- homes and cars crushed by trees, calamitous flooding, and utter powerlessness. Fully 90 percent of the Long Island Power Authority's customers lost electricity. Forget at least 10 days; realistically, it may take LIPA several weeks to get everyone's lights back on.

 

In the city, flooded subway tunnels mean that the economic engine of the Empire State will sputter for days, until the Metropolitan Transportation Authority can restore service.

 

The storm's full cost will not be known for weeks. State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli's staff is trying to assess how many billions we've lost, in physical damage and business, but that's hard to calculate. From the lost trading activity on Wall Street to shuttered businesses across the Island, we've taken a huge economic hit -- though tree-trimmers and unemployed construction workers will benefit, and some businesses will thrive.

 

In the damage assessment and in the rebuilding, there's a vital role for all of us.

 

We have a right to expect our government leaders to rise to the occasion and point the way. And they have a right to expect us to listen to their counsel. We can no longer afford to indulge in what-the-heck thinking, ignoring evacuation warnings because we don't expect anything that bad to happen.

 

So Babylon Supervisor Rich Schaffer and Islip Supervisor Tom Croci were sorely disappointed in residents of evacuation zones who chose not to obey the towns' advice to evacuate. That was not just a personal decision, affecting only those reluctant to leave their homes. It was a choice that endangered the lives of those called on to rescue them.

 

It's a time when government must set a clear priority on clearing away the debris to restore movement, and on helping those most badly hurt. But towns, villages and cities, already coping with severe budget crises, will now have to absorb incalculable added costs. The difficulty of public service just went up several notches. So did the importance of bipartisan problem-solving.

 

For all of us, an informed and vigilant patience is the best approach to the uncertainties ahead: whether insurers will pay for the damage, how to cope with the costs of food spoiled by the lack of refrigeration, and how to deal with any deep cold snap, when so many of our heating systems depend on electricity.

 

Then there's the matter of the election. Next Tuesday, we'll pick a president, plus a U.S. senator, members of the House of Representatives, the Assembly and the State Senate -- plus special elections for supervisor in Brookhaven and Babylon and the 12th District of the Nassau County Legislature. But it's not clear how closely people will be able to focus on voting or what complications the lack of electricity will create at the polling places.

 

The biggest test of all faces LIPA. It's a state agency, and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo will be watching closely to see how it performs, and what that performance says about how the authority should be reconfigured for the future.

 

Once we know the dollar value of our losses, we must weigh that against the billions it will cost to bury power lines, and come up with a long-term plan for making our power grid more stormproof. It's no longer adequate to say that it would be too expensive. We have to ask what must change. What's truly too expensive is the economic chaos that this storm, the one last year, and others ahead will impose on us.

 

And there's no doubt that we now must cope with frequently freakish weather. Cuomo made that clear yesterday.

 

"There has been a series of extreme weather incidents," the governor said. "That is not a political statement. That is a factual statement. Anyone who says there's not a dramatic change in weather patterns, I think is denying reality."

 

That means rebuilding the city and the Island to face that new normal. It is a threat to our lives and livelihoods. It's a challenge we ignore at our peril.

It's hard to believe and hard to accept that we were so unprepared.

 

Sandy has forever made our island existence impossible to ignore. We have always celebrated its bountiful good, our beaches, boating and fishing cultures. Now we appreciate the dark side. Islands are vulnerable places. And it's deeply unsettling to realize our home turf is so fragile.

 

Our powerlessness these past two weeks goes far beyond the mere loss of electricity. Our exposure to the elements is a blow to the psyche as well.

 

In the Northeast, we expect snowstorms and ice storms and take them in stride. Surrounded by the ocean and Sound, we know wind and rain and high tide-full moon floods. Nor'easters and even hurricanes will occasionally strike. Irene, the tropical storm that hit in late August of 2011, was greeted by the sturdy and the surfers who awaited on the beach.

 

We've weathered them, recovered swiftly, moved on.

