Sandy Biggest Atlantic Storm Ever

[cjppjc]

Re: Sandy Biggest Atlantic Storm Ever

Holy heavens! For reals? Have you verified this?

I believe it. There are still thousand of customers without power in Northwest New Jersey.

http://outages.firstenergycorp.com/nj.html

[doom&gloom]

Re: Sandy Biggest Atlantic Storm Ever

New Jersey has got their Obama to solve the problems.

But I say it's gona get worst. Climate change is for real. The Day After Tomorrow is not science fiction, at the current rate, it is what Manhattan will look like by 2035.

Actually yes, The Day After Tomorrow IS science fiction. It's a movie meant to evoke emotion and sway, and it obviously did both with you.

When the 'climate scientists' and that blowhard AlGore were all beside themselves, they did no good to 'the movement' by lying about things like 'the hockey stick', ignoring solar events and sun cycles, ocean currents, or a host of other things that have an affect upon the 'climate'

And when the data showed that nothing had been warming for about a decade, they reframed their debate to 'climate change' to keep it going. The clubbyness of the East Anglia emails showed how those in control were doing their best to stifle ANY dissenting opinion. Real science should never be afriad if dissent or questions, but these guys sure were!

It might be reasonable to take all this a bit more seriously if, coupled with all their dubious assertions, the 'climate scientists' put out a plan that would NOT entail yet more governmental taxation with the money going into some black hole of spending -- as usual.

Realistically, there is absolutely NO need for any kind of taxation, since policies that would 'benefit the planet' would also alleviate some of the pressure on fossil fuels. However, despite a Dept of Energy, we don't have, and have never had, any kind of long term energy plan. Proof positive yet again that politicians have NO interest in solving problems, just keeping them alive continuously so they may be used to bleed voters for more money on a regular basis.

Now personally I am not delusional enough to believe man has NO affect upon the planet, but I am relistic enough to know all the models they use are flawed. And despite all this 'greehouse gas' buildup, we don't seem to have turned into crispy critters yet Nor will we.

The planet has been both much warmer and much colder than it is now. We are not that significant that we will 'burn it up'.

[touchring]

Re: Sandy Biggest Atlantic Storm Ever

The planet has been both much warmer and much colder than it is now. We are not that significant that we will 'burn it up'.

Perhaps it makes a difference to one's perspective if you lived in Asia vs America. It appears that much of America, even the NYC, hasn't changed much in the last 15 years, but the changes in Asia especially since the turn of the millennium is earth shattering.

Cities and farms replaced what was previously virgin jungle and forests, aircon compressors popping out all over the place, an explosion in vehicle population, massive jams, massive coal power plants, unbelievable pollution.

For most parts of Asia, you won't recognize the place you been to only 15 years ago. And I'm not just talking about China where the changes in landscape since 1997 is ridiculous, to the point of being surreal.

[don]

New York Subway Repairs Border ‘on the Edge of Magic’

Metropolitan Transportation Authority employees using a pump train to get water out of the L train tunnel under the East River.

you can't beat libertarians for getting things fixed . . these are city workers?


By MATT FLEGENHEIMER

Inside a sprawling Manhattan command center, a board that detects subway activity by sensor had gone quiet. No trains were running; the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had shut the system down as Hurricane Sandy approached.

Suddenly, the screens inexplicably crackled to life.

Something was moving down there. And it was not the trains.

To the subway’s chief maintenance officer, the storm’s encroaching waters were even more obvious. He was forced to flee with his flashlight from the South Ferry station in Lower Manhattan as the waters charged over the platform and up the terminal stairs, chasing him like an attack dog.

It has been less than two weeks since the most devastating storm in the New York City subway system’s 108-year history. Seven tunnels beneath the East River flooded. Entire platforms were submerged. Underground equipment, some of it decades old, was destroyed.

The damage was the worst that the system had ever seen. And yet, the subways have come back — quicker than almost anyone could have imagined.

Less than three days after the storm hit, partial subway service was restored. Most major lines were back within a week. Repairs came so quickly in some cases that the authority was ready before Consolidated Edison had restored power.

“Some of what they’re doing borders on the edge of magic,” said Gene Russianoff, the staff lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign, a rider advocacy group that is frequently critical of the authority.

Across the region’s transportation network, scars from Hurricane Sandy are still keenly visible. PATH service remains out between Hoboken and New York. New Jersey Transit’s Midtown Direct service is not running at all. At the Port Authority Bus Terminal, commuters endure chaos and winding lines that have lasted for hours.

But nearly everything under the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s auspices, from its commuter railroads to its bridges and tunnels, is running close to normal. Each restoration presented its own challenge, but none more daunting than the task of resurrecting the subways.

