6 ways New York City is preparing for the next Superstorm Sandy

In 2014, the capacity of New York’s emergency shelters was just 10,000. Though more haven’t been built yet, the city has created plans to bring that number up to 120,000.

These shelters are meant for New Yorkers with disabilities who are unable to evacuate their homes without support. Existing shelters are also slated to be retrofitted to have accessible entrances, restrooms, and other upgrades.

The New York City Economic Development Corporation is distributing $30 million of federal grant money to fund tech projects that will help small businesses survive the next storm.

The money is being divided among 11 initiatives, including goTenna — a startup that allows users to send text messages and create a mesh network between their cell phones when internet or phone networks go down — and the Red Hook Initiative, which created a free local wifi network in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood that stayed live after Sandy.

Many of the residents impacted most severely by Sandy were those living in New York’s public housing. According to WNYC, more than 200 buildings were damaged during the storm, which left many residents without heat or power for months.

After the storm, FEMA awarded the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) $3 billion to make upgrades — the biggest grant the federal organization has ever awarded. That money is being used to build storm gates, install flood walls to protect boiler systems, and revamp communication policies around emergency and evacuation situations.

The Metropolitan Transportation Agency’s Fix and Fortify program was created for the two purposes stated in its title — to make repairs to the transportation infrastructure damaged by Hurricane Sandy, and to prepare subway tunnels, train tracks and other parts of the network to better weather future storms.

Part of that plan involves a controversial proposal to shut down the notoriously crowded L train, which connects north Brooklyn to Manhattan, for 18 months of repair work. The tunnel that passes under New York’s East River was filled with more than 7 million gallons of water during the storm.

The winner of Rebuild by Design, a competition created by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, was a proposal called the Big U. The plan is an ambitious flood protection construction project created by the architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group, along with a group of other architecture, engineering, and environmental organizations.

The plan is broken into three parts — one on Manhattan’s west side, one on the east, and one surrounding the southernmost tip of the island. Each would create a pedestrian-accessible area that would act as a park and would also lessen the impacts of storm surges. The federal government has so far given the city $335 million to create the first section on the east side. According to the city’s 2015 OneNYC report, the project is expected to break ground in 2017.