 

This time, however, is different. We are witnessing real suffering. The dead are being buried. Entire neighborhoods, the entire City of Long Beach, the entire Rockaway peninsula are still reeling, with homes destroyed and families left with nowhere to go. Soon after Sandy, there was a shortage of meals in the hardest hit places, and one night, even a request for donations of baby formula at a Nassau County shelter. Blankets were being collected by the Town of Hempstead to keep residents warm. Grocery stories had no dairy products. Shelves were empty of foods that need not be refrigerated. Gasoline was in short supply. We relied on social media to tell when the big-box stores got a new shipment of portable generators. "D" batteries became a currency.

 

The National Guard was deployed and is still here, to stop looting. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is here. As of Friday, there were still 1,000 people at five Red Cross shelters. Four national medical teams, the ones that fly into disaster zones, are working out of "M*A*S*H"-like tents in the parking lots of our hospitals, treating emergency cases and spelling the overworked medical professionals who normally staff these facilities. There are more out-of-state utility crews here than there are motel rooms to house them, so they sleep in their trucks. Neighborhoods welcome them like liberating armies. There are benefit concerts and disaster relief funds for the victims.

 

This did happen and is still happening, to us.

 

Responding to natural disasters takes expertise and planning, and it turns out we weren't ready with enough of either.

 

All along the South Shore, the Rockaways and across lower Manhattan, it's impossible to say when, or even whether, homes and businesses will be restored. Downed trees have yet to be cleared, roads are narrowed by rows of debris. Failed water and sewage treatment plants must be repaired.

 

The beloved beaches that define our identity have eroded, and even disappeared. Our barrier islands have been bisected by surging waters.

 

And to heal the spiritual wound and regain our confidence, our moxie, we have to come to terms with, and fix, the weaknesses of our surroundings. The recipe for healing is rebuilding, repairing and planning.

 

Now that we've experienced this level of destruction, it's time for plans that can adequately deal with disasters and coordinate response. Power sources, substations and lines, will have to be hardened and protected.

 

We need to make sensible decisions about beachfront building -- and the beaches themselves -- that take into account the massive expense of vulnerability to a changing climate and rising waters. We have to be ready.

 

We have to do this on Long Island, and in New York City, and across the region.

 

Once we've repaired the damage from these storms, and the damage from our lack of preparation for them, we can exhale. We can begin to regain our confidence.

 

But not before.

Dear Mr. President,

 

Welcome to New York. As you will see on your tour of the metropolitan region, we have suffered excruciating devastation. Entire communities were flattened, burned or flooded in superstorm Sandy's fury. Forty-three New Yorkers lost their lives. Almost a million customers on Long Island lost power to their homes.

 

The metropolitan area's mass transportation network -- the largest in North America -- was crippled for days as seawater overwhelmed our rail and vehicular tunnels. Our gasoline supply lines have been dangerously disrupted.

 

Powerless to help us after Sandy, the Long Island Power Authority should be rendered permanently powerless.

 

It is a power company that owns no electrical generation, operates no transmission or distribution, and can't communicate with its customers. It has been deficient in achieving its stated goal: providing Long Islanders with inexpensive electricity.

 

LIPA, born out of politics, is likely to die from it. The death knell is welcome.

 

Sandy brought all this dysfunction to a head, highlighting and exposing the flaws in this unique creation of New York State. The public authority was supposed to solve the problems created by the failed Shoreham nuclear plant. It's time to return it to the private sector as a regulated utility.

 

Surveys show LIPA customers are often the unhappiest in the nation, while their electric bills are among the highest.

 

LIPA couldn't fulfill its mission of containing costs while satisfying the needs of elected officials, who stopped the closing of antiquated generation plants, blocked the utility from challenging its property-tax assessments and extorted all sorts of benefits for local communities before any project could be sited. Politics compromised its functioning. The only beneficiaries were the lucky few who glommed on to its highly paid patronage jobs or got the many lucrative contracts for consultants, lawyers and projects that created or delivered the juice.

 

For those who were suffering in the dark -- cold and powerless for two weeks -- it's difficult to accept that the pace of restoration was good by industry standards for such a punishing weather event, particularly when you consider the nor'easter that followed Sandy. LIPA -- or rather National Grid, the for-profit company that does nearly all the utility work we associate with LIPA -- performed as well as or better than other power companies in the region facing similar challenges.