Interviews with those who oversaw the recovery suggest a rescue mission both thrilling and frightful, with officials at times alternating between a compulsion to cling to protocol and to toss it aside. Workers traversed darkened, slippery tunnels, inspecting sludgy tracks, equipment and third rails. Even the subway map itself was reimagined, as bright lines were faded to represent downed service.

None of this was truly expected in the days leading up to the storm.

In a morning radio interview on Oct. 25, the Thursday before the hurricane was projected to arrive, Joseph J. Lhota, the chairman of the transportation authority, recalled Tropical Storm Irene, which spurred an unprecedented systemwide shutdown last year.

“I don’t think we’re looking at anything like that,” he told WNYC.

By the afternoon, the tone had changed. During a 2 p.m. conference call with the governor’s office, Mr. Lhota recalled, state officials asked of the storm’s arrival: “What is zero hour?”

From there, officials worked backward. The authority’s storm plan included triggers for closing trains, bridges and tunnels, based on minimum thresholds of sustained winds. Waiting for these winds to arrive before acting was not an option.

“If we got everybody in on Monday morning,” Mr. Lhota said, “we couldn’t get them home.”

By Sunday morning, Mr. Lhota recalled, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo told him he had made a decision: the system would be taken offline at 7 p.m.

Thomas F. Prendergast, the president of New York City Transit, had already dispatched workers to cover vents and place sandbags at stations, and by Friday, the agency had begun coordinating with the Police Department and union leadership for the possibility of a shutdown. Barriers were placed at station entrances, including at South Ferry, near the tip of Lower Manhattan.

With a forecast for a storm surge of over 11 feet, Mr. Prendergast knew that flooding was possible. He predicted that three tunnels might have some flooding, which would equal the most in his career.

“I never anticipated seven,” he said. As the storm neared, pump trains were placed strategically at the center of the system, where crews could easily access them and approach the likely flood zones.

The dual tasks — shutting down the system and moving trains to safe ground — were often carried out simultaneously, Mr. Lhota said. Some trains continued taking passengers after 7 p.m. on Sunday, he said, but only if their route took them near their protected storage plot.

By early Monday, an eerie quiet had fallen over the agency. The subway was off, the trains were stored, but the storm had not yet arrived.

Around 8 p.m., after a local television appearance, Mr. Lhota decided to head downtown. But the West Side Highway was already submerged. Soon, he found, Greenwich Street was also impassable. He headed down Broadway, as far as he could.

Moments later, Mr. Lhota happened upon Mr. Prendergast, who had covered himself in a yellow jacket and a hard hat. Then the men in charge of trains and buses realized that another mode of travel might be required. “We’re talking about, ‘We’re going to need a bigger boat,’ ” Mr. Lhota recalled.

At the same time, Joseph Leader, the subway’s chief maintenance officer, went into South Ferry. No one knew the barriers outside the station had given way, Mr. Leader said, breached apparently by 15-foot hunks of wood that, late last week, remained strewed across the mezzanine, beside the turnstiles.

As he lurched into the terminal, the water had already risen over the platform. When it began climbing the stairs, Mr. Leader fled. He made his way on foot toward the darkened loop track, approaching Rector Street, training his flashlight ahead. “You could just see it rising, coming up the tracks,” he said. “I realized, I can’t stay here much longer.”

At the rail command center, the boards began to light up. “Everything just started to look like there was a train everywhere,” said Tom Calandrella, the senior director of rapid transit operations. “Once it gets wet, that same thing that conducts the train wheels, water, if it pulls up to a certain height, conducts everything.”

Mr. Lhota spent Monday night at a hotel in Midtown, near the authority’s headquarters on Madison Avenue. He got in around 3 a.m. and returned to the office hours later. In between, he found a deli open nearby. He ordered an omelet.

By late Monday night, teams had already been dispatched to inspect sections of the system, particularly those out of the surge’s path. Some work trains even ran during the storm, in areas removed from the surge, to check for water buildups, Mr. Leader said.

But restoration options were few, at least in the short term.

“It’s triage,” Mr. Lhota said.

Strategy turned on a simple question, Mr. Leader said, posed often in meetings with agency officials: “Well, what works?”

It seemed likely that buses could return quickly, as they soon would on a limited schedule, but the subways required painstaking decisions on how to deploy the agency’s resources.

“We had 7 under-river tunnels flooded out of 14,” Mr. Prendergast said. “And we have three pump trains. The first thing we have to do is, which tunnels do you go after first?”

The Joralemon Street tunnel was an obvious target, given the heavy ridership of the No. 4 and 5 trains and what appeared to be relatively little damage to the tube. It was dry almost immediately. Other tunnels, like the 14th Street tube that carries the L train or the Greenpoint tunnel for the G, had to wait.

Water in the L tunnel stretched 3,400 feet and was 15 feet deep. It was not dry until this week. For the Montague Street tunnel, which carries the R line, 4,000 feet of water, 10 feet deep, had still not been entirely pumped as of Thursday.

