By: Frederic Klein, American Red Cross

People who live in the Rockaways — a peninsula in southeastern Queens which separates Jamaica Bay from the Atlantic Ocean — know what it’s like to live face-to-face with the ocean. While some areas of the peninsula are renowned for their beaches and oceanfront summer homes, many of its residents are intimately familiar with the challenges that often accompany year-round life in a coastal community.

Denean Ferguson, a longtime Rockaways resident, is a community leader, involved with numerous organizations that serve the people in her neighborhood of Far Rockaway and surrounding areas such as Baywater, Wave Crest, Edgemere, and Arverne.  She understands what it’s like to constantly keep an eye on tidal charts to see if high tides will coincide with heavy rainfall events, causing flooding. She also knows that many members of the community’s working-class population often lack the time and energy to take preparedness steps in advance of storms and other threats.

“There’s an internal resiliency built into you,” Denean explained. “When people live in impoverished communities, they’ve got cockroaches running around, mice running around, they’re OK. They learn to live with it. Water is rising — ‘Yo, this is crazy, but…’”

She let the words trail off, thinking about how many of her neighbors are often surprised by and unprepared for rising sea levels.

Like many longtime residents, Denean vividly recalls the day more than a decade ago when water levels in the Rockaways rose to unprecedented levels during Superstorm Sandy —  one of the most devastating and destructive storms in New York City’s history.

“When Sandy happened, my mom — who’s 82 — she’s in a different house a few blocks away, and actually closer to the ocean than I am,” Denean said. “I’m like, ‘Mom, I’m gonna pick you up at 5, we’re out of here before the evening high tide.’”

When her mother resisted — “Oh no, a little water in the basement, Denean, it’s not a big deal. It’s happened before” — Denean was persistent. “‘Ma, I could’ve used a canoe this morning! We are out of here,” she said. “That was the first time I’ve ever seen it, with Sandy.”

DISASTERS ARE DIFFERENT

The 2012 storm impacted millions of people along the Eastern Seaboard, ultimately causing $65 billion in property damage. Since then, as the climate crisis has caused storms to increase in frequency and intensity, the number of billion-dollar disasters per year has more than doubled.

The United States experienced a record 28 such disasters in 2023, and many scientists agree that this could become the new norm.

Gary Chin is now the Disaster Program Manager covering Queens, but he first started working with the Red Cross and disaster relief as a volunteer in 2004. As a Queens resident and a long-time Red Cross worker in various disaster relief capacities serving the five boroughs of New York City, he has noticed a change in the types of disasters the Red Cross is called upon for relief.

“That seems to be a big difference from even a few years back; we’re hearing more and more of those types of events [from heavy rain],” Gary said. “When I first started, a lot of the Southeast Queens area was heavily impacted by disasters like home fires and not necessarily flood events or flooding in itself.”

PREPARING THE TOWN(S)

Along with the increase in the frequency and scope of weather disasters has come an increased need for residents to prepare to stay safe, and the Red Cross of Greater New York has made it a mission to help them do that.

Jason Lyons is the organization’s Regional Preparedness Manager, and he leads a team that helps people prepare for disasters such as floods and home fires before they occur. One of the flagship programs this team works on is Prepare the Town, a hyperlocal and comprehensive community event that aims to boost resilience in communities that are most vulnerable to disasters, such as those in the Rockaways.

“I think a lot of times, we want to look at what happens on the macro level but not on the micro level,” said Jason. “The idea of Prepare the Town came from understanding what preparedness is for the person in the home, the community, and then building on that.”

The need for that type of preparedness was evident during Sandy, when many Rockaways residents were caught off-guard. 

Eugenia Gibson, who has lived in the Rockaways for 50 years and is the current Resident Association President at Beach 41^st Street – Beach Channel Drive Houses, said that many people didn’t think the storm would be as destructive as it was.

“It was an experience I’d never had before,” said Eugenia during a preparedness training organized in a community room at her apartment complex. “It looked like one of the old Western movies where you see sand, dust, everything. I couldn’t believe it. “

“The people that it affected, they had to have boats, little canoe boats, to get people out of their houses,” she continued. “Their cars were floating down the street. Water had reached up to the second-floor apartments in our buildings here.”