 

But it was LIPA that failed to help us deal with the storm's consequences by not providing any meaningful time frame for restoration. It was LIPA that locked angry customers out of its offices, had to take down its online outage map because it was so inaccurate and, in the age of tablets and smartphones, was issuing handwritten work orders and paper maps to direct out-of-state crews to trouble spots.

 

That's incompetence, but it's where incompetence and politics meet that the authority really finds trouble.

 

Under relentless pressure from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other state and local officials that began with the cyclone's winds, National Grid, which ordinarily has 200 linemen on duty, brought in another 6,000, plus thousands more for related cleanup tasks. It was far more than the authority could organize, dispatch or use. There was no comprehensive disaster plan in place, one that truly provided for coordination with local governments, to most efficiently use the assistance. The excessive staffing will cost hundreds of millions of dollars that may not be totally recouped from the federal government.

 

Wasted money, inefficiency, poor communication, poor planning and problems brought on by politics: That's LIPA in a nutshell.

 

LIPA is a creation of the tortured reasoning of Albany, produced from the inability of the Long Island Lighting Co. to get the Shoreham nuclear plant into service and to recoup the money it had invested there. The Shoreham plant was first proposed by LILCO in 1965, with a $70-million price tag attached. By 1989, the cost had swelled to $6 billion and public opinion had turned against the project.

 

Disasters at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986, evacuation fears, cracked emergency generators, Newsday reports of generally shoddy construction and a slow response to Hurricane Gloria had soured the public on Shoreham and LILCO's management of it. And a callous culture at LILCO, exemplified by chief executive William Catacosinos' refusal to return from a European vacation as Long Island went without power, only made matters worse.

 

Over time, a deal spun out that brought LIPA into being. It allowed borrowing at municipal rates, shuttered Shoreham forever, and generously bought out LILCO's shareholders and bondholders, to the tune of billions of dollars. And it left Long Island's power customers saddled with the debt for it all. Almost 25 years later, that $6-billion note hasn't shrunk appreciably.

 

Once the oversight for the delivery of electricity was in the hands of a state authority, the opportunities for patronage, self-promotion and pandering kicked into high gear. The debt has stayed high because LIPA borrowed more rather than take the politically unpopular route of raising rates, and wasted money on a hundred self-serving expenses in the process. Today, power on Long Island is generated, transmitted and distributed by National Grid, which is in the last year of a management contract that wasn't renewed. LIPA owns the wires and substations, but National Grid runs and services them. LIPA has the task of making good decisions about storm-proofing the system, trimming trees and installing the technology to track outages.

 

Undoing LIPA will be complicated, legally and operationally. In 2011, this page argued that the current contract with National Grid should have been extended one more year while a legitimate study on selling and privatizing the system was conducted. Instead, a bid from PSE&G of New Jersey for a 10-year contract starting in 2014 was accepted.

 

After two years of avoiding the shortcomings of LIPA, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has now invoked the state's investigative powers to find out what went wrong. That involves a lot more than looking at what happened in the days before and after Sandy hit, and the result should be more than a few trifling recommendations on how to handle storms and blizzards.

 

It must expose the structural flaws inherent in LIPA, making an irrefutable case for selling it to a for-profit company.

 

Electricity on Long Island must be run by utility professionals, who will make sound decisions based on rational self-interest and responsibility to their shareholders. That doesn't mean it will be perfect: Private utilities have flaws, too. Long Island's own experience with LILCO bears witness to that. Such a company would be subject to regulation by the state Public Service Commission, and the pressures applied to it, for profit rather than politics, would likely lead to better planning, management and communications.

 

The tricky but doable part is ensuring that payment to LIPA bondholders is guaranteed, and untangling the authority from the new contract with PSE&G. Let's put the system out to bid.

 

LIPA was a badly designed hybrid, its structural flaws only compounded by its politically centric management over the years. It's time to pull the plug.

This is not a new question for Long Island: Now that we've seen a storm's power to disrupt the flimsy pretensions of our species to build homes on the shifting sands of our shores, what do we do next? Do we build again, or do we retreat from the shoreline to safer ground and let nature do what nature does?

