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I remember when I first heard about Hurricane Sandy from my teachers and classmates. I felt a little bit uneasy because I didn’t know what exactly was going to happen, and I live not too far away from sources of water. I live two train stops away from Coney Island in the neighborhood of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. My house is within Zone 3 of the NYC evacuation zone map, with Zone 1 being the first to evacuate and Zone 6 being the last. When Hurricane Sandy finally came, I didn’t think too much of it. There were some strong winds and heavy raining. I went outside for a bit to watch the rainfall. The sky was cloudy and the empty street looked as if it was constantly covered in a layer of water. The ripples made from the raindrops shook harshly. It was quite an awesome sight. I noticed there were fewer parked cars, which I thought perhaps was because people wanted to drive away to stay at a different place for the storm. For the remainder of the storm I essentially played video games until it was time to go back to school.
The first day of school after the storm felt strange. One of the gymnasiums in my school turned into a temporary shelter for about 500 people who were displaced by the hurricane. In almost every single classes I had, my teachers wanted to know if Superstorm Sandy had any profound effects on any of us. The storm didn’t have huge effect on most students. Some of us had to deal with a blackout. Others got their basement flooded and their textbooks ruined because of that. Sandy didn’t seem so bad until I came home and turned on the news. Reporters were showing fallen trees and wrecked homes in Red Hook. I felt very bad for the people whose home was destroyed by the storm, and was thankful that my home stayed intact, but I was also aware that I won’t be able to fully relate to these people until my own home or the home of someone close to me gets destroyed by a storm too.
The night Hurricane Sandy hit New York wasn’t so bad for me. Really, I consider myself blessed to have not have had to combat the devastating floods, interspersed fires, or property damage that many of my neighbors experienced. My street is situated on a slight incline, a characteristic I hadn’t noticed until my mother and I watched from the window as the water receded and the line reached approximately two feet tall on my neighbors’ houses. My house was ravaged by about an inch of water, at most.
The reality of Hurricane Sandy truly set in for me the next morning, when my friends and I walked through Howard Beach watching as other residents cleared out their houses, the first floors gutted by water and rot, their soaked and decaying possessed left on the curb.
Howard Beach did not have power for days. For a week at school, girls whose neighborhoods were unaffected were elated that our principal was allowing us to dress in non-uniform clothing in an effort to lighten our moods, but I just wanted to go home and finally be able to flip my bedroom lights on. None of my friends were dealing with the aftermath I was coming home to, but my English teacher was also without power, so on the days I saw him we would commiserate.
I distinctly remember the night of the 2012 Presidential election. My best friend was sleeping over—she had been for a few nights because the first floor of her house had flooded, leaving her without a bedroom or clothing—and we were sleeping in my brothers’ room while they slept on the couch downstairs. My friend and I stayed up and watched coverage of the election on my phone, and the next morning I blearily stumbled into the unlit kitchen and announced to my family “Obama’s gonna be President again, everyone.”
My family was very fortunate during Super storm Sandy. My house is a mere block and a half from the water’s edge. This body of water is known as Flushing Bay. My house is located on a slight hill, however, which protects it from minor flooding. We did have some flooding in the basement but it was quickly dealt with; no harm was done.
The only damage we sustained was on our roof. The heavy winds, which had sounded awful against our lonely house, had ripped off a couple of shingles. It was expensive to have them replace, however, the roof would not survive more rain without being fixed. That is the only lasting memorial to the destruction Sandy caused. The black replacement shingles can be seen in contrast to the white roof. Surprisingly, our wooden fence held fast after we lied it down.
I remember seeing the damage in other neighborhoods when school reopened. My bus passed through Bayside and many trees could be seen on the ground or on top of cars. The bus had to maneuver around the debris. The tree in our neighbor’s backyard was what cared us the most. It is a huge, old tree that would almost certainly fall to our side and crush the top of our house if it were blown down. Fortunately, our little house pulled through.
