Adams admin confirms identity of NYC’s extreme weather czar after months of mystery

Mayor Adams’ office has confirmed that City Hall chief of staff Camille Joseph Varlack is the administration’s extreme weather coordinator — ending months of mystery over who’s running the top storm response post.

The mayor’s team relayed Varlack’s new assignment in a communication to city Comptroller Brad Lander’s office last month, according to a new audit from Lander’s office released Monday.

Lander’s audit — which scrutinizes the Adams administration’s response to September’s Tropical Storm Ophelia — doesn’t make clear when Varlack started acting in the coordinator role, which was created by former Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2021 in the wake of deadly flash floods in the city caused by remnants of Hurricane Ida.

The comptroller’s audit says the mayor hadn’t “appointed” anyone to the extreme weather coordinator job when Ophelia caused severe flash floods across the five boroughs on Sept. 29, 2023.

Adams spokeswoman Liz Garcia said Monday that Varlack didn’t take on the coordinator post until February. Garcia said “a previous staffer who worked directly under” Varlack used to hold the coordinator position before her, though she declined to name that second staffer.

Controversy over the extreme weather czar post first mounted in the aftermath of Ophelia, when the Daily News reported that the post had been sitting vacant since the de Blasio administration’s coordinator, Emma Wolfe, left upon Adams’ inauguration.

At the time, Adams’ spokesmen said the mayor had opted against a de Blasio-era recommendation of making the coordinator role a new full-time position at City Hall and instead decided to task a senior administration official with taking on the duties of the post alongside other assignments. However, Adams’ office declined at the time to identify the official, and Garcia wouldn’t elaborate further Monday.

According to Lander’s new audit, Varlack is now the extreme weather czar responsible for coordinating all city agencies involved in extreme weather response during storms and for conducting after-action reviews to “correct weaknesses in the city’s emergency management.”

“However, to date there has been no public announcement of her appointment, and it is unclear what, if any, communication has been provided to city agencies,” the audit says of Varlack.

Beyond the Varlack revelation, Lander’s audit found there were multiple issues with the city’s emergency preparedness during Ophelia.

The audit reported that 32 of the city Environmental Protection Department’s 51 catch basin cleaning trucks were out of service when Ophelia hit, leaving only 19 trucks to cover all five boroughs.

The audit notes that “catch basin cleaning is one of the city’s best tools to prevent localized flooding before heavy rains” and that fewer than half of about 1,000 catch basins that are especially susceptible to flooding were inspected before Ophelia barreled in.

In the immediate aftermath of Ophelia, Adams and his administration faced criticism for not warning New Yorkers sooner about the severity of the storm — and Lander’s audit says just 2.7% of New Yorkers older than 16 received NotifyNYC emergency alerts on their cell phones as Ophelia was soaking the city.

The audit says the low figure is a result of poor enrollment in the service, which is the city’s primary vehicle for warning New Yorkers about emergencies in real time.

Another issue highlighted by Lander’s team is the administration’s method for keeping track of basement apartments, which are particularly vulnerable to flooding during storms. The audit found that a list of basement apartments in the city that the administration maintains to be able to send out quick alerts has only 2,378 subscribers, or fewer than 1% of the total number of New Yorkers estimated to live in basement units.

In response to the Lander audit’s broader findings, Garcia, the Adams spokeswoman, touted that ahead of Ophelia, the city “inspected over 900 catch basins, distributed thousands of flood barriers, rain barrels and other protective tools, and got the word out to millions of New Yorkers two days ahead of the event.”

“We will continue to build on these short- and long-term flood preparedness efforts,” Garcia added.