Publicly, the authority did not provide a timeline for service restoration. But Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg offered a guess at a news conference the day after the storm, estimating that service would not return for “a good four or five days.”

Mr. Lhota recalled seeing the announcement and wondering where the mayor was getting his information.

“It obviously wasn’t true, either,” Mr. Lhota said. “I have no idea who was briefing him.”

(A spokeswoman for the mayor said Mr. Lhota and Deputy Mayor Caswell F. Holloway corresponded frequently, but added that a briefing for the mayor before the news conference had focused on more immediate city concerns and included little about transportation.)

Nonetheless, the estimate may have succeeded in tempering public expectations for the system’s recovery. Mr. Lhota said the authority also made a point of publishing images from the tunnels, both to communicate progress and to relay the scope of the tasks, allowing riders to set expectations accordingly.

Beyond deploying the pump trains, which are diesel-powered, Mr. Calandrella said detritus on the tracks could affect draining.

And even if tunnels were pumped, obstacles remained. Workers had to inspect tracks, third rails and signals. There could be no dangerous debris in the tunnels. Some cables needed to be reattached.

Mr. Lhota said that despite the authority’s trove of ancient underground equipment, the authority’s warehouses in Queens and the Bronx were rarely without a required replacement part.

“Things break all the time,” he said. “We have inventory.”

Test trains began running partial routes on Wednesday. But with power still out in Lower Manhattan, no trains could run between Manhattan and Brooklyn. If not for the power loss, officials said, the No. 4 and 5 trains could have very likely returned during the week.

A so-called bus bridge — service to plug the gaps in the limited subway routes — emerged as the only option, Mr. Lhota said. Some officials worried about offering a below-average experience underground.

“There was a debate here about, ‘Do we bring them back if we can’t bring the countdown clocks?’ ” Mr. Lhota recalled, incredulously. “I was saying, ‘Yeah, we bring them back.’ ”

Charles Gordanier, the authority’s chief map designer, began drafting changes to the old subway map, fading out the lines that were without service. Copies were released to the public on Wednesday, and have since been updated as service is restored.

The bus bridges created winding lines and widespread gridlock, resulting from a simple math problem, Mr. Prendergast said: Between 1,500 and 2,000 people can pile into a train. A bus can fit no more than 75 or so.

Accordingly, connecting the boroughs by subway was the next priority. Late Friday, as the power returned, officials were confident they could restore full service to some trains, like the Lexington Avenue line and the No. 7, almost immediately. By Saturday morning, they had, and several other connections between boroughs followed.

After a news conference Saturday with Mr. Cuomo, Mr. Lhota held up a sheet of paper with a bar graph, depicting how much subway service had returned. By day’s end, it was expected to be 80 percent.

There were some hiccups. At West Fourth Street, unexpected third-rail and switch problems delayed the return of the D, F and M trains. As the authority prepared to bring the G train back this week, a transformer blew, keeping the train offline for the morning rush hour on Wednesday. There were still service gaps on the N train, the A train in Far Rockaway and the R line, among others.

On Thursday morning, inside his office, Mr. Lhota checked his BlackBerry often, hoping for an update on the L train. Moments later, he placed a call to Howard B. Glaser, Mr. Cuomo’s director of state operations, whom he wanted to brief on the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.

The tunnel could open Friday, he told Mr. Glaser, remarking that Mr. Bloomberg, “like an idiot,” had predicted publicly that the tunnel might open over the weekend. “He’s making it up,” he said, after a brief hail of profanity in which Mr. Lhota wondered aloud who, exactly, Mr. Bloomberg had been talking to.

“It’s wrong,” he told Mr. Glaser. “It’s just wrong.”

Mr. Lhota also spoke of the L line’s importance, as if his audience needed convincing.

“You know who knows where the L train goes?” he barked into the phone. “All the hipsters in Williamsburg.”

The BlackBerry buzzed on the table in front of him. He grabbed it quickly, then put it back. No good news yet on the L, he said. Hours later, that would change. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” he wrote on Twitter. “The L train is back. Enjoy your trip home tonight.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/09/ny...covery.html?hp

[Ghent12]

Re: Sandy Biggest Atlantic Storm Ever

Perhaps it makes a difference to one's perspective if you lived in Asia vs America. It appears that much of America, even the NYC, hasn't changed much in the last 15 years, but the changes in Asia especially since the turn of the millennium is earth shattering.

Cities and farms replaced what was previously virgin jungle and forests, aircon compressors popping out all over the place, an explosion in vehicle population, massive jams, massive coal power plants, unbelievable pollution.

For most parts of Asia, you won't recognize the place you been to only 15 years ago. And I'm not just talking about China where the changes in landscape since 1997 is ridiculous, to the point of being surreal.