 

Sandy now forces us to revisit the question. The answers seem likely to turn out much the same as they have in the past. But we have a serious obligation to look squarely at the issue. On Nov. 15, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo created three commissions to study what Sandy did to us and make sweeping recommendations on how to improve New York's emergency preparedness and the ability of our infrastructure to stand up to future storms. The governor should make sure the commissions address the build-or-abandon-to-nature issue.

 

They don't have to start from scratch. The problem of shifting sands arose long before Sandy shifted them again.

 

Two decades ago, a powerful storm in December 1992 did serious damage to homes on Fire Island. In its aftermath, Newsday ran a series of detailed stories about the build-or-abandon conflict. The series found, for example, that a year before the 1992 storm, a state commission headed by then-Lt. Gov. Stan Lundine had recommended a policy of "strategic retreat" from the shore.

 

That was in keeping with what coastal geologists say: The ideal solution would be to clear away the rubble of the latest storm, don't build back nearly as close to the water, and let nature take its course. When storms hit, reporters call coastal experts such as Orrin Pilkey of Duke University, Nicholas Coch of Queens College and Malcolm Bowman of Stony Brook University, and the scholars all point out some version of the futility of rebuilding and of nourishing beaches damaged by the storm.

 

No government, however -- not the state, not the towns, not the Fire Island National Seashore, an arm of the National Park Service and the Department of Interior -- has been able to win legal battles with owners who want to live as close to the water's edge as they can. Courts uniformly rule against any prohibition of rebuilding as an unconstitutional "taking" of property.

 

Despite the advice of scientists and the Lundine commission's report, the 1992 storm didn't dissuade people from rebuilding their homes too close to the new sand brought in to replace the sand that had been washed away.

 

And now, here we are again.

 

Some parts of the Island's 1,200 miles of shoreline have fared better than others. But the damage from Sandy has been widespread. Breezy Point and the Rockaways have been devastated. Robert Moses State Park and Wildwood State Park have suffered sharp drops in beach elevation. The storm has cut new inlets in Fire Island east and west of Moriches Inlet, at Smith Point County Park and Cupsogue County Park, and through the Wilderness Area of Fire Island National Seashore. Sandy also wrecked many private homes along the South Shore.

 

Now the questions are what to fix, what to rebuild, and where.

 

Our two U.S. senators, Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, are pushing for $500 million to $1 billion to fund seven Army Corps of Engineers coastal protection projects from Staten Island to Montauk Point -- including such locations as Long Beach, Gilgo Beach, Fire Island and Asharoken -- that already have congressional authorization.

 

But authorization is only the first step. The approvals process before a project gets done is long and labyrinthine. So the two senators want Long Island to enjoy the same shorter, more expedited process that the Gulf Coast received after Hurricane Katrina.

 

The senators obviously intend to be relentless on that funding and those projects. There may be no appetite right now for the back-to-nature approach that scientists recommend. But it should at least get a respectful hearing by one of Cuomo's commissions. These are some of the big questions that need answering over the next few months, and the commissions seem like a natural starting point to get some answers:

 

What areas absolutely must be protected by building sand back up on beaches -- and what areas should be left to the mercies of tide and wind?

 

Can we afford to continue that sand replacement over and over after monster storms yet to come? There's plenty of history to show that this repair work has had to be done repeatedly at barrier beaches along the Atlantic Coast.

 

Since there's a long line of court decisions that uphold the right of people to rebuild their damaged beachfront homes, how can we legally discourage building back in highly dangerous locations?

 

Can we nudge people to think twice by changing the way the up-to-its-neck-in-debt National Flood Insurance Program reimburses losses? Do we dare to say: Your flood insurance will pay for one loss of a home, but next time you're on your own? It's one thing for flood insurance to help families who have the misfortune of living in a flood plain in the middle of the Island, but quite another to keep paying out to those who keep making the same mistake over and over on the beach. Why should taxpayers foot the bill for this sort of private but seemingly reckless behavior? Any long-term solution has to include a flood-insurance fix.

 

Can we change building codes so future construction has to withstand storms as fierce as Sandy -- or worse?

 

To begin answering these questions, Cuomo should instruct someone on one of his commissions to look back at the Lundine report of two decades ago and at the sea-level rise task force from 2010, which made recommendations on how the state could cope with those rising levels. That's a starting point.

