“It’s Just a Hurricane”
Before I moved to the US the closest I had
come to experiencing a natural disaster was severe windstorms in France and
England, and an earthquake in Israel in 2004. The only reason I felt the latter
was because my chair rolled from one end of the room to the other and back again
while I was sitting on it - otherwise I probably wouldn’t have known! Right
after the 2004 South East Asian Tsunami I worked over the weekend helping to
provide rush translations to the Red Cross (I cannot thank the people at the
BBC World Service enough for their help getting the documents translated into
Sinhalese), watching the scenes on the news with disbelief at the sheer power
of nature. I moved to New York in June 2005, and a few months later found myself
watching the news with baited breath as Hurricane Katrina
created a path of destruction across the Gulf of Mexico, slamming into
Louisiana and literally destroying the state. I remember feeling so hopeless,
wishing I could fly down there and DO something. It was at that point that I
started taking some interest in hurricanes, and how unpredictable they are. I saw
some mega blizzards in NYC, the biggest one in December 2010 just after Christmas,
where so much snow fell from the sky that buses and cars were stuck in the
streets and I was snowed in to my apartment building. When someone finally dug
us out I waded through snow up to my thighs. Earlier that year I saw my first
(and last) real-life tornado, from the 40th floor window of a Manhattan
high-rise, travelling over the lower end of the island straight towards
Brooklyn. The abandoned building on my street corner was destroyed in it; its
front façade ripped off, exposing dusty rooms and boarded up bathrooms. That
office window was always wonderful for sunrises and sunsets, fireworks
displays, watching pilots do emergency landings on the Hudson River, and
lightning strikes.
But I honestly never thought I would
actually live through an earthquake or a hurricane in the city. NYC… One of the
biggest cities in the world! 2011 was the last year that I worked in the high
rise, but also the year of THE earthquake and my first real hurricane. I was
sitting at my desk, working during my lunch hour, when suddenly the building
started swaying and my chair rolled over to another desk and back, my stomach
rose and fell, rollercoaster style. Then it was over. We all looked around,
wondering if we had all felt the same thing. A 5.8 earthquake in Virginia, not
far from Washington DC, which was felt all the way up the coast. On paper 5.8
seems like small fry compared to the 8.1 that Mexico just experienced, or even
the earthquakes that California expects (generally hovering between 5.1 and 8).
A few weeks later Hurricane
Irene brewed far away in the Antilles, gaining momentum until it looked
like she was heading straight for NYC. We stocked up on food, made a huge pot
of pasta “just in case”, filled the bathtub with water, and made sure we had
enough batteries, candles, and flashlights for a few days. It was exciting,
exhilarating. The winds whipped up and howled around us, and the tropical storm
rain pounded on our windows. It was so warm, and humid, and grey. Irene
actually DID make landfall in Brooklyn, but the city was spared.
We strolled through Manhattan after Irene,
laughing, taking pictures of a fallen branch and exclaiming “that was it?!”. We
were so full of ourselves, not even considering that just outside of the city
borders houses were floating down streets and people were without power for
days. Lucky us, Irene bypassed NYC and instead ravaged parts of New Jersey and
Connecticut, and of course places like South Carolina (not even mentioning the
other countries she hit). We didn’t realize how lucky we had been that year. We
didn’t even think to look a little further outside and see what damage she had
caused. We had survived a hurricane! In retrospect I wish I had listened to my
friends who HAD actually survived hurricanes (like Hurricane Andrew in 1992
that devastated Florida). And thought more about those who were sitting in
their homes with no electricity, waiting for the flood waters to recede. Irene
was a monster.
We learnt what it was like to get through a
hurricane the following year.
On Sunday October 28th 2012 I
was working a double, bartending in a restaurant in Manhattan when we were told
that all public transport would be shut down that evening, and that we should
all go home and prepare for the storm. Of course I shut the restaurant up with
my coworkers and went to my other place of work next door, an Irish pub, and
proceeded to get drunk. What else were we going to do on this sudden evening
off?! The streets were dead, it wasn’t cold out, and there didn’t really seem
like any imminent threat, apart from a bit of wind blowing through the grid. I
went home, slept, and prepped for the storm in the same way as we had prepped
for Irene, by buying a ton of snacks, filling the bathtub with water and making
sure my windows were sealed (Irene actually cause some leak damage to all of
the windows in our apartment building). My roommate, her boyfriend, me, and our
good friend hunkered down to weather the storm, and for some reason I decided
to stay sober, “just in case”. Still, I was the one who decided that it would
be a good idea to go up on the roof when the winds picked up, holding onto the
barrier for dear life, until I realized that maybe it was a little dangerous… This
wasn’t Irene passing us by. This was Sandy and she was
hitting us with all she had left, and it was a LOT. We all huddled down in our
living room, watching the news when we saw sparks flying in the distance from
our window, and suddenly, from what we could see from Brooklyn, the power went
out in Manhattan. I had been texting friends there and all of a sudden we
stopped, not sure when the power would be restored. Other friends updated
Facebook with statuses of water flooding the streets and terrible winds
battering their homes, and we all calmed down a little, wishing for the howling
to stop and the world to feel safe again.