A distinct memory from my senior year of high school is Hurricane Sandy. I remember the feeling of shock we all felt when the storm was over, and far worse damage was done than we had anticipated. My dad at the time was away for business, so it was just my mom, my siblings, and I at home holding down the fort. We didn’t own a power generator, so when the power went out we spent much of the day crowded around small portable lanterns on the ground floor of my house. I remember hearing a loud noise coming from our basement: it was the sound of water rushing in through a crack in the door that led to our backyard, which was surrounded by the golf course. The water was coming in from the golf course at high speed, eventually breaking down the door entirely. At that moment we decided it was best to wait upstairs, and call one of my neighbors for help after the storm had subsided. When we opened the door to the basement a few hours later, we found our basement completely flooded with six feet of water. Random objects such as office supplies, towels, and plastic boxes were floating on top of the water by the staircase.
While it only took a few days to get all the water drained out, it took a full two weeks for the power lines on my block to be repaired. My entire street was flooded with what looked like an ocean of water, which probably came in from the beach near my house. The water that filled my street that day left behind tons of garbage, branches, and trees it took down with it. We spent the next few weeks that followed living in a close family friend’s house, along with my other neighbor who happened to be my best friend. Although they lived in my neighborhood, they were more inland and had little to no damage, so the power on their block was turned back on almost immediately after the storm. In all honesty, although the damage done to my house created a lot of stress for my parents, as I’m sure for many others, I remember Hurricane Sandy as an exciting and fun experience. School was closed for a full week, and my best friend and I got to live together in our family friend’s house. I remember all three of us doing homework together when school reopened, and carpooling to and from class. It felt like an adventure – like a giant sleepover that never ended.
The reality of the situation only really set in when one of my classmates returned to school around the same time I moved back into my house. She lived in Belle Harbor, a beach-town near Breezy Point, which was hit extremely hard by the hurricane. Her entire house was in shambles, and she was back and forth between friends and relatives for months. When she told us about her family’s experience dealing with the aftermath of the storm, I felt the hardship. My grandparents, too, lived in Belle Harbor and while their house was only partially in ruins, my dad spent the entire year travelling back and forth to their house, helping out in any way he can. Although my grandparents were living in Florida during the storm (and the next few months that followed), my dad felt the personal responsibility of taking care of their house and making it as comfortable as he can for when they returned.
While my friends and I still reminisce about the great adventure that was Hurricane Sandy, I am not blind to the devastation that it caused. I know that tons of people were affected by the storm for months and years after, and I felt that firsthand when I visited my grandparents at their house some months later. I can still picture the massive sand “dunes” that crowded the streets, the collapsed houses and quaint boutiques that were as old as my dad. The devastation was real, although I did not experience it, I did feel it.
Nicole Schneider
“No, no. We’re all fine, we’re really all fine over here.” The phone clicked back into the receiver as I watched my mother sit back on the couch. It was the third call that day. “It was your cousin from Australia,” she said matter-of-factly. “They saw news of the storm on TV so they called to check up on us.”
“Oh,” I said, somewhat disinterestedly as I turned to look out the window again. I watched as water ran down the windowpanes and the big tree in my neighbor’s backyard shook violently outside. My only worry, was that the tree would be pulled from the ground, and tip over towards my own little bedroom. But hey, it was just a little rain, right?
The gravity of the situation, the fantastic power of the storm; neither of these things really set in until I turned on the TV the next day. I watched as minute upon minute became hour upon hour of b-roll footage of submerged roads, houses torn from their frames, uprooted trees, tangled power lines, flooded subway tunnels, etc. New York had been hit with one of its worst storms in history, and remarkably, my own family had come out of it relatively unscathed; a thought that became even more apparent as my mother learned that her friend had been evacuated from her home in Long Beach, and returned to find half the house in ruins. But then, came the aftermath.
My experience with hurricane Sandy, experiences of consequence at least, can be summed up by two simple things—gas cans and metro cards. If I remember anything about hurricane Sandy, it was the shortage of gasoline that came about from the lack of gasoline trucks able to come into the city. I remember being forced to sit in our car for hours to get gasoline from one of the few filling stations that was actually open for business, and wishing that my family owned a gasoline can like those lucky people who weren’t waiting in line, but just manually filling their cans and promptly returning to the safety of their own homes. I wished we could buy a can, but evidently they were sold out everywhere in the franticism that followed the Sandy scare. How could one get around without his or her car?
