OEM Advises Manhattan Beach Residents How To Prepare For Another Sandy

As part of an ongoing effort to strengthen ties with local communities, officials from the Office of Emergency Management met with the Manhattan Beach Community Group Wednesday night to advise residents about how to prepare for another Sandy-sized storm.

Manhattan Beach Community Group (MBCG) President Judy Baron invited the officials to speak with her organization after she attended a disaster preparedness meeting at MCU Park this summer.

“It occurred to me that there are things that we don’t know about and that we haven’t done,” she said. “Nobody has done anything to help us — be it federal, state, or city. And we are in the same predicament tonight as we were the day before Sandy.”

James Esposito, deputy commissioner for planning and preparedness, said federal money to protect against future flooding was slowly making its way out to communities like Manhattan Beach. His own home in Howard Beach was flooded during Sandy, and he said he understood the frustration with the federal government’s sluggish response.

“I’m not going to sell you a basket of goods that isn’t there,” he said. “This community remains as it did probably before Sandy hit. My community, I know, is as it was before Sandy. And if Sandy were to occur this year, my house would be flooded all over again.”

He said his agency was working hard to grab the “low hanging fruit” by making sure the city was prepared to respond to another hurricane.

OEM officials urged the audience to look up the evacuation zones and to develop a network of friends and family who could take them in during an emergency. They also explained that nearest evacuation center, because it was located out of the flood zone, was Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School at 20th Avenue and 58th Street. Staff there would assess whether evacuees needed any medical assistance before directing them to a shelter.

The OEM members also recommended that residents create a “go bag,” which would include first aid, food, water, money, and other supplies, that they could take with them if they had to leave in a hurry. The audience was also asked to stock an emergency kit in case they were trapped at home during a snow storm or power outage.

Esposito said his agency had made it a priority to engage with local communities in order to spread awareness about how to prepare for disasters and to listen to the needs of residents.

“Our commissioner wants us getting ideas from the community and he wants us interacting and sharing information as much as we can,” Esposito said.

Baron said she was satisfied with the information presented at the meeting.

“There was an awareness that people were given tonight for things that they didn’t know how to do,” she said. And the purpose of the meeting was to tell people that it’s not just another Sandy, it could be an electrical outage that lasts a week and a half, it could be almost any disaster.”