It wasn’t so funny anymore. The next
day, we woke up to a new day, grey but warm, and still had power at home. My
friend and I decided to walk over the bridge into Manhattan to see if our
friends and workplaces were OK. There was no power for 40 blocks. Streets were
flooded, subway tunnels were flooded, trees were down, old and disabled people
were stuck in tall buildings, and there was no hot water. There was also no
cell service for 40 blocks, so we walked around the Lower East Side and West
Village, hoping to bump into people we knew, headed up to Times Square and BAM
the lights were on up there (and we walked into a random Irish pub and bumped
into all of our friends, that’s NYC for you).
The power didn’t come back on for a week. I
was lucky from a living standpoint, as my home wasn’t affected. Both of my
places of work remained closed for a week, meaning that I went without pay for
as long as the power was out, and my bosses’ second restaurant on the other
side of the Hudson was flooded up to the ceiling (we didn’t reopen until May of
the following year the damage was so bad). Friends lost their apartments due to
flooding, and entire neighborhoods along the NYC beaches lost EVERYTHING.
Homes, schools, shops were destroyed, peoples’ entire lives gone, just like
that, into the storm surge. Me losing a week’s wages and tips seemed like
nothing compared to what other people were going through. Public transport
remained down for days, and petrol ran out in many of the petrol stations, a
lonely tanker appearing now and then when they were able to get through to the
city. People would line up at 2am and sleep in their cars, hoping that there
would be enough petrol to fill their tanks. I walked around the West Village at
9pm, completely lost, uncomfortable in the eeriness of complete darkness,
relying on car lights and torches to guide my way. My amazing roommate and one
of my favorite people on earth worked tirelessly over in the Rockaways and Red
Hook, clearing homes and beaches. Our city beaches were gone; dunes disappeared
into the relentless ocean.
I learnt that the winds may not always
cause the most damage in a hurricane. When you live by the coast (don’t forget,
Manhattan is an island, and NYC is literally on the coast), storm surges are
the most dangerous part. When water floods through your underground subway
system, into the streets where you walk every day it really helps you
understand that hurricanes are tremendously powerful. And by the time she
reached NYC Sandy had been downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone. I can’t even
begin to imagine what more devastation she could have done at a Category 1 or
higher.
Today my heart goes out to the people who
have gone through Harvey and Irma, those who live on islands and who could not
evacuate, those who did not have the resources to evacuate. I will never again
say “that was it?!”, I will never again think “oh, it’s JUST a hurricane”. I’ve
lived through many a gale force wind, but I honestly hope I never have to
witness a hurricane again. The devastation is unreal. New York City went
silent, powerless, for a week. Can you even imagine what a hurricane does to
places with different infrastructures?
Mother Nature doesn’t care about status,
wealth, race, gender or anything else. But unfortunately humans do – our ability
to pick ourselves up from the devastation a hurricane or other natural disaster
depends on the empathy, compassion and aid of others. I feel like I was too
involved in my own wellbeing in the Sandy aftermath, wide-eyed in how surreal
it all seemed, so this year I am doing what I can to help those who have lost
everything in a natural disaster. This doesn’t mean you need to be rich –
clothes, breast milk, diapers, sanitary products can be collected and sent to
different charities/donated in specific locations (I use Charity Navigator to see which
charities are above water). And if I have to read another comment saying “why
didn’t they just LEAVE”… Well some people have nowhere to go and no extra money
to pay for petrol and hotels and flights. Sometimes you don’t have a choice.
An overview of what Sandy did to the city and surrounding area I lived in at the time. One street may have been spared and the other destroyed. It still
feels surreal looking at these pictures, but it was very, very real.
Written by Jade
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