Today, even less-intense weather events can cause hardships for residents. Phylicia Emanuel, who is raising two kids in the Rockaways, says that every time high tide comes it floods their backyard and neighborhood.

“It looks like a river, the garbage cans are floating all over,” said Phylicia, while Red Cross volunteers installed new smoke alarms in her home. “The garbage trucks can’t come down, so we have garbage for extra days because there’s no way for the truck to come. There’s no way to walk.”

While the need for preparedness in the Rockaways is evident, the geography and the cornucopia of cultural backgrounds among residents made it challenging for the Red Cross to organize the typical single-day format that Prepare the Town events have followed in places like Spring Valley (Rockland County), Brentwood (Suffolk County), and Mount Vernon (Westchester County).

Instead, members of the Greater New York preparedness team organized a series of events across the community in February. They joined elementary school students in their own school auditoriums, brought preparedness trainings to community rooms of large apartment complexes, met with older adults in the cafeterias of their senior centers, and connected with teenagers at after-school programs. In addition to offering tips about how to prepare for and stay safe during weather events, team members educated residents about fire safety and installed free smoke alarms in their homes.

In total, the team held 13 Prepare the Town events in the Rockaways — including three Prepare with Pedro presentations, featuring a costumed penguin and fun activities designed to teach young children how to stay safe during disasters. There were also several impromptu trainings that happened after the official events.

Hannah Wetter, who joined the Red Cross in December 2023 through the AmeriCorps program, was quickly tasked with helping the preparedness team organize Prepare the Town in the Rockaways.

“It was good because we were able to meet more people where they were,” Hannah said after the event series had concluded. “At one of the senior centers, there were a couple of friends sitting at a table and they probably would not have been mobile enough to travel to a different place. But they stuck through the whole presentation and had some questions at the end, and it felt like they learned a lot from that.”

The fundamental goal of Prepare the Town is to build resiliency and readiness within a community, as well as within the Red Cross and its partners who help deliver relief after disasters strike. A key part of that strategy is developing and deepening relationships with government agencies and community partners.

Maria Anguiano leads the effort in Greater New York to build relationships with diverse community partners, including the Far Rockaway Arverne Nonprofit Coalition (FRANC) — of which Denean Ferguson is a member through her work with the Church of God Christian Academy.

“There were many relationships that were at one point very active and then suddenly — COVID hit,” said Maria. “And because of this program, we were able to reengage [FRANC] and be more present.”

As part of the monthlong series of Prepare the Town events, the preparedness team also collaborated with a wide range of organizations including the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), Jewish Association Serving the Aging (JASA), the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) and FDNY Foundation, Youth and Justice Initiatives, New Horizon Counseling Center, local elected officials, tenant associations, and more, Maria said.

“Those relationships don’t happen overnight, and being out there for a whole month, people started to call me by my first name. They’d be like ‘You’re here again, great to have you’ — and that’s always welcoming to see the different approach and how people really appreciate being out and about for a whole month.”

READY FOR NEW CLIMATE NORMS

The story of the Rockaways is one that can be seen throughout the United States and abroad as communities deal with climate-related disasters such as rapidly intensifying storms, extreme heat, record floods, and widespread wildfires. These disasters often take a heavier toll on frontline communities, such as those in the Rockaways, which are already dealing with chronic social issues.

The American Red Cross projects that it will need to spend at least $1 billion over the next several years to adapt its disaster response and recovery services to better meet the needs of frontline families and communities. Part of this strategy will include the strengthening of local partner networks, such as those organizations that partnered with the Red Cross for Prepare the Town in the Rockaways.

Team leader Jason Lyons says the event series is already yielding positive results with partner organizations.

“This week we were dropping off go-bags to partners that have continued doing presentations after the end of [the event series],” said Jason, two months after Prepare the Town concluded.  “So, it shows that relationships have not just grown with strategic partners, but also at the grassroots level on the ground. People are saying now, ‘Hey, we can depend on Red Cross, we can call on Red Cross.’ That’s wonderful.”