It really was a dark and stormy night. The surf was up, the wind howled, the lights flickered and the windowpanes buckled a bit, but it felt reassuring to be in a cozy apartment with the modern world at one’s fingertips, constant updates available by phone, internet and TV.
I was back in my hometown on Long Island over the
weekend for a Lynbrook High School high school reunion; just hours after the farewell brunch held at the dockside Porthole in East Rockaway, onward travel became impossible and I ended up getting a
front-row seat as the Atlantic Ocean released a once-in-a-century fury.
Superstorm Sandy hit hard, as expected, but the collapse of infrastructure
still came as a surprise. Witnessing the storm from an ocean-facing apartment
in Long Beach, New York was fun at first, like an added bonus to a nostalgic
reunion. It was special to stand with childhood friends, watching impossibly
huge, windswept waves break on a beach full of summery memories.
Then the lights went out, telephone and cable followed,
and cell phones went dead. Electric power, the juice of modern civilization,
was gone with the flick of a celestial switch.
Losing electricity at such a time is to be hurtled a
hundred years back in time when our technology was no match for nature. The
Internet cloud we have come to depend on was suddenly out of reach, as if blown
away by the gale force winds. I-pads, I-phones, cell phones and other sleek
artifacts of our busy, hectic modern lives were rendered cold, dark and
unresponsive.
Then, as the high tide combined with the pull of the
full moon and the surge of a tropical cyclone, the sturdy wooden boardwalk was
breached by thundering waves and foamy torrents, as the high tide got higher and higher. Water spread across
the barrier island of Long Beach until the ocean met the bay. Cars were lifted
in the swift flow, flipped around and floated like toys, while boats, broken
from their moorings, drifted into parking lots, train tracks and homes.
Long Beach, Long Island, like many other seaside
communities in New Jersey and Staten Island, was suddenly off the radar, out of
touch, hidden in a black hole of sorts. No news in, no news out. Actual
conditions in the immediate area were less than grievous, the apartment
building weathered the storm except for the flooding on the first floor, but
there was no way of knowing what was happening more than a few hundred yards
away.
People in the apartment building lit candles but the
mood was less than romantic, sharing stories about loss of water, dripping
freezers and toilets that didn’t flush.
At one point, several residents gathered under the
fading illumination of an emergency light on the third floor to share what
little information there was to share.
”I miss my TV,” said a young businessman.
”I miss my TV, too, added a college professor.
“Yeah. I miss my TV,” sighed a dental hygienist.
I missed my computer. It’s both a testament to our
entertainment-addled age and the critical need for reliable information in a
time of crisis that we all hungered to be connected electronically to the
larger world. We ended up gravitating to windows, watching the weather and
swirling cars and water surges below.
With daybreak, it was still difficult to assess the
damage. The waters had receded, reduced to puddles and ponds banked by sand
plied as thick as snow drifts. I ventured down a pitch-black staircase and
forded a flooded entrance lobby. The force of the high water had smashed the
front door, glass shattered to bits. I climbed up the cracked ramp of a broken
and twisted boardwalk and headed west along its buckled, bent, surface wending
my way towards a hotel where I thought it might be possible to get food and
water. Dangling wires, collapsed walls, a drowned cat and beached fish,
splintered planks and exposed nails demanded slow going, even though fierce
squalls and hurricane gusts thrust me forward and made me reach for the
non-existent guardrail that was washed away by the storm.
There were a few police cars in sight and some national
guard jeeps and armored personnel carriers, grinding up and down the sandy boulevards
downtown, but most residents had little choice but to venture out on foot.
The nearest hotel was flooded, vehicles around it
embedded in sand, but the boardwalk level lobby was intact and there were a few
people milling about nervously. I figured where people gather, there was news
to be found; I hoped to add to my limited understanding of what was going on
the work of many eyes and ears, the word of travelers passing through.
In the ocean front café there was no toast or coffee to
be had, the kitchen was understandably out of commission, but the hotel staff
put out a table of bread, jam, juice and bottled water, and handed out
flashlights to those venturing up and down dark hallways and unlit staircases.
The telltale trucks of TV news crews were parked outside, a promising sign as
there was something I was craving more than food; information.
I ran into a man in the lobby whose home was destroyed;
he carried with him a backpack and a crate of weathered files and papers.
Several TV crews spent the night in the hotel, another had just arrived,
driving in from lower Manhattan across the only bridge open. Curfew was yet
unenforced and the toll booths unattended.
What was happening? Damage? Casualties?
Reports of fire and flooded homes in neighboring coastal
communities were not entirely unexpected, but it came as a surprise to learn
that lower Manhattan and much of Long Island was blacked out. What's more, Long
Beach had no water, the sewage system was broke and most of the cars that at
first glance appeared to have escaped the storm unscathed, but for a coat of
sand and brine, were rendered inoperable.
