Task Force: NYC Bldgs. 'Must Become Stronger'

NEW YORK CITY-Having outlined a $19.5-billion plan to protect the city at large from a future Superstorm Sandy earlier this week, the Bloomberg administration on Thursday issued recommendations to fortify the city's individual buildings. The 33 recommendations of the Building Resiliency Task Force, which was overseen by the Urban Green Council, cover commercial and multifamily properties, as well as single-family homes and hospitals, and address both existing buildings and new construction.

“Our buildings must become stronger,” according to the BRTF's report. “New York City's current building code ensures that new buildings will be hardy enough to stand up to the weather of the past. But the code needs to prepare for the weather of the future, which will be more extreme due to climate change.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg was joined by City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and other city officials at the CityLights Building in Long Island City, which flooded as a result of Sandy and whose ownership has since made upgrades to protect the apartment building and ensure back-up power.

Among other measures, the report recommends relocating and protecting building systems, allowing underground sidewalk attachments for temporary flood barriers, bolstering fire safety communications, preventing wind damage to existing structures, expanding cool roof requirements to include pitched roofs, using cogeneration and solar power during utility blackouts, ensuring supply of drinking water in residential buildings, maintaining habitable temperatures during outages and developing better emergency preparedness plans.

Bloomberg and Quinn convened the task force last fall after Sandy, to study what measures existing buildings could adopt to protect against future storm damage, and also to propose changes to regulations that would raise resiliency standards in future construction. The BRTF assembled more than 200 volunteer experts in architecture, engineering, construction, building codes and real estate to produce the report and its 33 recommendations.