ALBANY, N.Y. - Having a gasoline reserve and requiring gasoline stations to have generators are two of the suggestions by a panel created by N.Y. Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the wake of superstorm Sandy, Petro Plaza News reports

The commission was tasked with finding ways to enhance disaster preparedness after Sandy pummeled the state in late October. A 1978 state law requires disaster preparations to be reviewed twice a year. The panel recommended that the state set up a reserve of fuel and to ensure gasoline stations have generators to power pumps. New Jersey lawmakers are considering a requirement to have generators at gas stations.

The governor is expected to outline those ideas further during his State of the State address next week. Meanwhile, the fingerpointing continues as New Yorkers try to figure out what happened to storm preparedness during Sandy when the state has plans in place to mitigate such disasters.

For years, New York has not followed requirements by law that "recommended disaster prevention and mitigation projects, policies, priorities and programs," said Richard Brodsky of the Wagner School at New York University and a former member of the Assembly. "This isn't a technical or academic failure. It resulted in the unnecessary flooding of the Battery and other tunnels and hundreds of millions of dollars of damage to transportation systems alone. If Goldman Sachs could figure out that sandbagging would save them from the surge, why didn't the city, state and MTA do likewise, especially since the law required them to do so?"

Cuomo countered that over the past two years, he??s tried to rectify years of neglect in storm preparedness. "This has been an evolutionary process and there has been more readiness and preparedness," he said. "You look where this was 10 years ago it was a much less sophisticated operation at both the state level and the local level."