Dyson College of Arts and Sciences

The papers in this report from faculty in each of Pace's schools constitute one result. The prime theme of the meeting was lessons learned from Superstorm Sandy, which in October 2012 exacted a deadly, costly and disruptive toll on several of the city's boroughs and across the New York Metropolitan Region despite decades of warnings from scientists about rising vulnerability to storm surge. But it was stressed throughout the morning that the same characteristics that can bolster a community's ability to absorb a hurricane blow apply in facing almost any threat. A cornerstone is to learn from failures and, often more challenging given institutional and infrastructural inertia, to propel meaningful change. Notably, the kickoff conversation between Pace President Stephen J. Friedman and Patrick J. Foye, the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, did not start with obvious questions about hurricane defenses and the like. Reflecting the reality that cities have to grapple with an array of risks, Friedman's first question was about health surveillance at airports. The Ebola outbreak was then raging in West Africa and concerns, both legitimate and unfounded, had swept New York when a young doctor tested positive for Ebola after returning from treating patients in Guinea. Foye explained the layers of federal and regional responsibility for disease surveillance—no small challenge given that more than 100 million passengers pass through the area's airports each year. (Later in the summit, Ebola was cited as a prime example of why authorities need to be responsive and communicative even when a threat is not real—in this case to counter the much-hyped idea that the epidemic could spread here.) Foye then described three traits in institutions and individuals that can amplify losses when inevitable, but rare, calamities strike. First is a consistent "failure of the imagination." He said too many policymakers, business owners and homeowners extrapolated from past storms presuming that an incremental increase in coastal protections would suffice. They were wrong. Second, he cited a familiar dictum in military training. "Beginning a new war, the generals are always fighting the last war," Foy told Friedman. "We have got to be careful about that in the analysis of Sandy. I don't know what the next man-made or natural trauma to New York, New Jersey, or the United States is going to be. But it will be different than Sandy." That point would reverberate through the rest of the meeting. Finally, Foye said more must be done to examine development and investment policies that can increase vulnerability, noting that parts of lower Manhattan had been steadily widened in the past, as recently as the 1960s, in ways that hydrology guaranteed would spell trouble. "Each of those land reclamations and expansions of the island east and west had an impact that was reflected in Sandy," he said. "The river wanted to find its way home." 8

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