I was involved in some of the very first meetings that created the maps that showed what would happen if you had a Category 1, 2 or 3 hurricane in New York.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I've been through natural disasters. I lived down in Miami and was down there for Hurricane Andrew which was a Category 5. There were members of my family that thought they were going to die. Everyone was in the bathtub.
I've been through quite a few hurricanes. I worked in North Carolina, where there's a housing development whose name was Landfall.
I grew up in the Northeast; I've seen hurricanes before and trees down and cars destroyed.
When I left school, I never wondered whether my apartment in New York was vulnerable to storm surges, but my three daughters have to consider the realities of extreme weather and how it may destabilize communities around the globe.
'The Storms We Share' has been a project that I've been working on for so long.
I have lived through many major hurricanes during my lifetime: Camille, Frederic, and Ivan, to name just a very few. However, never have I seen destruction, panic, and fear on this massive scale.
We tell stories with maps about global warming, biodiversity; we can design more livable cities, track the spread of epidemics. That makes a difference.
For me, it started as a child with one of those little wooden jigsaw maps of the U.S., where's there's crocodiles on Florida and apples on Washington state. That was my very first map.
We started with things like locating ski runs or locating a transmission line corridor or locating a new town or doing a coastal zone plan. We ourselves weren't doing the planning work, but we were doing all the mapping work for the landscape architects and planners who would subsequently incorporate the maps into their actual designs.
After Sandy hit, my wife and I saw pictures of the devastation following the hurricane in the news. We immediately wanted to find a way to assist those in need.
No opposing quotes found.