Hurricane Sandy

I had another blog for a while, but I am back. I have been to many, many disasters since I last wrote here. Currently I am in NY helping with the Hurricane Sandy disaster. I flew into Philadelphia, PA because all nearby airports were closed from the storm. I got a rental car to drive to Newark, NJ turned that in and got another rental car for the next 30 days. The Hertz rental in NJ had no power and the people renting the cars were using headlamps for light. I used my flashlight to use the restroom because it was pitch black, but not everyone has a flashlight to use, and perhaps it is better not to see what others have done in the dark. I drove into New York facing the place where the Twin Towers had been. I sucked in my breath as the memories from the time I spent there at 9/11 came rushing back. As I drove on the West Highway, I remembered all the signs and plackards and crowds from 9/11and the long, long line of dump trucks that stretched on for as far as you could see. I pushed those memories aside and drove to my hotel in Times Square.

I got up the next morning to go to work at a new mobile DRC in Lower Manhattan. I got up in the dark and drove to work in the dark, but there was no light. There were no street lights or street signals for directing traffic. Only a few intersections had police directing traffic. It was very dangerous to poke the car out into the intersection an inch at a time in the pitch black, trying to get the traffic to see my headlights so that they stop long enough for me to cross the street. No one wanted to stop and the drivers in NYC are pretty aggressive about getting where they want to go! I took some pictures of driving to work, but the first ones I took were black squares. I had to wait for the sun to come up a little bit so that the pictures would turn out.