And then there was MTA public transit. When the subways re-opened for service to New Yorkers, I remember my mother being overjoyed that school remained closed. She feared any water damage the subways may have taken from the storm; feared that the subway’s watered up electrical currents would fry her two children, and made her stance on staying home very clear.
In general, I would say that although I was not physically affected by Sandy, the psychological aftermath—both in comforting friends and family, and in not being able to get around as much or as easily were the things that resonate most with me in recalling my experience 4 years ago. But of course while my experience ended after a mere few days of turmoil, I can never forget that there are people still fighting the aftereffects of the storm today.
My family didn’t handle the Hurricane Sandy crisis all too wisely. I remember my mom and I driving down from Oneonta—a small town in upstate New York where my sister goes to school—about a day before the brunt of the storm hit New York City. The weather wasn’t bad, a light drizzle, cloudy skies, and we listened to the news on the radio warning about the storm, and the specific evacuation zones in New York City. At the start of our drive to the city, I was concerned whether or not school would be cancelled, at this point in the drive I was concerned whether or not it would be safe to stay in the city.
I check my mom’s email and she received a message from our building telling us that we lived in a zone that was going to be hit pretty hard, and they strongly suggested the residents evacuate—go to higher ground. I remember going over what we should do with my mom, and we were just very confused about the whole thing. Where is higher ground? Which friends of ours live there? Would they even want us to stay with them? We decided to go to Brooklyn, grab our important things—laptop, hard drives, etc.—and head to our grandmother’s in Marblehead.
Well, Marblehead is a coastal town a little bit north of Boston, and while it was not hit nearly as hard as New York City, the waves by my grandma’s beach were tremendous. I mean, the beach was consumed entirely by the harbor, and the waves were lapping the seawall. Halloween that year was pretty uneventful.
While I was pretty lucky with the fate of my houses, my school was attacked by the storm. Located on 75 Broad St., Millennium High School is basically on the tip of Manhattan, which was subsumed by salt water. And while my school was located on the 11th, 12th, and 13th floors of an office building, that salt water flooded the buildings basement, in effect frying the functionality of the entire building. No heat. No electricity. Nothing for months.
My entire high school was actually transferred to the University Neighborhood High School building in the Lower East Side—I’m talking very low. It was certainly a change from the general atmosphere we were all used to, with a polished, renovated interior, being surrounded by mostly businessmen in suits. We were now in the most quintessential New York City public school—radiators, cafeterias, caged windows, lockers from the 50’s. Suffice to say, we were not particularly welcome at UNHS. While the MHS students’ schedules never coincided with those of UNHS, they would pound on the gates separating the staircases we were allowed to use from the ones that they were allowed. We were locked in our classrooms when class was in session, which became especially irritating for we could not control the radiators. The teachers had none of their resources necessary for their curricula. Oh, and that’s also around the time I had to start wearing glasses—unrelated to Sandy, I know, but still inconvenient.
Our time at this other school lasted around three months, and we were thrilled to return to our home.
In the days leading up to Hurricane Sandy, I heard about the storm from friends and classmates. Some of my friends were preparing for the storm by obtaining essentials like food, water, and flashlights, while others doubted that the storm would hit New York City as hard as the media claimed it would. After hearing about the storm at school, I told my parents about the hurricane and advised them to begin preparing. My parents were not aware that there was a storm heading towards New York City and also expressed doubt over whether it would affect us. They insisted that everything would be fine. I was told to worry about my AP Biology exam instead. While I tried to study for my exam, I couldn’t help but look out the window every few minutes to check the weather outside. The streets were clear. It was windy and raining, but it was no different from a normal rainstorm. I guess my parents were right, I thought.
The next day, I heard about how certain parts of New York City were badly hit like the Rockaways in Queens, Red Hook in Brooklyn, and Lower Manhattan. I attended Stuyvesant High School, which is located in an area that was hit rather hard by the storm. My classmates posted pictures of the school during the storm. The streets were flooded with more than four feet of water. The difference between the dry streets in my neighborhood and the flooded streets near my high school was astonishing. How could we have experienced no damage while others had their homes and businesses damaged, their streets flooded, and their electricity lost?
