Hurricane Sandy Damage Amplified by Development of Coast

This article discusses the devastation Hurricane Sandy had New York and New Jersey. It also discusses how the scale of the storm could have been lessened if proper planning and zoning had been enforced
Given the size and power of the storm, much of the damage from the surge was inevitable, but not all of it. Some of the damage along low-lying coastal areas was the result of years of poor land-use decisions and the more immediate neglect of emergency preparationson coastal areas and barrier islands. Authorities in New York and New Jersey simply allowed heavy development of at-risk coastal areas.
On Staten Island alone, developers built more than 2,700 mostly residential structures in coastal areas at extreme risk of storm surge flooding between 1980 and 2008, with the approval of city planning and zoning authorities. Some of this construction occurred in former marshland along the island's Atlantic-facing south shore. The city allowed development and growth to happen in areas that probably shouldn't have been developed," said Jonathan Peters, a professor of finance at the College of Staten Island. "I think the fact is that you put a lot of people in harm's way with the zoning." Developers built up parts of the Jersey Shore and the Rockaways, a low-lying peninsula in Queens, N.Y., in similar fashion in recent years, with little effort by local or state officials to mitigate the risk posed by hurricanes.

This article does a good job at explaining how the intensity of the development along the coast clearly influenced the scale of the disaster.

Article and Image Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/12/hurricane-sandy-damage_n_2114525.html