Lights on all night at OEM, the hub of recovery from Sandy
Tucked at the edge of a park in Downtown Brooklyn, the headquarters of the city’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) has been the center of non-stop activity since Hurricane Sandy hit the radar screens.
OEM, led by Commissioner Joseph F. Bruno, is the agency that is coordinating the city’s response to the massively destructive storm – from handling evacuations, to setting up emergency shelters, to deploying heavy equipment and fuel.
Inside the building’s Emergency Operations Center (EOP) on Tuesday evening, roughly 100 men and women, some in uniform, bent over computers or glanced up at wall-mounted video monitors.
Unlike the other offices and briefing rooms in the OEM building, the EOC is manned only during large-scale emergencies. Officials from city, state and federal agencies sit at workstations labeled by function, such as “Transportation.”