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In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the Oct. 29 maelstrom that miraculously bypassed Central New York, communities in the New York City area, including New Jersey and Connecticut, were slowly recovering from the wallop of the storm.
This writer, a native New Yorker, had been training for months to run the New York City Marathon, scheduled for Nov. 4, but instead joined other runners in relief efforts in his family’s Staten Island neighborhood of Oakwood Beach. He made the decision not to run the race long before New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg finally did the right thing and, on Nov. 2, canceled the 26.2-mile trek through the five boroughs. Starting the race on Staten Island, as is the norm, would have proven difficult, as Griffin-Nolan’s trek there, subsequent assistance to the storm’s victims and observations, printed below, show.
What follows are some stories of the people who survived the storm, those who are helping them recover, and ideas for how Central New Yorkers can help out downstate.
A Day at the Beach
Andre Zhigin and his wife, who did not want to give her name, live on Tarlton Street in Staten Island, just three blocks from New York Harbor. They’ve been here 10 years, and are part of a large wave of Russian emigres who have settled on Staten Island in recent decades. Andre works as an ambulance driver. On the night of the storm he was in the ambulance when his wife called his cell phone, panicking as the water in their home rose to the second story. They have four chihuahuas that they adore, and she would not think of abandoning them.
Andre raced down Hylan Boulevard, then turned on Guyon Avenue, all the while trying to get to her. When he reached Mill Road, still three blocks from the house, the water was too high. He got out of the ambulance and the torrent swept him away. “My partner had to rescue me,” he said. “I almost drowned.”
Finally he was able to swim to the house, where he found his wife clinging to the dogs on the second floor. Five days after the storm, they carried the little dogs out past the muddiest part of the street to walk them down closer to the beach.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been to visit them and they have filed their paperwork with the government agency, hoping for some disaster relief. Now they are waiting for their insurance company to tell them what they will provide, the key piece in determining what their future will hold.
Nearly a dozen runners who were scheduled to participate in the New York City Marathon spent 90 minutes hauling material out of their home, which was scooped up by two front loaders from the Department of Sanitation. Couches, chairs, shelves, racks, carpets, cookware and silverware—if you have ever seen it in a house, it was out there on the street.
The marathoners came to Staten Island after the 26.2-mile road race was canceled by Mayor Bloomberg. Thousands of runners traded their athletic gear for work clothes, and fanned out across the city to help people devastated by the hurricane. More than 250 of those runners found their way to Oakwood Beach, where they spent the day hauling soggy drywall and insulation from basements, raking tons of sea grass from yards, and piling furniture and other belongings on the curb for truck drivers to haul away.
Sticker Shock
As darkness descended at barely 6 p.m. on Nov. 4, the first night of Eastern Standard Time, the reality of another chilly night presented itself to the residents of Oakwood Beach. A mother and daughter whose name I have forgotten showed up at the staging area at Riga Avenue asking for cleaning materials. Frank Lorenzo, a Medicaid fraud investigator for the city of New York, helped them load a basket of Clorox, sponges, mops, rubber gloves, Comet and other donated scrubbing items, which we carried over to my mother’s car, one of the few in the neighborhood with a full tank of gas.
Frank had to insist that they also take blankets, flashlights and batteries, and some canned soups. It’s hard to get these people to take stuff: We had to walk them through the whole lineup of items and ask about each one, then convince them. We don’t like to take no for an answer, and they take a lot of pride in taking care of themselves.
Lorenzo has been working with his friends Derek Tabacco and Phil Ferrante, Staten Island businessmen who set up the staging area on Nov. 2 after the principal at a local Catholic high school (which they both attended) told them they had to vacate the gymnasium that had been their depot for clothing, food and other relief supplies. They occupied the front yard of an elderly neighbor and sent out social media requests for volunteers and donations. Since then they have been deluged with food, clothing, blankets, flashlights, cleaning supplies and toiletries. And the stuff keeps coming in.
These two women have lived in the neighborhood only two months. They have no other family and don’t know their neighbors. When we drove them to their house, a large pickup with pet carriers and a sticker saying “SPCA” sat in front of the house. Theirs was a house I had seen earlier in the day with a note about two cats. The cats did not belong to the ladies we were helping, but the cat owners had written their Massachusetts (!) phone numbers on their door asking anyone who found the cats to call them.