 

If Sandy finally makes us look at these crucial coastal questions and come up with real long-term answers, she will have done us at least one favor.

 

The long, disheartening lines of cars at gas stations and the angry confrontations between those patiently waiting and those rudely cutting the line are some of the most searing memories of superstorm Sandy's visit. Now that we can drive by gas stations without reflexively hitting the brakes to get on line, it's time to turn those gas-shortage memories into smart plans and actions to avoid a repeat.

 

First, let's remember we're an island, with limited means of delivery of gas, and develop a sense of urgency about planning ahead. Let's also realize the gas shortages were not only an inconvenience. They pitted all of us against one another for a limited supply -- not just everyday citizens, but first-responders, whose ability to drive is crucial in a disaster. It made us feel trapped. It was the tipping point of our frustration and helplessness. It limited our emergency response and slowed our recovery efforts.

 

The origins of the crisis lay in perfectly rational market behavior: Most people knew a storm was coming, and they stocked up on what they thought they'd need. So they filled up their cars' gas tanks, even if they were half full, and bought gas-guzzling generators. Those decisions to buy a little extra gas started the shortage, before Sandy made it worse at every step in the distribution chain. The U.S. Coast Guard shut down the harbors, the ports and terminals were damaged, and some terminals and pipelines and many service stations were left powerless.

 

What happens next time?

 

Five weeks ago, it was superstorm Sandy that laid waste to Long Island, killing 13 people here, taking out homes with water, wind and fire, plunging most of us into indefinite darkness, and cutting our gasoline supply.

 

Sandy is now regarded as the worst natural disaster in Long Island history. But other superstorms have reaped death and destruction in these parts, too.

 

In 1966, two years before the National Flood Insurance Program was introduced, a presidential task force issued a warning that resonates today:

 

"A flood insurance program is a tool that should be used expertly or not at all. Correctly applied it could promote wise use of flood plains. Incorrectly applied, it could exacerbate the whole problem of flood losses. For the federal government to subsidize low premium disaster insurance or provide insurance in which premiums are not proportionate to risk would be to invite economic waste of great magnitude."

 

These are wise words, and they have not been heeded. In the wake of superstorm Sandy, which devastated swaths of coastal Long Island, New York City and New Jersey, it would be irresponsible to ignore that warning any longer.

 

Now that Sandy has receded, astonishing storm surge numbers are being reported. The highest was 17 feet, in Long Beach, but practically all of the Nassau County and Western Suffolk shore, north and south, saw surges of 10 feet or more. This is even more daunting when we're told the climate is changing, sea levels are rising and violent storms will be more frequent. At its start in 1968, the flood insurance program was an improvement. The private market had never offered property owners much in the way of protection because companies didn't want to bear such unpredictable risk. When insurance companies did try to sell flood policies, customers thought them far too expensive.

 

So when floods came the federal government provided money to rebuild. The national insurance program had two purposes: get those property owners at risk of flooding to pay premiums to create a pool to pay losses, and attach conditions to those loss payments that would get people and communities to build smarter. It is supposed to be entirely self-supporting, with rates set high enough to pay out claims.

 

Municipalities that participate -- there are about 22,000 nationwide and 100 on Long Island -- are not supposed to permit new construction where there is more than a 1 percent risk of flooding in any given year. Homeowners in such areas must have the flood insurance if there is a federally backed mortgage on the property, which is common.

 

The average policy in the federal program costs $600 per year, but they can run five times that in the highest risk areas. In Asharoken, policies average over $1,500, while in Lake Grove they average less than $300. There are 5.5 million policies in the nation, just over 80,000 of them in Nassau and Suffolk counties. Residential damage reimbursements are capped at $250,000 per incident, commercial damages at $500,000.

 

For over 35 years flood insurance worked. The program sometimes had to borrow from the government, and those loans were sometimes forgiven, but the sums were not astronomical.

 

But in 2005, the finances of flood insurance blew up when claims from Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma totaled nearly $18 billion, almost none of which has been repaid. Now, interest payments on that debt cost on average $400 million per year, which comes out of the $3.5 billion total paid annually in premiums. That staggering debt service makes it nearly impossible to build up a fund for the next storm.

