More than a decade after Hurricane Sandy flooded the East Coast and killed over 200 people, a new study has revealed the storm’s lasting impact on mortality risk among older adults. The researchers linked hurricane flood exposure to a 9% increase in risk of death for people over the age of 65 who continued living in the area after landfall.
Experts estimate that Hurricane Sandy caused over $60 billion in damage after it made landfall in 2012. Record-breaking storm surge and catastrophic flooding inundated the coastlines of New York and New Jersey, destroying hundreds of thousands of homes. Over a decade later, affected communities have largely rebuilt, but the storm’s invisible impact on senior mortality risk endures, according to the new study. The findings, published Wednesday, August 6, in the journal Frontiers in Public Health, underscore the need to consider how natural disasters impact public health over the long term, particularly within vulnerable populations, the researchers say.
“Hurricanes and associated flooding and damage impact the lives of those around them; fixing homes, dealing with the stress associated with this all can have long-lasting impacts, which may be seen in terms of mortality,” Arnab Ghosh, senior author and assistant professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, told Gizmodo in an email.
“We also know from other data from hurricanes that the environment changes in areas that are impacted. Socially, people move away; economically, businesses close. These factors can also limit social networks and friendships, all of which are particularly important in older adults,” Ghosh added.
He and his colleagues split the areas that were most affected—New York State, New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York City—into 959 zip code tabulation areas. ZCTAs are generalized representations of zip codes that public health researchers use to group demographic and health information by location. Of the 959 ZTCAs, 454 had flooded during Hurricane Sandy, and 505 were within a 10-mile (16-kilometer) radius of flooded areas.
The researchers then analyzed health data from nearly 300,000 residents aged 65 or older who were enrolled in Medicare and continued to reside in the same zip code area from 2013 to 2017. To isolate the effects of hurricane-related flooding, they controlled for age, gender, race, and living circumstances, as well as other demographic and socioeconomic factors.
The analysis revealed that Medicare beneficiaries who stayed in flooding-impacted ZCTAs had a significantly higher risk—9% on average—of death from all causes compared to those living in areas unaffected by flooding. That increase persisted for up to 5 years after the hurricane hit.
Localized increases in mortality risk varied by region, but not in ways the researchers expected. Medicare beneficiaries living in flooded parts of Connecticut and New York City showed the greatest increases in risk of death: 19% and 8%, respectively. Ghosh and his colleagues were surprised to see that seniors living in affluent Connecticut fared worse than those living in New York City, where socioeconomic and demographic characteristics may result in greater exposure to natural disasters. Further research will need to investigate the reasons behind this, but Ghosh suspects it may be partly related to lack of hurricane preparedness in Connecticut, as this state rarely sees tropical storms.
What’s more, hard-hit New Jersey and New York State did not show significant hurricane flooding-related effects on seniors’ all-cause mortality. “We were surprised by this finding,” Ghosh said. In New Jersey, this may be due to the fact that most coastal residences are single-family vacation homes, limiting the consequences of flood exposure, he explained.
Ghosh hopes that this data will aid disaster relief and preparedness efforts at the local and federal levels. Organizations need to think about not just the short-term outcomes but also the long-term health problems that stem from hurricanes, he said. “We certainly need more policies and infrastructure, particularly as hurricanes become more intense, [frequent], and dangerous.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Arnab Ghosh is an assistant professor of medicine at Cornell University. This affiliation was incorrect, and has been changed to Weill Cornell Medicine.
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