Right, and that is real anthropogenic climate change. Deforestation and smog are among the real ways that humans affect the local climate, and to some extent regional climate. It is the myth that CO2 is some demon gas that needs to be controlled that makes climate alarmists sound like shrill hacks. It is the obsession with CO2 that causes otherwise sane people to do insane things, like clear-cut Danish forests to install wind farms. It is the laser-beam focus on CO2 that allows scammers, banksters, and thermodynamically ignorant people to support things like Cap and Trade.

If you want to talk about deforestation and smog, then you are positing legitimate environmental concerns. If you want to claim that CO2 emissions must be stopped at all costs, then you are insane.

[touchring]

Re: Sandy Biggest Atlantic Storm Ever

Right, and that is real anthropogenic climate change. Deforestation and smog are among the real ways that humans affect the local climate, and to some extent regional climate. It is the myth that CO2 is some demon gas that needs to be controlled that makes climate alarmists sound like shrill hacks. It is the obsession with CO2 that causes otherwise sane people to do insane things, like clear-cut Danish forests to install wind farms. It is the laser-beam focus on CO2 that allows scammers, banksters, and thermodynamically ignorant people to support things like Cap and Trade.

If you want to talk about deforestation and smog, then you are positing legitimate environmental concerns. If you want to claim that CO2 emissions must be stopped at all costs, then you are insane.

No one cares about CO2 in China or in much of Asia. CO2 is found in soft drinks, right?

There are important issues such as the following --> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...s-scarlet.html

[doom&gloom]

Re: Sandy Biggest Atlantic Storm Ever

Right, and that is real anthropogenic climate change. Deforestation and smog are among the real ways that humans affect the local climate, and to some extent regional climate. It is the myth that CO2 is some demon gas that needs to be controlled that makes climate alarmists sound like shrill hacks. It is the obsession with CO2 that causes otherwise sane people to do insane things, like clear-cut Danish forests to install wind farms. It is the laser-beam focus on CO2 that allows scammers, banksters, and thermodynamically ignorant people to support things like Cap and Trade.

If you want to talk about deforestation and smog, then you are positing legitimate environmental concerns. If you want to claim that CO2 emissions must be stopped at all costs, then you are insane.

Too much CO2 means a lack of oxygen getting to the brain. Maybe that explains it?

[don]

a City Full of Stories

By COREY KILGANNON

ED SHEVLIN looked out over a mountain range of soggy trash in the parking lot of Jacob Riis Park in Queens and proclaimed it “an tubaiste mor” — a big disaster.

The words were in Irish, the language that survives in parts of Ireland. Few people in New York City are as immersed in the language as Mr. Shevlin, 52, a New York City sanitation worker who picked up phrases growing up in a heavily Irish-American neighborhood the Rockaways. He began to study it and banter with Irish immigrants on his trash route through familiar blocks.

And now few people are as deeply immersed in the damage wreaked upon the neighborhood as Mr. Shevlin, who for the foreseeable future is assigned to the immense cleanup: clearing battered sections of the boardwalk where he played as a child, and carting away contents of friends’ houses.

It is all hauled to the parking lot: a temporary dump with the remnants of people’s lives piled several stories high in two wide dunes stretching for a quarter mile.

“If these piles could talk, they’d be screaming,” said Mr. Shevlin, whose own apartment on Beach 103rd Street stayed dry, if without power as of Thursday. His parents’ apartment, and his brother’s house, were both flooded and severely damaged.

“I like to think I’m a strong guy, but this devastation has really gotten to me,” said Mr. Shevlin, who wears his green Department of Sanitation uniform proudly.

“I’ll be wearing this uniform every day for months,” he said. “We were the first boots on the ground and we’ll be the last to leave.”

Mr. Shevlin was profiled a year ago in this space, as the subject of the inaugural Character Study column. Hurricane Sandy’s effects seem to have permeated New York City so deeply that nearly every one of the 50 or so New Yorkers who followed Mr. Shevlin in the column has had a telling hurricane experience.

There was good fortune for A. J. Gogia, who runs a school for taxi drivers in Queens and kept gas in his tank because students who work at gas stations brought him cans of it, like apples for the teacher.

There was the wistful resiliency of Otto Mond, the 80-year-old Manhattan man who planned on running his 19th New York City Marathon. With the race canceled, he went for a casual four-mile jog and vowed to “get ’em next year.”

There was worry, as in the case of Helen Hays, who monitors the tern populations on Gull Island, off the tip of Long Island, where the battering waves destroyed part of the dock (she remained on the comparatively safer island of Manhattan).

There was the sly resourcefulness practiced by Pete Caldera, the sportswriter and Sinatra singer. His apartment in Murray Hill lost power, so he had to write his articles at a local bar, something Ol’ Blue Eyes would have endorsed.