After exchanging updates with a determined British
camera crew who were fighting the wind to film from the boardwalk, I
volunteered to be their local guide, showing not just the storm damage, but
also helping to win the cooperation of locals and put things in context of a
beach community just miles from where I grew up and went to school. For the
first time in a long career in journalism, I was in effect, a native informant.
Covering Long Beach with a British news crew brought to mind years in the field;
traipsing through the ruins of earthquake-damaged Japan, of riot-torn Bangkok,
of China on the cusp of an uprising with foreign TV crews, looking for local
informants. It gave me a better understanding of how frustrated people used the
camera of a foreign news crew to deliver an oblique criticism of their own
leaders, why some teary-eyed people might gush off camera but not on camera,
because they were in no mood to perform for a camera, or why interviewees,
after baring their souls and sharing their sorrow, would ask small favors, and
tidbits of the latest news, from a crew that was in possession of a working
vehicle, bottled water and links to the outside world.
The usual practice for TV news crews is to shoot first,
ask permission later, if at all. This created some tension while navigating the
thick patchwork quilt of American ethnic diversity. One minute we'd be in the
swamped home of a retired, Irish American cop, engaged in a lively conversation
that could have gone on all day, the next minute we were intruding on the
privacy of a stunned, broken Latino man whose basement home was entirely under
water, colorful plastic toys floating like buoys. When the camera rolled, he
froze, unable to communicate in English, instead releasing in a torrent of
Spanish. He expressed the fear he felt for his three year old child, caught
between flood and high winds at midnight until offered refuge in his neighbor's
house.
We tried talking to national guardsmen in camouflage
uniforms and Federal Emergency Management Agency officials, but they seemed to know little and said even less.
At one point our cameraman approached a long line of African-Americans lining
up for water, only to be yelled at and chased away by a community organizer.
"Turn that damn thing off, we have enough to deal with as it is."
The crew was operating on London time, which meant that
the 10pm news deadline was rapidly approaching, so we made a dash for New York
City along debris-strewn deserted roads, crossing empty bridges, passing a
looted shopping center and an eerily immobile airport, finally crossing through
blacked out sections of Flatbush to reach the one link to Long Island that
never closed down, the oldest and most solidly built bridge of all, the
Brooklyn Bridge. The driver for the rented van, an immigrant with a weak
command of English, knew the roads like the back of his hand and was our steady
compass under chaotic conditions of storm-swept highways and blacked out
traffic lights.
Coming into Manhattan from the bridge it was immediately
obvious there was no power, which made the little light left in the gloomy late
afternoon sky all the more luminous.
We pulled up to the entrance of a five star hotel next to
Ground Zero, the crew keen to get back to their rooms to find a coddled refuge
from the storm, only to find chaos. No lights of course, but did the toilets
all have to be out of service too? Elevators stuck. Staff overwhelmed with
disgruntled luxury guests. I couldn't wait to get out of there. I headed north
on foot walking block after block along blacked out streets and past boarded up
shops until I got to midtown and suddenly the lights were on and mood almost
festive, streets packed with pedestrian refugees escaping the Stone Age reality
of life in the marbled canyons of a lower Manhattan deprived of power, food and
water. I later read a tweet that described the transition perfectly; it was
like going from East Berlin to West Berlin.
On 31st Street, I found a Korean restaurant, tables packed, and had a
bowl of hot soup, thankful for small luxuries like a warm, well-lit room, with
hot food. Then I joined the northward flow of New Yorkers who were also moving
from the dark zone to the light zone. There was a stark faultline between power
out and power on neighborhoods; traversing the two was as dramatic as leaving a
static monochrome Kansas for the living color of Oz.
In days to come, there would be candle-lit gatherings in
beachfront homes of childhood friends, filling the long night with stories and
curfew-defying moonlit walks along the shore where the ocean now lapped like
puppy trying to reclaim it’s innocence. In time tempers would flare and the
mood would grow gloomy as attempts at power restoration failed, gas supplies
dwindled, and those with more turned their backs on those with less, as
politicians went about bickering and campaigning as usual, as life went on, at
most gently interrupted for those outside the disaster zone, while those inside
suffered in silence, trying to save hearth and home, trying to keep their
dignity after being battered and exposed by the storm.
I saw
in this similar dynamics to disasters in Asia and elsewhere; the stunned
silence, the sense of being neglected, the shock, the uneven burdens of rich
and poor, only this time with a strong Long Island accent.
As a journalist I have been a frequent witness to
disaster and its aftermath, most especially in poor and developing countries,
but it wasn't until Hurricane Sandy hit my ostensibly modern hometown in the
New York metropolitan area that I realized that it only takes a dark and stormy night to pierce the comforting veneer of civilization. The third world is
here, it is everywhere and it is us.
