Hurricane Passes, But Worries About Rikers Evacuation Remain

Elmhurst — In August, as the city was scrambling to prepare for what many were predicting to be a potentially devastating hurricane, controversy arose over what was otherwise an innocuous answer at a press conference: There would be no evacuation of Rikers Island, Mayor Bloomberg said.

After a prisoner advocacy blog called Solitary Watch posted something about the mayor's announcement—drawing comparisons to stranded prisoners left behind in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina—a number of other websites followed suit, along with a few traditional news outlets. Twitter users caught on shortly after; a petition demanding the city take action was circulated. Many were struck by the fact that while the city was shutting down its transportation system and making other unprecedented storm plans, the some 14,000 people housed on Rikers Island would stay put.

Irene came and went, however, and with a wet whimper instead of a bang. The ten jail facilities on Rikers came through unscathed, as the mayor's office and the Department of Correction repeatedly said they would, and it seems as though the jail was never in any real danger from the storm to begin with. But the incident raised a question that received little public attention before: how the city would deal with the tens of thousands of inmates on Rikers, an island accessible by only one bridge, should an emergency arise.

"Whether they had to evacuate Rikers or not during Irene, they'll have to evacuate eventually," says Dr. Irwin Redlener, director at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. "The key point is, do they have an effective evacuation plan at the jail? And to my impression they do not."

A no-flood zone?        

The Office of Emergency Management's hurricane evacuation map color-codes low-lying areas as either Zone A, B, or C—from the highest risk of flooding from a hurricane storm surge to the lowest risk. Rikers, 96 acres nestled in the East River between Queens and the mainland Bronx, is shown as all white, meaning at no risk of flooding.

"The vast majority of Rikers Island is located in a No Flood Zone," Department of Correction spokeswoman Sharmen Stein wrote in an e-mail.

"Only one facility is located in Zone C—the first floor of that one jail may be vulnerable to some flooding, but is not susceptible to loss of life. In that instance, the inmates and staff assigned to the first floor would be relocated to higher floors in the jail, or moved temporarily to other facilities on Rikers Island. It is only a narrow portion of the outer perimeter of the island—where there are no jails—that might be vulnerable to flooding, even in a Category 4 hurricane."

Klaus Jacob, a research scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and a member of the mayor's New York City Panel on Climate Change, says that in the event of a 100-year storm—a magnitude of storm that, statistically speaking, has a one percent chance of happening in a given year—"only a small fringe of the island" would flood.

He added that New York State emergency maps, like the city's map, show portions of the island at risk of flooding should a category 3 or 4 hurricane occur, while other portions of the are shown as above any flood zone.

"It seems understandable that an evacuation was not warranted for Irene since it did not make a hurricane category 1, nor did it make a 100-year storm," Jacob says. Indeed, Irene was downgraded to a tropical storm by the time it hit New York.