 

And now we have Sandy. More than 115,000 flood insurance claims have been filed so far. Estimates put the total payout for claims at $7 billion, $4 billion more than the flood insurance program is authorized to borrow.

 

But even before Sandy, this would be a very troubled program.

 

At every turn, politics have stymied its goals. Structures have been built and insured where they should not have been allowed. Premiums have been kept artificially low: When policy holders see their premiums skyrocket thanks to new flood maps, they balk -- and elected officials step in, and low prices are maintained. This happened as recently as 2010 in several places on Long Island. Properties in some areas flood repeatedly. One property in Mississippi valued at $183,000 flooded 15 times in 10 years, and the owner received almost $1.5 million in reimbursements. Another Texas property has garnered more than $2 million in payouts. It is valued at $116,000. Thousands of properties have received multiple payouts and used them to repair the same waterlogged structures.

 

And the waters are rising.

 

Some experts, in the face of rising waters and rising flood insurance program debt, want the program to end. Our nation's population is concentrated near its oceans and rivers, however, so pulling the plug on insurance for more than 5 million property owners isn't politically possible.

 

But premiums, rising significantly through a multiyear schedule of increases imposed last summer, need to go up even more. New construction in areas most prone to flooding must be designed to be flood-proof, or coverage should be denied, on Long Island and across the nation. An existing program designed to identify properties too risky to insure again must be pursued more aggressively, and better risk maps are needed. It's possible that high premiums, hardened construction and a limit on repeated claims can restore the National Flood Insurance Program to stability.

 

And the rising waters need to be monitored. Because there may come a day when beachside building and riverfront views can't be insured, when the waters creep too high or the storms become too frequent. If that day comes, people will still have a right to build where they choose, but they won't have a right to expect other taxpayers to cover their losses.

From Long Beach to the Rockaways to the skyscraper canyons of lower Manhattan, New Yorkers are wrestling with a basic question as they contemplate building back after superstorm Sandy: Does it make sense to rebuild in areas highly vulnerable to extreme weather and rising sea levels?

 

The question became all the more urgent late last week as President Barack Obama said he would ask Congress for $60 billion in federal supplemental funds to help the region rebuild and mitigate risks presented by changing climate patterns. What restrictions do we need should Congress give us the green light for extensive reconstruction?

 

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg offered a commonsense answer last week.

 

Yes, the mayor said, it makes sense to rebuild -- but with ample measures of forethought and caution. New Yorkers would never abandon the waterfront, Bloomberg noted: That's not who we are. In 1835, much of lower Manhattan burned to the ground, partly because firefighters lacked access to an adequate water supply. So the city and state dammed the Croton River and built an aqueduct system to supply water -- the bones of a system the city still uses.

 

We've seen that spirit replicated time and again -- on the shores of Long Island and after the terror attacks in Manhattan.

 

When disaster strikes we rebuild and move on.

 

But the city can't simply rebuild and hope for the best, either. It must find ways to build back smarter, stronger and more sustainably.

 

What does this mean?

 

It means redrawing the flood zone maps. After Tropical Storm Irene struck in 2011, the city expanded Zone A, where chances of a mandatory, pre-storm evacuation are high. But Sandy surged well beyond low-lying Zone A and into places where major flooding wasn't expected.

 

It means figuring out why vital infrastructure networks failed during Sandy and determining what is needed to make them stronger. In an age of modern fiber optics, for example, why does so much of the city's communications system use copper wiring? Sandy took out 95 percent of lower Manhattan's copper-wire network, creating a huge problem for stores and offices that could last for many more months.

 

It means resisting the temptation to fight the last battle while missing the one straight ahead. Sandy shocked everyone. The storm came in with a full moon at high tide and was buffeted by a second weather front that slammed it directly into the most populous region of the United States. The surge in lower Manhattan was 14 feet -- 3 feet higher than the previous record, set in 1960. But who knows what the next superstorm will look like?

 

It means worrying about other kinds of extreme weather as well. Record rainfalls in the city's Catskill watershed during the last three summers introduced large amounts of dissolved organic matter into the creeks and took the water system out of commission for months at a time. Meanwhile, record heat last year led to the highest energy use ever recorded in New York City.

