The same day that Mayor Bloomberg requested billions in federal aid to help the city rebuild after Superstorm Sandy, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that Sandy cost the state $32.8 billion in repair and restoration costs.
Additionally, New York will need an estimated $9.1 billion in mitigation and prevention costs, said Cuomo, for measures such as flood protection for the World Trade Center site and vulnerable road and subway tunnels, fuel supply system power generation, sewage treatment plant flood protection and secondary power supply systems for health care facilities.
To cover the approximately $42 billion in costs, the state will need supplemental federal assistance, said Cuomo.
That estimation includes approximately $5 billion in recovery needs for the MTA, 1.5 billion for utilities, 6 billion for businesses and 9.6 billion for housing.
Compared with Hurricane Katrina, about 100,000 more housing units were damaged or destroyed in Sandy and almost 250,000 more businesses were impacted, said the governor’s office. There were also approximately 1.4 million more power outages from the superstorm.
When looking at those numbers, said Cuomo, Katrina, in many ways, was not as impactful as Sandy.