For a week we did not have school. The subway was being restored and those that were hit by the storm began to rebuild in the aftermath of the storm. During this time, I was fortunate to have electricity and used the extra time to study for my AP Biology exam. When we returned to school the next week, some of my classmates told me about the damage the storm had done to their homes and how they were living with friends or relatives while they figured out how to rebuild their homes.
Living in the Lower East Side meant that when Hurricane Sandy hit, I felt the immediate effects of the storm. There was little to no damage done to my neighborhood, so all I remember was being out of electricity for a week. The power grid was down for the city below 30th Street, and both subway and buses were out of service. Although we had our phones, we had no power source to keep them alive; I remember filling with dread each time my battery’s percentage dropped. Communication was limited, and we had to pull out a battery-operated radio to keep up with the news. All activities had to be done during the day, where the only light source was the sun; since we didn’t know when the power would return, we had to ration our candles carefully. I remember eating dinner in the dark, huddled around a few candles with my parents as we ate food we could barely even see.
For the most part, my parents encouraged me to stay at home; since the stairwells in our building were windowless and steep, it was of utmost importance to bring a large, bright flashlight to light our way as we went down. I ended up going outside at some point for whatever reason and heading into the outskirts of Chinatown. A few restaurants were still open, running on their backup generators. Here and there, we could see lines where people paid to charge their phones and other electronics. In several parts of the neighborhood, there were people who came by to give out water and food to people who had not prepared well enough for the aftermaths of the storm.
I didn’t really feel the effects of Sandy until after the MTA allowed buses and trains to run once again. I recall that we could get on the buses free of charge, and I seized the opportunity to visit a Barnes and Noble further up in midtown to charge my devices. I realized that for most of New York City, life went on. People were just sitting around in the bookstore, just living as they normally did. Meanwhile, I was finally connected to the Internet and saw the devastation in surrounding areas. For some of us, the week that school was cancelled for Hurricane Sandy was just another break. For others, including me, that week was an inconvenience. For even others, Hurricane Sandy was a disaster whose effects are still felt today.
Hurricane Sandy came smashing into my life in a whirlwind of power outages, uprooted, severed trees, and wind speeds of 115 mph. Hurricane Sandy was an experience that shook me to my core, unsettling me from all previous notions that the great New York City was somehow impenetrable to mother nature’s forces.
I remember scouring the Internet a day before the storm, double and triple checking that our area (Lower Manhattan, Chinatown) wasn’t one of the most high-risked neighborhoods. I remember my family stocking up on water, batteries, candles, and preserved foods. I remember creating a duffle full of dried food and emergency money in case we had to go to safe house to rough out the storm. Supermarkets were packed to the gills, the shelves picked clean, residents frantically buying everything they could possibly need to endure the storm. All preparations were completed and the entire city waited with bated breath for the hurricane to strike. The hurricane began during the early morning. I remember sleeping fitfully the night before the storm. I woke up befuddled and scared, listening to the wind’s high pitched screams as it whistled past my apartment building at 115 mph, making the windows rattle and the brick foundation creak. The most severe part of the storm lasted until the afternoon; the sky was gray and muddy, the sun completely obscured, the snapping of tree branches added to the cacophony of loud, eerie whistling as the winds gusted past.