In Queens, Mike Greenstein, the old-time strongman known as the Mighty Atom Jr., who at 91 can still pull his car with his teeth, lived two blocks from Mr. Shevlin. After the storm, he and his girlfriend hopped in that car and drove to Florida to escape the misery, his neighbors said.

To the west, Breezy Point was reduced to a surreal wasteland by fire and floodwaters. Billy Mackay lived there and worked summers as a cabana boy at the Silver Gull Beach Club, which first opened in 1963 and was used for the filming of the movie “The Flamingo Kid.” The club was devastated by the storm, though the owners plan to rebuild. As for Mr. Mackay, a phone call to his home number yielded only an automated message saying, perhaps appropriately, “All international circuits to the country you are calling are busy right now.”

To the east, in the Rosedale neighborhood on Jamaica Bay, Kim Zatto, 46, a fifth-generation bait seller in the Seaman clan, the city’s last eeling family, watched floodwaters envelop her house, and her father’s and her uncle’s on either side.

The family’s curbside bait store, out front, was nearly submerged in water that also ruined the family’s packing sheds and freezers. The frozen bait had to be discarded. Of the live bait, only the eels survived, in an underwater pen in the creek out back.

Doris V. Amen, a flamboyant funeral director in Brooklyn, stayed busy during the storm, which left her condominium in Brighton Beach without electricity. She spent more than a week in a room above her business, the Jurek-Park Slope Funeral Home near Green-Wood Cemetery, and several days cleaning up from her annual Halloween party in the funeral home’s basement, held, as usual, on Saturday night. She had used one coffin for a buffet table and another to hold the beer. She had dressed as Lady Gaga and belted out rock ’n’ roll songs with her band.

While she was cleaning up, the day after the hurricane hit, a new client called. The caller, Aris Ziagos, said he was having trouble recovering the body of his mother, Virginia Ziagos, 70, who had just died at Bellevue Hospital Center.

Ms. Amen said she hopped into her 1978 silver Cadillac hearse — which had also been a party prop — and barreled through flooded streets into blacked-out Lower Manhattan, only to be told by hospital officials that the body was not available.

“Apparently they did not know who they were dealing with,” said Ms. Amen, who can haul coffins while wearing a tight dress and high-heel pumps, all without chipping her purple nail polish or disturbing the long electronic cigarette she keeps clenched in her teeth.

She told a rollicking tale of how, armed with a flashlight and her outsize Brooklyn moxie, she went to three city morgues in search of the body and finally picked it up at the one in Queens later that night. Never one to waste a good opportunity for self-promotion, Ms. Amen arranged for the wake to be filmed by a German television crew.

The storm’s surge up the East River flooded streets in Long Island City, Queens, where Stanley Wissak, 85, owns a cab company called 55 Stan. It washed into his garage and lot and destroyed some of his fleet of 140 yellow cabs.

But there was Mr. Wissak at 4 the next morning at the garage, which lost electricity.

“If you’re the man with the keys, you can’t lay down — you got to keep going and make the best of it,” said Mr. Wissak, who settled into the cramped booth behind the bulletproof glass and dispatched drivers for the day shift, as he has done since the 1940s.

“With the subways shut down, the drivers made up to $400 a day,” he said. “One of my guys made 600 bucks driving someone to Stamford — biggest fare I’ve ever seen.”

Through the gas shortage, Mr. Wissak kept his cabs fueled from his private gas pump. He rebuffed drivers offering him $10 for a gallon, he said, and potential thieves were deterred by the police officer the local precinct assigned to guard the pump.

Catherine Kendrick, 78, dock master and lifeguard-at-large for the City of Yonkers, evacuated her office on the city pier, where she has kept watch for 60 years, even after her lifeguard husband, Frank, died while rescuing a woman during a storm 10 years ago.

Ms. Kendrick’s health is shaky and over the past year, while sitting sentry at the pier, she had been crocheting a “going-away blanket” to cover her coffin when she dies. She rescued the blanket, which took on new meaning for her after she spent nearly 10 days with no power and sleeping on a lawn chair in her dank, dark apartment.

“The storm changed my mind,” she said on Wednesday. “I’m going to redo my apartment in pastel colors to match the blanket, and I’m going to use that blanket in life, not death.”

Lois Kirschenbaum, 79, New York City’s longest-standing opera buff, clung tight to her battery-operated radio while going without electricity for five days in her longtime rent-controlled apartment in the East Village.

“I survived on QXR and peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches,” said Ms. Kirschenbaum, who is legally blind but has been going almost nightly to ballet and classical music performances in New York since the early 1950s (and to the stage door afterward).

She continued her streak during the blackout, she said. With a flashlight and help from strangers on the street, she took two buses nearly every night to Lincoln Center, she said.