 

"You don't have to be a believer in climate change to understand that the dangers from extreme weather are already here," Bloomberg said.

 

It's now clear that we must mitigate the risks whenever possible. But at the same time, we need to acknowledge that life must be lived -- and that comes with certain risks we can't eliminate.

Two months ago on Sunday, Sandy was dying down and the extent of the damage was becoming clear. Millions of lives were disrupted, some devastated. On the South Shore and in New York City, people died, homes were uninhabitable, workplaces disappeared, schools were battered.

 

Much normalcy is restored. For most the impact -- no power, no school, no gas -- is over. But the public-policy questions Sandy raised remain unanswered.

 

We risk losing the moment and the momentum. Eventually the fears, the frustrations and the promises to do more, to do better, will fade.

 

Sandy threw everything about our island existence into question. We are uncertain about how to go forward, and how much we can trust our institutions to prepare for extreme weather and respond to its aftermath. To regain confidence, we must chart a path that will make our hurricane-vulnerable region safer and more secure.

 

The challenges are clear, but time is trotting on and the big issues have not been tackled. A few commissions have been formed but nothing we have seen or heard so far convinces us their conclusions will be thorough, or lead to action. If a comprehensive and convincing plan isn't available soon, we'll construct shoddy buildings in the wrong places, and fail to fix our institutions, by default.

 

Do we rebuild as if Sandy was an exception, or the introduction to an era when such storms are common and higher oceans make them more destructive? The water in New York Harbor, up a foot in the last century, rises still. The climate is changing. We must plan accordingly.

 

What can we allow to be built, where, and according to what standards? Construction near the water that doesn't heed the dangers can't be encouraged any longer.

 

How do we insure risky properties, and who bears the risk? It has to fall on the property owners, which was the intent when the National Flood Insurance Program was established. Now it's about $20 billion in debt and politicians have kept the rates low to keep flood-threatened voters happy. This can't continue.

 

How do we turn the Long Island Power Authority into an agency we can rely on? The weeks without power after Sandy were bad, but the lack of information was a travesty. LIPA's structure, too political and not accountable enough, must go. The most likely solution is a form of privatization that allows its $7 billion in debt to stay in tax-free bonds. But just as crucial is modernizing LIPA's technology, so that it can tell when customers have power, and improving its organization, so it can better deploy out-of-town crews in emergencies.

 

How do we improve the reliability of our gasoline supply? More local storage, an additional terminal to receive fuel on-Island, and incentives to gas stations to purchase generators would help a lot. And the same attitude must be taken toward other staples the Island needs to survive catastrophes: food, equipment, water, medicine. When a storm is coming, the materials needed to survive must be on hand.

 

How can an island of fiefdoms unite during disasters, working with state and federal resources to protect and rebuild? There was no shortage of Sandy response, but there was a lack of coordination. The answer is planning, practice and cooperation. Police departments, municipal governments and emergency service providers need to draw up and rehearse scenarios that will enable a more organized response next time.

 

How do we harden our sewage plants against catastrophe, so they can keep functioning or can be brought back online quickly after storms, and not dump millions of gallons of waste into our waters, as several of our plants did? This is a question of will, management and money. East Rockaway's Bay Park, the worst example, is a leaking, foul-smelling plant in the best of times. Suffolk, largely unsewered, also has problems with waste runoff during harsh weather. Sewage treatment needs to be brought up to date and hardened against future storms that could again send waste into our water.

 

How do we improve our mass transit to stand up to inclement weather? The Long Island Rail Road recovered fairly well from Sandy, but the days it was down reinforced our vulnerability as an island. Putting it on a separate, more secure power grid should be considered, as should ways to keep the tunnels that connect us to the larger world dry.

 

Will our elected officials get us the help we need? Washington must pitch in to repair this region, which for so long has paid the federal taxes used to help other places in times of trouble. The $60 billion requested is facing opposition in Congress. Our representatives must overcome that opposition.

 

These are answerable questions and surmountable challenges. We are a tough region, one that can adapt and rebuild, but the lack of progress thus far is disturbing. We must improve before we forget.

 

If we don't, the next storm may bring waves of damage that never recede.