Four Years Ago Today Hurricane Sandy Hit New York, New Jersey

I’ve been through a lot of hurricanes. But Sandy was the worst storm I have experienced.

I had made my preparations in my apartment to ride out the storm. The year before we had had Hurricane Irene, which was very bad in its own way, and I’m from Hurricane Territory so I don’t care if it seems like I’m over-reacting. I prepare. I sat on the bed. Gearing up. The wind started to rise, and I could feel it buffeting my apartment building. I’m on a cliff – which means we don’t get the flooding up here – but we do get the wind. And yeah, it was heavy wind, but nothing too out of the ordinary.

But then – at some point – it was like a switch had been flipped and the wind changed. The storm had hit. It was not gradual: you could actually feel the giant wall of the storm hit. My windows were taped up, but the frames started buckling inwards, something I had never seen before. The window frames were giving way. I have a lot of big windows. If they crashed inward, it would be chaos, so I raced around hammering up sheets over the windows, basically so if the windows crashed inward, the sheets would catch most of the debris. The sheets were tie-dyed, (which meant that the following day my apartment looked like a house of ill repute. A hippie den of iniquity.) I sat on my bed, listening to the walls creaking and the window-frames rattling. The wind was literally screaming, a high-pitched eerie whine. A queasy sound. It was going to be a long night. I was shocked that I still had power (I would lose it shortly.) Anyway, at one point I actually started to get frightened. Things were getting out of control. It felt like the Wizard of Oz cyclone was directly overhead. Like I said, I’ve been through some pretty hairy Hurricanes in my life, the most memorable being Hurricane Gloria, when we holed up in my parents’ house, playing Trivial Pursuit by candlelight and listening to the hair-raising crack of oak trees falling in the neighborhood (a sound you almost never hear, but it’s instantly recognizable when it comes. Those oak trees crash into houses and kill people. Our house was surrounded by them. So we’d pause, to listen, looking upwards, and then go back to our Trivial Pursuit game).

I wondered what else I should do to keep us safe. (I ended up taking Hope and the two of us slept – or didn’t sleep – in the bathtub that night. There’s only one window in there and it looks into an airshaft. So as my panic rose (and I’m not a panic person), sitting on the edge of my bed, listening to window frames cracking inwards, I glanced behind me to see how my cat Hope was doing. She freaks out when the plumber comes to check my radiators. A fire engine goes by outside and she hides under the bed. She is a skittish cat. I hoped she was doing okay. This is what I saw.

Uhm, yeah. I think she was handling it quite well.

I didn’t have power for two weeks. Unheard of. People clustered outside the Dunkin Donuts at the corner, which had power, so they could charge their phones. Everyone was patient. Nobody said, “I really need my phone, can I cut in line?” We all need our phones. I was working as a freelancer in a huge building on the West Side Highway. I couldn’t go back to work for three weeks because the building was flooded up to the ceiling of the first floor. I only mention this because I was a freelancer, I work by the hour, I lost three weeks of pay, something I had not at all saved for. Saving money? In New York? Anywhere? Please.

The days following featured National Guard trucks barreling down the empty streets, helicopters hovering, the horrific news from the Rockaways, random images of Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel literally packing up their OWN van with diapers they bought themselves, and driving to the Rockaways to hand them out. They didn’t do this under the auspices of any agency. The situation was that dire. Large sections of The Rockaways were wiped off the face of the earth. Then came gas rationing and the long lines. Everyone put up with it. There are sections of New York and New Jersey that have yet to be rebuilt to this day.

The day before the hurricane hit, I went to the grocery store. I had already stocked up on canned goods, batteries, candles, and bottled water. (Unfortunately I did not remember to buy tampons, having no idea the level of devastation coming towards me and that I needed to plan for weeks, instead of days. In the couple of days afterwards, I couldn’t get to the store, and had to ask a Red Cross truck guy if he had tampons. No hesitation, he reached behind him and handed me a box.)

At the grocery store, this is a view of a couple of shelves of what the rest of the place looked like.

I drove to the beach a couple days later and everything had been destroyed. Homes. The boardwalk crumpled like matchsticks. Sand had blown blocks inwards, piled up on grassy lawns 3/4s of a mile away. A school was totally flooded and the cleanup crew found FISH swimming in the flood water. I saw a lifeguard boat on the beach, cracked in half.

Listen, I got off easy. EASY. My apartment is on a cliff, therefore I never get the flooding that other areas of New Jersey get. Hoboken was basically underwater. A friend of mine who had spent three days crouched in the upper floor of her house with her son, waiting for the water to go down, admitted to me flatly, in her tough Jersey accent, “We pooped in a fuckin’ bowl.” There were people who lost everything. There are people out there who still haven’t recovered. The coverage of Hurricane Katrina was so intense, the relief effort eventually (finally) so all-encompassing that it dominated the headlines for months. Sandy? Not so much. It was baffling and enraging to us here on the East Coast. What, the Rockaways people are irrelevant? The Long Island people are irrelevant? Not worthy of aid? The media moved on. I feel like people had no idea what was really going on out on Long Island or in the Rockaways. New Yorkers were on their own. People (including myself) flocked out to the decimated Rockaways to help with the cleanup, because for some reason it took weeks for aid to reach the area. I could not believe my eyes, and like I said, I’ve been through a lot of hurricanes. The destruction was total. Elderly people were trapped on the upper floors of their apartments for weeks. It was a life-or-death crisis, that aftermath.

It was a devastating storm that has left its mark on the city (and Jersey) forever.