When the storm died down, people began sticking their heads out of the windows, the braver ones venturing out the front door, to observe the aftereffects of the storm. The city was a ghost town: all the shops closed, the windows shuttered, and the metal grates drawn. The streets were littered with leaves, tree branches, and pieces of garbage. Here and there, smalls shops opened for a few hours, selling a rapidly dwindling supply of dusty batteries and battered candles, day old bread and pastries, bringing in lines of customers that wrapped around the corner. Without electricity, the city had lost its soul. Without electricity, the city has lost the light, both literal and figurative, that came from the bright streetlights, bustling restaurants, and technological devices, as well as the hustle and bustle of the residents and the tourists. It was a truly a terrible week. My family began waking, working, and sleeping according to the sun: clustered by the windows in my room where the daylight was brightest, my sister and I catching up on homework while my parents read and re-read newspaper articles. Our daily meal was a never-ending cycle of cereal, bread, and granola bars. Hot showers were out of the question, and we drank water from our pre-packaged supply, fearful that the water supply was no longer safe because of the storm. Our only connection to the outside world was a small battery-run radio, and we would listen to it constantly for warnings in case we had to leave our area. School and work was cancelled that week, and the transit system was down. We became lethargic, feeling sleepy in front of the nightly candle, depressed from the lack of activity, purpose, and the short, short hours of sunlight. Our relatives called our landline, urging us to go to Brooklyn where life went on the same as usual. For them, electricity, hot water, and opened supermarkets flourished, and the hurricane was simply a week long vacation. We finally caved three days before the storm ended, hopping on the next bus heading out of lower Manhattan, and then laughing out loud as we watched the streetlights finally turn on one by one as we were driven out of the city.
Hurricane Sandy was, dare I say, an interesting experience. Many of my friends were unaffected by the storm, having a nice break from school in Queens and Brooklyn, but some who lived in the farther reaches of New York City were disastrously effected when their homes were destroyed. Hurricane Sandy was truly a terrible storm, not only because of the aftereffects of smashed homes destroyed by a mix of wind and seawater, but also because of the fear it inspired in a city known for its resilience and ability to overcome all odds.
Immediately before Hurricane Sandy’s debut to New York City during October 2012, the world seemed near apocalyptic. It was foreign and something I had never experienced before. Canned goods, flashlights, and every item imaginable were flying off of grocery store shelves. Morning prayers before classes in my Catholic high school began to include mentions of safety during the storm. Classes were soon canceled. While this intensifying anticipation of the storm frightened me, I somehow remained confident that nothing would happen.
The storm hit, and nothing did – besides power outages and fallen trees in my surrounding Queens neighborhoods. Many of my friends also were not affected, and the hashtag “#NoSchoolNovember” had even surfaced across social media platforms due to the accumulation of days off from Sandy and its following November 2012 snowstorm. Ashamedly, I had even benefited from the storm, taking the more expensive Long Island Railroad during the few days all New York public transportation was completely free. Needless to say, my own life had continued to function almost exactly as it had before the storm.
However, many of my classmates were not as lucky. Friends from school living in Long Beach, Howard Beach, the Rockaways, and Breezy Point were affected tremendously by the storm. Pictures soon surfaced on social media of people’s torn properties, ruined backyards, and wholly destroyed boardwalks. From this, I witnessed acts of solidarity, including students raising money to help out their peers and concerned e-mails from teachers, allowing for the extension of assignment deadlines for those who needed it. Hurricane Sandy allowed me to see my high school as a community and not simply an institution.
In addition, Hurricane Sandy also brought a life-altering experience to a friend taking SAT classes with me at the time. Although he lived ten minutes away in an area that was as landlocked as mine, a fallen tree almost took his life. While taking a shower during the storm, he saw a tree fall down into the side of his house and crashing into his bathroom – having missed his body by only a few inches. When asked by our instructor how our hurricane experiences had been like, he simply lifted his pant leg to show an array of stitches from his thigh to his ankle.
Although Hurricane Sandy had barely affected me, I had definitely acknowledged its life-changing effects for others. Hurricane Sandy continues to remain a powerful reminder of how powerless we are rendered during disaster, but how powerful we can stand in solidarity after the disaster’s passing.
Hurricane Sandy was the first legitimately terrifying storm I witnessed since moving to New York City. What started out as a nonthreatening, minor storm that most New Yorkers were not taking seriously became a natural disaster that destroyed homes and ruined the lives of thousands.
It was around Halloween. My friends and I were riled up from the excitement of the coming Halloween Parade my high school holds every year. We were discussing our costumes, the hurricane a distant thought. Queens had never been hit with a serious storm before and so, the threat of Hurricane Sandy was no cause for alarm to us. It was just another case of inclement weather blown out of proportion by the media. But the reality hit us all when New York schools were closed and the first couple images of the damages were revealed in the news. For an entire week, New York schools were closed.
