Abstract
As extreme weather events seemingly increase in frequency and magnitude, we are accumulating evidence about how the intersection of circumstances creates vulnerability. The specter of elderly residents in Brooklyn, New York, trapped in their apartments for days due to flooding from the storm surge brought by Hurricane Sandy, provides us a troubling lesson. As vulnerability emerges from the confluence of multiple factors, changing social, natural, and other factors combine to create unimagined problems. Hong Kong is a case in point. The city has seen much of its new development occurring on reclaimed coastal land. At the same time, there has been a significant demographic shift as the city’s elderly population has been its fastest growing demographic. The social transition also means more elderly persons living alone. All of these produce conditions that render the population increasingly vulnerable to coastal flooding. Yet, there is not enough systematic effort, in major cities, at identifying these vulnerabilities. Hong Kong is emblematic of coastal cities the world over, in that it has yet to come to a full realization of such emerging risks. Future research must be able to analyze intersectionalities.
Highlights
On 29 October 2012, Hurricane Sandy swept through the east coast of the United States.By the time it arrived at metropolitan areas like New York City, its winds had subsided to less-than-hurricane levels, and yet, post-event assessments would recognize it as one of the most devastating storms in the nation’s history
Among the neighborhoods most beleaguered by Hurricane Sandy was the Red Hook district of Brooklyn, New York
In the Red Hook Houses, apartment buildings run by the city housing authority, elderly residents were trapped for days, some of them alone, running low on water, food, and medication
Summary
On 29 October 2012, Hurricane Sandy swept through the east coast of the United States. The story of Red Hook is a lesson in understanding what causes vulnerability: the intersection of multiple factors involving natural hazards, socioeconomic conditions, built form, and other factors. We propose that using stories from events experienced elsewhere, such as the Red Hook narrative, can help communities imagine such scenarios These exercises can be used to build adaptive capacities in local social networks and identify measures to increase resilience in the multiple components of interdependent systems [16]. We can view vulnerable places (and communities) as having deficits in different forms of capital [20] This includes physical capital, such as seawalls, and natural capital, such as the loss of coastal open space that served as buffer zones. We briefly discuss some of the factors that intersect to create hotspots of vulnerability
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