Ask the Architect

The way things could’ve been after Sandy

Posted

Q. Last week I wrote that the New York Rising program could have been more organized, and since we managed to avoid being flooded by Hurricane Joaquin, we have the opportunity to better understand what is needed to help victims who want to keep their properties and homes, but need help to survive physically and financially.

A. NY Rising should have had construction professionals, estimators, design professionals and code officers meeting under one roof, a clearinghouse, with stations set up for each stage of recovery. Telling people individually to get a soil report, a survey and an estimate, with little knowledge of what this data was needed for or why, created a mess. Had local surveyors and soil boring companies been given blocks of area to provide data to the one central clearinghouse, they could have fanned out and done each affected property up and down a street in a shorter, more organized way instead of randomly coming back to the same street a few days apart for an adjacent soil test.

The clearinghouse could have then shared this data with the local building and engineering departments, improving the whole region’s information database. A homeowner would have made an appointment, and been assigned a caseworker and estimator to navigate the system and review the estimated cost of repairs, or ECR, and then meet with an architect or engineer (the design professional) of the homeowner’s choice. The design professional the owner hired would have prepared design and construction documents, reviewed them with the owner and met with a code official.

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