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Many FEMA Centers Remain Closed as Frustrated Locals Search for Aid - Roxbury - DNAinfo.com New York

Many FEMA Centers Remain Closed as Frustrated Locals Search for Aid - Roxbury - DNAinfo.com New York

Everything is in short supply; perishable food, heat, power, gasoline, patience. There are long lines waiting for gas at the gas stations. The lines of cars go down the street and around the block. Some of the lines required police officers to keep the crowd from getting too boisterous. Mostly people waited in an orderly line, but they are out of gas. They can't get to work, they can't take the kids to school, they can't go somewhere warm because they can't drive there. I am in Staten Island where the public transportation system is not as extensive as on Manhattan and people are frustrated. Even when there was finally gas for the cars, it was rationed. Even ending on license plate meant you could fill up on even days. Hours each day are spent trying to survive to get basic items. Some of the people in the gas lines were lining up at night and staying in their cars so they could be the first in line the next morning to get gas.

After a short time in Lower Manhattan we moved to Staten Island where there was more damage. We moved into a building to work that had no heat, but we were out of the wind. People on Staten Island were devistated by the damage and loss they had experienced and working with the survivors was draining. We were still living in Times Square because the disaster survivors were living in hotels in the area. We had a minimum of a 2 hour drive to work, worked a 12 hour day, and a minimum of 2 hours home, depending on how bad the traffic was. Those were some very long days.

There were no lights in Lower Manhattan: no elevators, no electricity to keep food from spoiling, no electricity to pump the water up the apartment buildings or to pump the sewage down the building. Residents described the floors of their apartment buildings as pitch black. They said you have to put one hand on the wall and feel your way down. If you live 20 floors up, that is a slow and dangerous walk. The food sat in the kitchen and the refrigerators and rotted. They were not able to take their garbage down all those floors in the darkness so the garbage sat in the apartment. They described the smell in the apartment buildings as rotting garbage mixed with the smell of sewage. Some of them, the younger and healthier, made the trek down the apartment stairs looking for electricity to charge their cell phones so that they could connect with the outside world and to have a phone in case they had a personal emergency. There was no food to purchase because the stores had the same problem with rotting food and the restaurants could not cook the food even if they had it. The first day we worked there we went without food all day because we couldnt find any to purchase. The next day we located a pizza restaurant with a wood-fire oven that was making cheese pizza. That cheese pizza tasted soooo good. One of the things we did was to use our bus to generate power to let people charge their cell phones. We gathered quite a crowd around our bus while their phones charged. They were courteous to each other and even with the large crowd there was no problem.

We went to work in the dark and drove home from work in the dark. But when we got to our hotels in Times Square, it was as if nothing had happened. The lights were on, the people were shopping, the shows were going and it was a bit disconcerting. It was as if there were parallel universes and we were going in and out of them. One had all the conveniences, the other had none. After being cold all day, I went back to the hotel and took a very hot shower, trying to get my body warm again.

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.