The SPCA guys had found both cats under mattresses in the house and had called the owners, who were going to pick them up at the shelter. Presumably they were previously tenants at this house, and the cats followed their instinct and returned there when the storm hit. I noticed more and more cats out as the temperature dropped and nighttime approached.
As we listened to the stories of people who decided to stay in their homes as the monster storm approached, many of them were pet owners. Most of them had no idea that shelters were willing to take pets.
One more problem: There was a big red sticker on the door of the women’s house. That meant the building department had inspected the house and determined that it was structurally unsafe and that no one could enter, much less spend the night. There was no way to convince these women that they should accept shelter for the night, or stay in the city bus that was providing a warm place at the staging area, so they went into their house anyway.
Law and Disorder
Mark Lane sits in front of the 113 Fox Beach Ave. bungalow he shares with his wife. It’s got a red sticker on the door. The 57-year-old is a retired plumber and has lived here for 16 years. The tiny bungalow, just a few doors down and across the street from the house where a father and son died in the storm, has been declared unsafe. He’s not supposed to go in. He’s waiting for the insurance company to decide what he’ll get for the property, and then he plans to move elsewhere on the island.
His wife, who was out shopping when I stopped by, has a great sense of humor. Next to the door with the red sticker, she hung a water pistol and a sign warning that “We Shoot Looters—with water.” In this neighborhood, like most others in the wet zone, rumors of looting are rampant, but they are always about somewhere else. A police detective told me that he had two cases of looting the first night, and the perps were quickly apprehended. From the mood of the people I believe that the greatest likelihood of violence occurring here would be if the people caught a looter and the police were not around to protect the guilty party.
“This has been great,” said Lane, referring to his years on the beach. “I loved it here. I walked to the beach every day. I fished when I wanted. I saw guys land 5-foot sharks from the pier. It was convenient for shopping—I never had to even go to Hylan Boulevard. It’s a great place to live, but after this, we’re done.”
On the night of the storm Lane took refuge with friends farther inland. At high tide on Sunday night, Oct. 28, he got a call from his brother, who lives around the block. He and his wife were trapped in the house and the water was rising. As the tide receded, Mark headed to the beach. He says he saw plenty of New York Police Department officers, but none who would help him get to his brother. An Army convoy appeared, and one of the soldiers offered to drive him through the water to the house. They were able to get through the neighborhood in a Humvee and lifted his brother and sister-in-law off their roof.
On a sunny afternoon six days after the storm, Lane gave his political analysis of the situation. As he talked, neighbors stopped by to check on a deaf couple that lived nearby—turns out they are all right and moved in with family.
“I’m a believer in government,” noted Lane, once a local official with New York City’s now-defunct Liberal Party. “I’m a big Obama fan. But we haven’t seen anything from the government here. It’s been the people themselves who got together to help one another. I’ve never seen anything like this. I had to get the Army to help my brother while the police sat in their cars.”
Waiting for Kickoff
Billy Schaeffer is a big guy. He sits in front of his house sipping a bottle of water, letting the sun dry out his collection of Playboy magazines, old photographs and his framed portrait of (long dead Yankee catcher) Thurman Munson. Billy doesn’t look like a man down on his luck. He laughs easily, shrugs off the hardship of living without running water and power for a week. He was in Kansas City, Mo., when the storm hit, and drove two days in a rental car to get home.
He found the house intact, but water over 12 feet high had filled his basement and come up to the middle of the first floor’s windows. For the first 15 years he lived here, this was a bungalow. Just a year and a half ago, Billy added on a second story and refinished the entire house. He’s not worried now: “I’ve got flood insurance. They’ll just build it again.” On Sunday morning, Nov. 4, he’s waiting for the Giants game to begin. He’s got his radio and some iced Budweiser.
“I heard the Steelers decided not to come last night and take up hotel rooms; they’ll drive in today. They did the right thing,” he said. Like most people in this neighborhood, this 33-year-old cable guy appreciates when people do the right thing. Unfortunately for Giants fans, the Steelers did not do the right thing: Pittsburgh topped New York, 24-20.
Billy’s brother John lives around the block. His house was knocked off its foundation, and he wants to get his insurance money and move out. Billy pointed to the back of the house across the street, where two local men, 51-year-old John Filipowicz and his 20-year-old son John Jr., drowned in their basement.
