You can say goodbye to living in Zone A, B or C. Yesterday the city released a new hurricane evacuation map which provides emergency officials with more flexibility in evacuating smaller sections of waterfront neighborhoods. The lettered system is being replaced with numbers (1-6). Citywide, almost 3 million people live in the zones (around 600,000 more than the previous map).
During Hurricane Sandy, city officials ordered the evacuation of large areas, including a huge swathe of the Lower East Side. In some cases, they chose not to evacuate blocks that ended up under water. As you can see from the map posted above, from WNYC, the flood zones on the LES still cover much of the neighborhood but they’re broken up into more categories. Zones 1 and 2 include the areas closest to the East River, stretching from Alphabet City down to the Two Bridges neighborhood. Zones 3-6 cover a wide area, as far west as Norfolk Street. If you’d like to see whether your home is included in an evacuation zone, you can search by address on the city’s web site, as well as on this color-coded map from WNYC.