I remember feeling excited simply because classes had been cancelled but the feeling subsided as I became more aware of the havoc the hurricane had wreaked. My mom’s coworker from the Howard Beach area had his home basically wiped out. He had nothing left. He and his family salvaged what few possessions they could find among the pile of ruble, and found safety with close relatives who had been lucky enough to have had little to no damages inflicted by the hurricane. Like many others, my mom’s coworker had to rebuild his home and his life but he did not have the money for it and the insurance was not nearly enough compensation to repair the damages. While my family and I were fortunate enough to have dodged the worst of the hurricane, to this day, my mom’s coworker and his family are feeling the effects of Hurricane Sandy.
I almost feel guilty talking about it. My Hurricane Sandy experience was uneventful, to say the least. At the time, I lived in an area of Brooklyn that was largely unaffected by the storm. We had no damage in the neighborhood and electricity was running throughout. I was absolutely giddy at the prospect of not having two weeks of school and playing video games all day. In retrospect, I feel extremely selfish for my thought process over those weeks, given some of the hardships that many of my friends had endured.
My school, Brooklyn Technical High School, was being used an evacuation shelter for displaced residents. I rejoiced because I knew that I would have additional time off from school while everyone else had to go back to school. The evacuees stayed in the school for a number of weeks after the classes resumed, but, nonetheless, this had little to no effect on me as I almost never spent my lunch period in the cafeteria where the people were being held. Thus, I was able to go about my day-to-day activities as if nothing happened. I recognize, and am thankful for the fact, that I was one of the lucky few New Yorkers that was unaffected by Hurricane Sandy.
Looking back, I wish that I had done more to help my friends recover after the storm. Some of them lost their homes and were struggling for a significant period of time in the months that followed. It was a difficult time for so many New Yorkers and I am glad to see that the City was able to get back on its feet. The events brought many issues of resiliency and recovery to the forefront of the political agenda and I am thankful that the Mayor and City Council, led by Council Member Mark Treyger, are taking action to ensure that the City is better prepared if, and when, such a storm will occur in the future.
Picture this; boarded up windows, enough canned food for a food drive, stacks of water bottles. All for the upcoming “Superstorm” Sandy. As landlords, an errant hurricane making its way up north was akin to the apocalypse. We went the whole nine yards, towels under the doorways to prevent flooding, all that. And then, nothing. All of our homes were entirely untouched. Actually, that’s a lie. One of our trash cans was blown over by the “storm force” winds. We didn’t even lose power.
My high school was a bit worse off. I remember seeing a picture on Facebook of the entrance being flooded. In fact, that whole area of Manhattan was hit pretty bad. However it’s also a VERY rich area so things were taken care of faster than bureaucracy has any right to. I remember hoping for a few extra days off from school, but alas as I walked to school that day I passed multiple giant machines whose purposes alternated between cleaning water and dehumidifying, and crushing the dreams of children. Walking into school that day felt like it was just another Monday.
That’s all I have. At school we joked about Sandy not destroying the place and talking about how we spent our week off, and at home we laughed about how over prepared we were. However after seeing how some neighborhoods were mauled by the storm, I am truly grateful that the storm passed over me and mine. I remember one kid posted a picture of him standing by the ocean during the storm striking some stupid pose and he got hundreds of likes. I’m sure there’s a metaphor hidden there somewhere; I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader.
Hurricane Sandy was a terribly devastating storm for NYC. It resulted in many New Yorkers losing their homes and some tragically lost their life. Although this super-storm destroyed parts of my city and my favorite vacation spot, Long Beach Island on the Jersey shore, the days of the storm and those following it were eerily calm and peaceful for my family.
Throughout the storm, my mom and I watched countless episodes of “The Golden Girls” and cooked a lot of cozy dishes, like stews and soups. I even baked some cookies, which was quite ambitious when I was 16. Our car was safely tucked away in the garage and away from the flood, and our cable service never so much as wavered even when the wind speed picked up. A few trees fell over in my backyard, but even with a few additional fallen trees, it was hard to discern whether a hurricane had hit town or an intense rainstorm.