Relief Work
Marta had come here with her husband, unaware that where she lived, in Huguenot, was much closer to Tottenville High School, a much larger staging area which is also a shelter. (That school won’t open until at least Thursday, Nov. 8; most city classes will be back in session today.) Marta’s neighbors are mostly Russian immigrants like her, and they have no idea where to turn for help. She has three kids at the house. They have no septic, no water, no power and, due to the power outage and the language barrier, no communication with the rest of the world.
As volunteers loaded her car with foodstuffs, cleaning supplies, toiletries and blankets, she hugged and thanked each one of us. “It’s such a relief. I cry because I am happy now.”
Brothers in Arms
As the two brothers desperately clung to pieces of shattered houses and surfed on broken shards of boards across the waves being pushed forward by Hurricane Sandy, each tried to call their wives on their cell phones. “I was in Iraq,” said Pedro Correa, who nearly drowned on the night of Oct. 29 as the storm surge from Sandy overwhelmed his house. “I was in the World Trade Center when the second tower came down. And I never before thought I was going to die. That night {during Sandy} I called my wife to say goodbye.”
Correa moved to Staten Island from Brooklyn six years ago. A sergeant with the state Department of Corrections, he felt like he had found a special place for his family. He described living by the shore at Oakwood Beach with his wife and two children as “like living in the country right in the middle of the city. It was a life like nowhere else.
“I bought a shack and turned it into a mansion,” said the 36-year-old do-it-yourselfer. The house is gone now, blasted to pieces in a raging burst of storm sea surge that very nearly cost Pedro and his brother their lives.
Before the storm Pedro evacuated his family. On Sunday night, Nov. 4, he returned with his brother Robert Gavars, 35, to try to secure the house. “I had $30,000 worth of tools in the basement, and I wanted to keep them dry.” They set up two generators to run his sump pumps. “I got here about 7 p.m. When we went down into the basement there was maybe six inches of water. We were down there less than 15 minutes. When we came back up it was like a river was coming down the street. All of a sudden it was like 20 feet of water, and the wind blew the house off the foundation.”
The two brothers climbed, then swam, up two flights of stairs, finally getting blown out a window, clinging to a dining room table as a flotation device. When that sank, they grabbed on to the roof of another house that was floating in the maelstrom.
“We floated on that roof,” said Robert, pointing to a detached rooftop sitting in a marshy field nearly a mile from where his brother’s house once stood. “Then we jumped from one board to the next, grabbed on to anything we could, and then we ended up swimming.”
Like many in the evacuation zone, the brothers underestimated the ferocity of the storm. Now Pedro and his family are facing a financial storm that he is not sure they can weather. “I’ve got a $450,000 mortgage and $150,000 in possessions that are completely gone. The insurance says they’re gonna give me $250,000. We can’t come back from that. Financially, I’m done. I have a $15,000 Home Depot credit card—how am I going to pay that if the house is gone?”
Still, five days after the storm that nearly took his life, his main sentiment is gratitude. “I’m happy to be alive. I’m not a bitter man,” said Pedro. “I served my country in Iraq. I hope my country this time will serve me. This is New York’s Katrina. I remember swinging on that table as it was dipping in the water, going up and down and thinking, ‘This is how it’s going to end?’”
What has ended for sure is the way of life he and his family enjoyed so much. It is unlikely that the city will allow reconstruction so close to the water, and insurance companies are not going to be willing to insure structures built in the high risk zone. So Pedro, who just put down $6,000 to set up an apartment, plans to find more permanent housing. It may be on Staten Island, closer to Sing Sing Prison, where he has worked since Arthur Kill Correctional Facility closed three years ago.
“You look out on this—this is my neighborhood—it all floated away. It’s a way of life that is gone—will never be back. . . ”
We Take Care of Our Own
People outside the area keep asking to whom they should donate. While many reflexively give to the Red Cross, I have to say that no one in this neighborhood has had a kind word to say about the Red Cross. The first Red Cross presence I heard of was four days after the storm, when a truck appeared serving coffee. In this situation, the neighbors themselves turned out to be their own salvation.
If you are able and inclined to give support to the recovery, people here on the ground have expressed a great deal of confidence in the Stephen Siller Foundation (tunneltotowersrun.org), formed in honor of a firefighter who died en route to the World Trade Center in 2001. It has set up its own fund specifically for Staten Island. According to my sister Kathy Bayer, an elementary school teacher on the island, the foundation has a good record of doing what they say they will do.
For updates on giving opportunities, consult Ed Griffin-Nolan's Facebook page.
