This is a natural disaster, but climate change means there will be an unnatural number of them in the coming years. Even so, there is no environment on Earth that is simply benevolent. Stay in one place long enough and you will face some kind of natural disaster. A rational and democratically planned society will be able to cope with natural disasters much better than an irrational and sporadically organised one.
This may be just another event, a memorable and individually significant one, but still an event. It could also be an existential moment for US capitalism and, by extension, global society. Every day New York is a disaster area is another day it is not working. In a global slump one of the major centres of capital accumulation has been shut down.
There is a current bourgeois political drive, known to us as Austerity, which is trying to turn societies like ours into a free market idyll, only found in text-books. The only realistic means for an organised response to a crisis like this is the state. The alternative is to let people fend for themselves. If ordinary citizens are expected to put aside for occasions like these it would be perfectly congruent with an austerity drive. But what would that mean for a city like New York? Millions of people have had to evacuate. If teachers, nurses, doctors, fire fighters, office workers, bus drivers, shop staff etc are forced to leave will they be able to return?