Although Hurricane Sandy did not cost me my home or much distress at all, hearing the experiences of my friends and fellow citizens made the tragedies of the storm much more real. One of my closest friends was a resident of Breezy Point, and because of Sandy’s devastation, she and her family were left completely homeless. Another friend of mine hailed from Far Rockaway, Queens, and had to leave her mom and dad back home to clean up the mess left by storm while she moved into her Aunt’s New York City apartment. There was no way she could make it to school everyday when her family had lost their car and the subways were not working properly. My commute into Manhattan has not been quite as efficient since before Hurricane Sandy, but my complaints about the subway seem petty in light of the struggles my peers have faced. Some of my friends and their families had to wait years before they received help rebuilding their homes.
This storm was a reality check for the city, which has been accustomed to hearing forecasts of blizzards but waking up to light dustings of snow the next morning. After facing a hurricane of Sandy’s force in recent history, the city must choose how to effectively deal with super-storms in the future.
I remember Super Storm Sandy like it was yesterday. The evening before the storm hit, my family and I gathered in our living room, watching ABC 7. Sade Baderinwa was in the middle of reading the list of zone A regions of New York. Far Rockaway was one of them. We were mandated to evacuate. Not long ago, my entire extended family traveled to my aunt’s house in New Jersey in fear of Hurricane Irene. However, this time the rush to flee was absent. My dad was on the phone with my uncle discussing whether they would leave. They would not. My dad knew though that we had to leave. In the next half hour, my sisters and I packed a week’s worth of clothes along with all of our books, textbooks, and laptops.
With the graciousness of my aunt, we were able to wait out the storm in Belleville, New Jersey. The only thing we lost there was power. To help with this, my aunt had a generator. For a few hours a day, we would have some electricity to shower and make the meals for the day. To pay for this, however, we would have to stand on the gas line every morning and some nights. After the storm had passed and it was cleared to go back, my father took a trip back to our home. Thankfully, he suggested my mother, sisters, and I stay until he assessed the situation. At the end of that day, he came back with a camera full of pictures of our town. As we scrolled through the pictures, my basement was filled with water to the ceiling. It was one foot away from hitting the floor of the first floor. In the water, there was everything we stored in our basement: my books from pre-school through tenth grade, my childhood books, my childhood toys, my mother’s pots and pans, and other things we sentimentally valued. Overwhelmed, I excused myself to the restroom and began to cry. I gathered myself and went back outside. Although my emotions were in control and I began to cry again, this time my family hugged me and began to cry as well. When we were able to turn on the television, I realized that in comparison, we were lucky.
After a week of staying with my aunt and other family members in Far Rockaway who were not affected, we went back to our home. There was no electricity and no heat. Honestly, our house was unlivable. Yet we had nowhere else to go. We had overstayed at all of our family’s homes. My dad, uncle, and cousin cleaned out the basement and we made our living room a five-person bedroom. We isolated the entire living room in heavy-duty plastic and placed space heaters all around. We used the generator my father bought and had electricity for a few hours everyday.
School would begin on Monday. However, my high school, Scholars’ Academy, suffered major damages. Instead we were relocated to Maxwell High School in Brooklyn. For the next two months until the middle of January of 2013, I would wake up two hours earlier than normal every morning to get the shuttle buses that took the Rockaway peninsula residents from our school to Maxwell. It was on the first day of school post-Sandy, I was able to relate to others who went through similar and worst things. My friends and classmates were much more unlucky than we were had their entire homes damaged and some even burned down in the Breezy Point fire. Again, in comparison, we were lucky.
There were many times where school was the only normal thing for many of us, the only structure to the chaos. We were encouraged by our principal and teachers to be “Rockaway Resilient,” and that we were. When we went back to school the following year and many of us began to recover at home, we saw every recovery as a blessing. Super Storm Sandy, despite all its damage, made a community of people stronger than ever. Personally, this storm validated that there are always people that have it worse than I do, and that I should be grateful for everything and everyday. The Rockaway peninsula will never be the same, but we are stronger because of the storm.