By State › New York

New York: Overview

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Everything in the main manual and the skill guides applies in New York exactly as written. What’s different here is the specific hazard profile and the state, local, and legal context around it. This page is the starting point; the other three pages under New York go deeper on laws, local resources, and the data behind the risks named here.

Coastal storm surge: Hurricane Sandy

Hurricane Sandy, which made landfall near Atlantic City in October 2012 but drove its worst surge into New York Harbor and lower Manhattan, killed 48 people statewide and caused an estimated $19 billion in damage to New York City alone. Subway tunnels flooded, the power grid in lower Manhattan went dark for days, and 90% of the direct deaths were drowning, most within three days of landfall. See the Risks page for the full breakdown.

Inland flash flooding: the remnants of Hurricane Ida

Not every major flood risk in New York comes from the coast. In September 2021, the post-tropical remnants of Hurricane Ida dropped a record 3.15 inches of rain in a single hour on New York City, overwhelming a sewer system built to handle roughly half that rate, and killed 13 people in the city, 11 of them in basement apartments, many of them unregulated units outside the 100-year floodplain entirely. This is a genuinely different hazard mechanism from Sandy’s storm surge: sudden, inland, and concentrated in exactly the kind of housing this manual’s Tier 1 shelter guidance assumes is safe.

Lake-effect snow: the Buffalo blizzard

Western New York carries a hazard the rest of the state doesn’t: lake-effect blizzards driven by Lake Erie. Winter Storm Elliott, over Christmas weekend 2022, dropped more than 56 inches of snow on parts of the Buffalo area in five days, with wind gusts to 79 mph and snowdrifts up to 15 feet, killing 47 people statewide, most of them in Erie County, the deadliest storm in the region’s recorded history, surpassing the infamous Blizzard of 1977.

What this means for how you use the rest of this manual

The manual’s Tier structure and the skill guides apply without modification. What’s different in New York: coastal and low-lying households need Sandy-style storm surge evacuation planning, urban and inland households, especially anyone in a basement-level unit, need to take flash flood warnings seriously regardless of official floodplain maps, and households in the western part of the state need a genuine plan for being snowed in for days at a time, not just an afternoon.

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