“This storm brought so much tragedy, it could make an opera,” she said. “But I certainly wouldn’t want to write it.”

Nearby, on East Ninth Street, the Rev. Patrick Moloney, 81, known as “the I.R.A. priest” for his championing of Irish republican causes, also lost power for five days in the brownstone he has run for 50 years as a shelter for troubled teenagers and illegal immigrants.

Father Moloney worked with the Black Panthers and spent four years in federal prison in the 1990s in connection with a $7.4 million Brink’s armored car robbery in Rochester, which authorities said he helped pull off to fill I.R.A. coffers. He managed to get gas to keep his generator going — “God works in mysterious ways” — and he put out extension cords so that neighbors could charge their phones and other devices. He said he cooked a big Irish stew and dispensed meals and sermons to neighbors.

“I told them, “This is an act of God, not just an act of nature,’ ” he recalled.

Shane Baker, 44, the gentile champion of Yiddish theater, went around checking on all his elderly friends who are veterans of the bygone Yiddish stage. He also made the rounds with the actor Fyvush Finkel and swapped stories at local coffee shops.

Then there was Harvey Bennett, 61, the owner of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett, on Long Island, who has spent his life optimistically throwing bottled messages into the sea. He lost his roof to the hurricane winds, but not his hope.

“When all this is over, I’m going down to the ocean to throw another bottle in,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/ny...=nyregion&_r=0

[don]

Occupy Sandy

By ALAN FEUER

ON Wednesday night, as a fierce northeaster bore down on the weather-beaten Rockaways, the relief groups with a noticeable presence on the battered Queens peninsula were these: the National Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Police and Sanitation Departments — and Occupy Sandy, a do-it-yourself outfit recently established by Occupy Wall Street.

This stretch of the coast remained apocalyptic, with buildings burned like Dresden and ragged figures shuffling past the trash heaps. There was still no power, and parking lots were awash with ruined cars. On Wednesday morning, as the winds picked up and FEMA closed its office “due to weather,” an enclave of Occupiers was huddled in a storefront amid the devastation, handing out supplies and trying to make sure that those bombarded by last month’s storm stayed safe and warm and dry this time.

“Candles?” asked a dull-eyed woman arriving at the door.

“I’m sorry, but we’re out,” said Sofia Gallisa, a field coordinator who had been there for a week. Ms. Gallisa escorted the woman in, and someone gave her batteries for her flashlight. As she walked away, word arrived that a firehouse nearby was closing for the night; the firefighters there were hurrying their rigs to higher ground.

“It’s crazy,” Ms. Gallisa later said of the official response. “For a long time, we were the only people out here doing relief work.”
After its encampment in Zuccotti Park, which changed the public discourse about economic inequality and introduced the nation to the trope of the 1 percent, the Occupy movement has wandered in a desert of more intellectual, less visible projects, like farming, fighting debt and theorizing on banking. While several nouns have been occupied — from summer camp to health care — it is only with Hurricane Sandy that the times have conspired to deliver an event that fully calls upon the movement’s talents and caters to its strengths.

Maligned for months for its purported ineffectiveness, Occupy Wall Street has managed through its storm-related efforts not only to renew the impromptu passions of Zuccotti, but also to tap into an unfulfilled desire among the residents of the city to assist in the recovery. This altruistic urge was initially unmet by larger, more established charity groups, which seemed slow to deliver aid and turned away potential volunteers in droves during the early days of the disaster.

In the past two weeks, Occupy Sandy has set up distribution sites at a pair of Brooklyn churches where hundreds of New Yorkers muster daily to cook hot meals for the afflicted and to sort through a medieval marketplace of donated blankets, clothes and food. There is an Occupy motor pool of borrowed cars and pickup trucks that ferries volunteers to ravaged areas. An Occupy weatherman sits at his computer and issues regular forecasts. Occupy construction teams and medical committees have been formed.

Managing it all is an ad hoc group of tech-savvy Occupy members who spend their days with laptops on their knees, creating Google documents with action points and flow charts, and posting notes on Facebook that range from the sober (“Adobo Medical Center in Red Hook needs an 8,000 watt generator AS SOON AS POSSIBLE”) to the endearingly hilarious (“We will be treating anyone affected by Sandy, FREE of charge, with ear acupuncture this Monday”). While the local tech team sleeps, a shadow corps in London works off-hours to update the Twitter feed and to maintain the intranet. Some enterprising Occupiers have even set up a wedding registry on Amazon.com, with a wish list of necessities for victims of the storm; so far, items totaling more than $100,000 — water pumps and Sawzall saw kits — have been ordered.

“It’s a laterally organized rapid-response team,” said Ethan Gould, a freelance graphic artist and a first-time member of Occupy. Mr. Gould’s experience illustrates the effort’s grass-roots ethos. He joined up on Nov. 3 and by the following afternoon had already been appointed as a co-coordinator at one of the “distro” (distribution) sites.

