ALTERNATE RENDERINGS
OF CLIMATE CHANGE
OF CLIMATE CHANGE
Portraits
of Sandy
VISUALIZATION BY
MICHAEL L KELLY
MICHAEL L KELLY
Everything changed. Surging waves overtook seawalls and flooded LaGuardia Airport. Subways turned to rivers. Hospitals were evacuated. Lives were lost. Across the Hudson, in New Jersey, beaches and homes were destroyed and businesses upended. Days earlier, Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the Bahamas all suffered damage and loss from yet another storm that upended our reality.
On the evening of October 29, 2012, Superstorm Sandy hit the five boroughs of New York City with a storm surge that led to flooding of an unprecedented degree. Extreme weather events are often spoken of in reference to x-year events, so that the 100-year floodplain represents the extent of land that stands a 1% or 1-in-100 chance of flooding in a given year. According to the PlaNYC report, A Stronger, More Resilient New York, which informs much of this text, the flooding from Sandy’s wave impact exceeded that floodplain by an additional 53%. It was a 260-year storm.
But weather and floodplain maps, viewed from hundreds of miles up and already abstract for many, cannot express the effect on human lives, no matter how harsh their colors or expansive their scale. Far more telling are the photos, documentation of destruction — the sky reflected where streets should be, the world turned upside down.
The aftermath witnessed in Sandy’s floodprint is not just in the past, but increasingly part of our present and future, as rising sea levels from climate change amplify surges from storms fueled by warmer oceans. To represent the effect on communities, can we find ways to expand beyond standard maps to tell more human stories with data? Can we make more compelling data portraits of the world we live in?
This visualization is an exploration of those questions, with the five boroughs — and their residents — as the subject.
Using silhouettes and not numbers, each card is a portrait of the community just after Sandy and (subsequently) today. Both the Borough Cards and Neighborhood Cards divide land into two fields, representing percentages above and below water at the height of Sandy’s flooding (approx. 10:30pm). They reconceive these areas as flooded elevations, with each neighborhood’s residents reflected in the risen water.
Borough boundaries have stayed roughly the same since the consolidation of the City in 1898, but those of neighborhoods are often debated. They are represented here using the 2020 Neighborhood Tabulation Areas (NTAs) — which suggest a more relatable area for residents than, for example, census tracts — and use the decennial US Census data from that year for population. Here the NTAs have been reordered from government designations to better reflect proximity to their neighbors.
Scroll each line of NTAs below to explore and compare their relative floodprint. Click on a card or an NTA on the map to see more details.
1. The borough of The Bronx contains one Neighborhood Tabulation Area (NTA) with a Queens prefix, Riker’s Island (QN0151), home to New York City’s most well-known correctional facility. As the island was not considered low-lying, incarcerated individuals were not evacuated. When the Island emerged largely unscathed, they, along with employees of the facility, made a significant contribution to recovery efforts.
2. Technically part of Manhattan, the neighborhood of Marble Hill is included here, as it falls into a Bronx NTA. (The neighborhood was separated from Manhattan Island by canal construction in the late nineteenth century.)
3. US Census, 2020.
As becomes evident, boroughs and neighborhoods were not flooded equally by Sandy, but these cards are only part of the story of flooding related to climate change.
While Sandy’s storm surge flooded 88% of coastal Brighton Beach (BK1303), farther inland neighborhoods like Prospect Heights (BK0801, an entirely dry card) have experienced overwhelming flooding more recently from less intense, unnamed storms. Rainwater cascaded down subway steps and walls, and residents forded streets in knee-deep water. Those in basement apartments — often the homes of lower-income residents — were also often hit hardest.
In a truly collective portrait of climate change that contained all effects, both the Borough and Neighborhood Cards seen here would have substantially more land under water.
1. Also known as Kings County, the borough of Brooklyn contains parts of Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in its southeast (BK5692). A number of these islands appear under water post-Sandy on a map produced by FEMA, but this is not represented in NYC Open Data. The card for that NTA should then presumably be more full of water. While the card shows no human population, the refuge’s name suggests how nonhuman animal populations are also severely affected by climate change–related events like Sandy.
2. US Census, 2020.
The stark differences in flood levels — seen most noticeably in those so flooded that they displace the label text — also belie wider-ranging impacts on infrastructure and livelihoods. Drier land did not necessarily protect residents from blackouts — and lost business — caused by power outages in Southern Manhattan and elsewhere. We are connected by more than shorelines and subway fares.
1. Also known as New York County, the borough of Manhattan technically includes Marble Hill, which is not represented here, as that neighborhood falls into a Bronx NTA. (The neighborhood was separated from Manhattan Island by canal construction in the late nineteenth century.)
2. Some of the apparent small islands floating off Manhattan’s east and southeast are piers attached to Brooklyn and Queens but are part of Manhattan NTAs, a further suggestion of the interconnected nature of a port city.
3. US Census, 2020.
New York’s 520 miles of coastline are home to residents of all incomes, with luxury apartments and public housing situated along them. Over 400 New York City Housing Authority buildings (intended to provide affordable housing for low- and moderate-income New Yorkers) lost power, heat, or hot water during Sandy, affecting approximately 35,000 housing units, according to the PlaNYC report. Subsequent planning aside, these residents found themselves with fewer resources for resilience.
1. Southern Queens contains part of Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in its south (QN8491). A number of these islands appear under water post-Sandy on a map produced by FEMA, but this is not represented in NYC Open Data. This NTA’s card shows no human population, but the refuge’s name suggests how nonhuman animal populations are also severely affected by climate change–related events like Sandy.
2. US Census, 2020.
When the waters receded, new landscapes emerged. Beaches on Queens’ Rockaway Peninsula, one of the hardest hit areas in the city, lost 1.5 million cubic yards of sand — half the total lost in the City and the equivalent of over 100,000 dump trucks — and over a mile of boardwalk was destroyed, per PlaNYC. Some residents in the Rockaways were without telecommunications services for days and without power for weeks. Some transit service to the peninsula was not restored until half a year later, and the system and community are still impacted today.
1. Also known as Richmond County, Staten Island had the highest percentage of land under water of the five boroughs.
2. US Census, 2020.
Of the 43 deaths in New York City connected to Sandy, more than half of them occurred in Staten Island, the front line that Sandy smashed against after hitting New Jersey. While Staten Island is the only one with the title, it is worth noting that four of the boroughs are islands, or parts of a larger one, and are linked through water. The overlapping cards seen here suggest neighboring NTAs, some of which share a coastline, but one could just as readily place Fort Wadsworth in Staten Island next to Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, which sits a mile away via the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Such is the connectivity of a port city.
We stand on the same ground and look out to and down at the same oceans. The US’s Intracoastal Waterway runs from Boston, past New York, down to Florida and around to its Gulf Coast, which Hurricane Ian flooded with a storm surge in 2022, then on to Texas, where Harvey dropped 60 inches of rain in 2017. At a similar latitude, halfway around the globe, the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya received record rains in 2022. Situated 150 miles inland on the Brahmaputra, still it floods from increased storm intensity.
This connectivity, like all this loss, is only suggestible — ultimately unrepresentable in easy-to-digest form. With inaction and lack of preparedness in the face of overwhelming evidence, how can we conceive and therefore mitigate the next superstorm’s impact? Sandy was almost 13 years ago, but some current models show the 9 ft. rise in sea level seen at the Battery in lower Manhattan — and the entire Sandy floodprint — as the new norm by 2200. Still, that 100-year floodplain is all regulation accounts for. If we don’t keep reflecting, if we don’t keep looking at the effects of climate change in new ways, how can others possibly relate? How can we ever adapt? •