As Sandy bore down on New York in late October, we asked an NYPD spokesman if people should be concerned about damage to property at the department's Erie Basin auto pound and storage facility, and received a prescient reply: "I would be." According to the Times, over 11,000 barrels containing DNA evidence were exposed to Sandy's floodwaters, and the damage has already affected at least one criminal case. A jury convicted Manuel Castro of robbery and attempted assault, despite the fact that the evidence against him, a jacket and boots, wasn't produced in court. "We believe the ruling that permitted the evidence to come in was incorrect and we are appealing," said Castro's attorney, Steven Banks, the chief lawyer for the Legal Aid Society. "This is likely to be the tip of the iceberg."

The NYPD has assigned 20 officers, six civilians, and a captain to the task of recovering evidence from the Erie Basin warehouse and another warehouse on Kingsland Avenue in Greenpoint, in addition to the private firm it has hired to determine whether the evidence has been contaminated by toxic elements in the floodwater, including human waste.

Before the implementation of a barcode system several years ago, the NYPD cataloged its evidence with paper vouchers. “It was all piles—piles, piles, piles,” former property division officer John Cassidy said. “It’s not like it was organized. You could have 50 vouchers on one pile.” Paper bags are also preferable to plastic because the latter is more conducive to bacterial contamination.

In addition to barrels full of evidence, around 5,000 "narcotics items" and 3,250 guns were being stored in the Erie Basin warehouse when the floodwaters entered.

The NYPD says it has no plans to repair the storage facilities, which represent two of the department's 11 depots, and is considering consolidating all the evidence in one place. In the meantime, the NYPD is also consulting with the New Orleans Police Department, which has been dealing with storm-damaged evidence for seven years. Robbie Keen, who is directing a federally funded DNA program in the city, said, “If you don’t keep [evidence] properly stored, you’re affecting somebody’s life,”