More than two months after Hurricane Sandy, Nicole Chati and her neighbors stood in front of a sad collection of aid tents in a beachfront park tangled with downed trees on Staten Island, trying to make rebuilding plans. A 12-foot-high storm surge had crushed some houses and flooded others up to their eaves. Asked how the 40-year-old homemaker and her neighbors were faring, Chati said at the time, “We’ve gotten no protection, so we flooded again at Christmas. We have to juggle insurance, FEMA, charities, contractors. It’s really stressful.”
The predictable chaos and lack of information are the outcome of any disaster, but one year after Sandy (which killed 150 people and damaged or destroyed some 650,000 houses), officials, charities, and disaster experts are concluding that much can be done to smooth the recovery process—and that there’s more for architects to do other than drive-by damage assessments and holding empty “ideas” competitions. Now architects are working in neighborhoods to link people like Chati to the resources they need.
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