OCCUPY SANDY was initially the work of a half-dozen veterans of Zuccotti Park who, on the Tuesday following the storm, made their way to public housing projects in the Rockaways and Red Hook, Brooklyn, delivering flashlights and trays of hot lasagna to residents neglected by the government. They arranged for vans to help some people relocate into shelters. When they returned to civilization, they spent the night with their extra bags of stuff at St. Jacobi Evangelical Lutheran Church in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

“They asked if they could crash here,” said Juan-Carlos Ruiz, a community organizer there who knew the Occupiers from their previous endeavors. “Those few bags became this enormous organic operation. It’s evidence that when official channels fail, other parts of society respond.”

When newcomers arrive at St. Jacobi — or at its sister site at the Church of St. Luke and St. Matthew in nearby Clinton Hill — they undergo an orientation course during which the volunteering process is explained and people are quickly introduced to the movement’s guiding spirit. There is sensitivity training (“We’re here to listen and be human”) and door-to-door training for those going into stricken communities.

All participants are asked to write their first names on a piece of masking tape and to place it somewhere prominent on their bodies. The informal atmosphere results in classic Occupy exchanges: “If you have a car, you should cluster up and go see Alexis in the shearling hat.”

Occupy Wall Street is capable of summoning an army with the posting of a tweet, and many of the volunteers last week were self-identifying veterans of the movement, although many more were not. Given the numbers passing through the churches, both fresh-faced amateurs and the Occupy managerial class — a label it would reject — were in evidence.

The St. Luke’s kitchen sits in the basement of the church, beside a well-stocked pantry of donations that on Tuesday morning was overflowing with cans of kidney beans, bottles of chocolate syrup, gallon jugs of corn oil and enormous quantities of organic Arborio rice. The peanut-butter-and-jelly team was busy making sandwiches at a table. On the crew that day, there were a Yale University student, a chef on medical leave from an institutional kitchen, a tourist visiting from Luxembourg, a budding fiction writer and an independent radio producer with her 9-year-old son, Zachary.

“We’ve made everything so far,” Susie Lindenbaum, an actress, said. “Rice and beans. Beef chili. Rosemary noodles. A big bread pudding and vegan collard greens.”

Upstairs, contributions arrived around the clock, coming in by telephone or received in person by runners who hauled the goods from cars parked at the curb to a basement sorting space where everything was organized according to handmade signs (“Shoes Here,” “Drinks & Water Here”). Volunteer drivers shuttled these supplies to more than 20 “field sites” in the hardest-hit locations: Red Hook, the Rockaways and Coney and Staten Islands.

THE Occupiers sometimes say a disconnect exists between the highly functioning distro sites and the more chaotic centers in the field. On election night, for instance, the television network Comedy Central donated 11,000 prepackaged pieces of apple pie, and volunteers who were headed in the morning to Red Hook and beyond were ordered not to leave without an armful. Most of the pies did not make it to their destinations — not that Ms. Gallisa, the field coordinator working in the Rockaways, would have wanted them. By Wednesday afternoon, with the new storm rolling in, she and her outreach team were scurrying among their various storage sites, trying to secure their own supplies.

Bridging the gap between the churches and the field is Andrew Smith, 27, who early last week was holed up in the St. Luke’s organ loft working on a list of crucial chores for the next big project: neighborhood reconstruction. On a giant pad of newsprint, Mr. Smith had jotted down two words: “Guts Logistics” — Occupy Sandy was getting into the renovation business. Under this heading, there were three numbered tasks: “1) Remove damaged materials. 2) Let buildings air out. 3) Mold remediation.”

“The long-term needs are where the real problems are,” said Mr. Smith, an experienced Occupier who two months ago helped to plan the protests marking the first anniversary of the Zuccotti occupation. “Where we’re headed now is into cleanup and rebuilding.” Volunteer brigades were scheduled, he said, to deploy to damaged areas on Saturday and Sunday. A budget for further reconstruction was already being planned.

Indeed, after he finished his to-do list and took the subway south to St. Jacobi, a woman poked her head out from the Staten Island War Room and called to him loudly as he went by, “Andy, we need more construction workers!” Acknowledging her request, Mr. Smith went up to the second-story communications room, where a six-person team was working on the protocols for accepting contributions on the phone.

After listening for a moment, Mr. Smith tendered a suggestion and the man in charge — the name on his masking tape was Peter — sighed in exasperation. “Look,” Peter said, “the amount of self-organizing here, it’s coming a bit too fast. I’m losing track, all right?” One of his colleagues asked him if he had eaten yet that day; Peter replied that he had not. Mr. Smith reached into his backpack and handed him a sandwich.

