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Editorial

When a Hurricane Strands Those in Need

For the most part, New York City’s bureaucracy responded quickly to the challenges presented by Hurricane Sandy. But it did not do nearly as well with respect to the most vulnerable citizens who live in public housing. As documented by Eric Lipton and Michael Moss in The Times on Monday, the city made insufficient efforts to remove them from harm’s way before the hurricane struck and moved too slowly to help them afterward.

The terrible — and avoidable — result was that many frail or disabled occupants of public housing were left stranded for weeks without power, water or medicines.

With almost 650,000 residents to look after, the New York City Housing Authority has long been underfinanced and understaffed — shortcomings that became even more glaring in the aftermath of a storm that wiped out electricity, heat and hot water for 77,000 people in 402 buildings and for which the agency was clearly unprepared. Despite assurances from Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other officials, it took three weeks before heat, hot water and electricity were restored to all the buildings.

Before Sandy hit, the city issued a mandatory evacuation order for low-lying areas — and, it says, made special efforts to convince more than 3,400 disabled residents in those buildings to move into city shelters. But that is a far cry from actually enforcing the order and physically helping people to leave their homes.

The predictable result was that most people stayed in their apartments, where they remained hostage to the floodwaters for weeks. In one telling example, a federal rescue worker discovered a 75-year-old teacher confined to a wheelchair who had been stuck so long in his eighth-floor apartment in Coney Island that he had cut back on crucial medicine, threatening gangrene in one leg.

Mr. Bloomberg has established a working group to figure out how the city should rebuild and how to respond to future storms. Its tasks should include a hard look at the overall management of the housing authority. It must also require the kind of workable emergency response plan for public housing that it plainly did not have this time around.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 30 of the New York edition with the headline: When a Hurricane Strands Those in Need. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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