My Experience during Hurricane Sandy:
by Juliana Maronilla
Someone might call me superstitious, but at least a week before Sandy I was praying that some phenomenon would wreck my boring little town, canceling school. Little did I know that such a wish was possible. Before Sandy hit New York, I found myself worrying heavily about completing my honors math homework and the capacity of the storm. During Sandy, those worries faded quickly. I went on several weather stations frequently in obsession on the storm’s magnitude, fascinated with the idea of a hurricane hitting New York. But the news came out eventually, that the storm was a tropical storm in my area. My hopes died down a bit, although the wreck clearly devastated my town, Scarsdale. First, the most horrible news that I learned later was the death of two boys because a tree fell on a house. Second, was the week-long closing of school and power-outages. I remember asking a friend when school reopened how she dealt with her house’s lacks of power. She told me that she went to stay at her sister’s house in Long Island (ironically) in a location where there was no flooding. The hysteria because of Sandy became real to me that week as my dad shared news of very long lines of cars at gas stations. As for my family and our house, we survived with little trouble. A tree fell in our backyard from the neighbors and my parents spoke with them later to remove it. Tree branches, leaves and rain surely wrecked the yard and the unfamiliar moving of the trees due to the wind chilled my soul. Moreover, the stories of people in my town going to other houses made me appreciate my own house having power. Besides these, my family was fine. Even if we had lost power, we were still fine. And, I was strangely calm, even as trees moved in my backyard.
One day during that week, I decided to visit my high school. I was fully aware that the storm was going on, and some might say it was stupid, but I was dearly curious as to how the rest of the town looked like, the part that wasn’t my yard or my neighbor’s yard. I don’t remember what the walk there was like. I do remember that when I got to the high school, I suddenly became aware of the intensity of the wind because things high up, like power lines, were rattling. At the high school, sections were yellow-taped off due to the flooding and I could see several trees had fallen down. The weather closely resembled “tropical storm”. Looking at the sideways falling rain, hearing the heavy wind, seeing the flooding, left me feeling as though the high school had been abandoned.
In general, my suburban, upper middle class town in Northern Westchester was lucky. We had experienced mostly high winds, but nothing extremely serious. I am aware that entire neighborhoods were flooded and landscapes erased. I am aware that people lost their lives and suffered long before receiving help. So I am grateful, to say the least that my family and house were okay.
