Bundy standoff
On March 27, 2014, 145,604 acres of federal land in Clark County were temporarily closed for the "capture, impound, and removal of trespass cattle." BLM officials and law enforcement rangers began a roundup of such livestock on April 5, and Cliven Bundy's son, Dave, was arrested. On April 12, 2014, a group of protesters, some of them armed, approached the BLM "cattle gather". Sheriff Doug Gillespie negotiated with Bundy and newly-confirmed BLM director Neil Kornze, who elected to release the cattle and de-escalate the situation. As of the end of 2015, Cliven Bundy continued to graze his cattle on federal land and still had not paid the grazing fees.
Howard Beach, Queens
Sandy made landfall on October 29, dragging a ten-foot-high storm surge from Jamaica Bay that flooded all of Old and New Howard Beach plus the neighborhoods of Broad Channel and the Rockaways, along with some sections of Lindenwood and neighboring Ozone Park. The storm knocked out power to Howard Beach for three weeks. The flooding damaged most, if not all, houses in the neighborhood, all of the stores along Cross Bay Boulevard, the Howard Beach – JFK Airport station, and the IND Rockaway Line trestle that carries trains over Jamaica Bay into Broad Channel and the Rockaways. After Sandy, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the New York City Office of Emergency Management provisionally re-classified Howard Beach along with the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Gerritsen Beach and Red Hook as Zone A neighborhoods.