Then one of the hot-line operators rushed into the room. It seemed the Red Cross was sending them — them! — a tractor-trailer full of fresh wool blankets.

“A tractor-trailer?” Mr. Smith exclaimed.

Utterly exhausted, he laid his forehead on the shoulder of the Occupier beside him.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/ny...l?ref=nyregion

[don]

Sandy Merchandise - Fast & Furious

By LIZ ROBBINS

ON the Saturday before Hurricane Sandy struck, when forecasters were still branding the offshore menace “Frankenstorm,” Dennis and Brian Concha hung a novelty T-shirt in the window of Think D’Sign Print, their year-old shop in Cranford, N.J.

The shirt showed the familiar monster inside a hurricane symbol with “Frankenstorm 2012” in red letters dripping like blood. By the Wednesday after the storm, when downtown Cranford was an oasis of power and people were streaming into the shop, the brothers had sold two dozen.

A day later, however, when the severity of the damage on the Jersey Shore became clear, they switched gears, creating New Jersey-centered designs that could be pressed onto a shirt for $15. The proceeds, Dennis Concha said, would go to the American Red Cross and the New Jersey Relief Fund.

The Concha brothers are hardly the only ones selling Sandy. On Oct. 28, the day before the storm made landfall in New Jersey, Zazzle, an e-commerce manufacturer in Northern California, was offering Sandy key chains, Sandy mugs, Sandy hats and Sandy bumper stickers. By Thursday, there were more than 19 pages of items, including “Sandy vs. N.J.” throw pillows, many variations of a double-entendre T-shirt about the storm’s winds, a Christmas ornament reading, “The Year Sandy Came Looking for Candy, Halloween 2012,” and “I Survived Sandy” commemorative sweaters — for dogs.

Call it crass commercialism in the wake of death and destruction. Storm porn. Retail therapy. Philanthropy. Whatever the label, it is all disaster merchandise. And in the aftermath of the storm, the flood of schlock has risen fast and furious.

Popping up in Times Square days after the storm hit were black or white T-shirts for $10, and hoodies for $25, screen-printed “I Survived Hurricane Sandy” with a red geometric storm symbol.

“That kind of stuff makes me sick,” said Darren Meenan, owner of The 7 Line, an apparel company that usually specializes in Mets-related products.

“It’s the same thing when people were trying to benefit off the F.D.N.Y. and N.Y.P.D. from 9/11,” he added. “It happens with every tragedy. It even happened with Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston, if you consider those a tragedy.”

Mr. Meenan, 32, designed his own T-shirt, a $25 black shirt with red letters spelling out “uNitY,” at the counter of the Bayside Diner in Queens, on the Saturday after the hurricane hit. “I wanted to wait, not be too instant,” he said.

So far, he has more than 900 orders and he planned to start printing the shirts this weekend in a plant in Jamaica, Queens. Mr. Meenan said he would give the proceeds to small charities in Breezy Point, Queens; Long Beach on Long Island; the Rockaways; and on Staten Island.

The Sandy paraphernalia ranged from high to low art.

Sebastian Errazuriz, an artist who was born in Chile and who lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, was hand-dipping “I Love NY” T-shirts in blue ink to represent the waters that submerged parts of the city. He was selling them through the online gallery Gray Area for $40, intending to donate the profits to artists in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and in New Jersey.

To benefit the Red Cross, an online gallery based in SoHo, 20x200, was selling high-resolution NASA satellite images of the hurricane churning toward the Northeast; the 24-by-24-inch version sold for $1,200.

Digital technology has expedited the entrepreneurial drive, allowing any designer — anywhere — to put a prototype on the Web, then start production. Zazzle, which has hundreds of users upload their designs and then prints the blank objects on demand, ships in a day. A Zazzle spokeswoman, Diana Adair, said proceeds from its Hurricane Sandy sales would go to charity.

Jeremy DeFilippis’s Jersey Shore T-shirt company, Jetty Life, was telling customers the wait could be two weeks. Already, Mr. DeFilippis said, he has 10,000 orders for his crisp design, an outline of the state of New Jersey partly filled with water, with the red hurricane symbol floating above. He is printing them now and using the early proceeds from the $20 shirts to buy about $8,000 in supplies for first responders and victims still without power or food, he said.

“The only reason I’m happy is that we could help so many people — because it’s so screwed up around here right now,” he said. Mr. DeFilippis scoffed at shirts made only for money. “It’s like selling flags during wars,” he said.

Except that flags tend to sell. And disaster shirts have a shelf life of maybe a week or two, said Gino Giuffre, 50, a longtime vendor on 45th Street and Broadway whose wares include fake pashminas, hats and I Love NY shirts. When a distributor offered him the hurricane shirts, he refused on two principles.

“Because they don’t sell,” he exclaimed. “I told the distributor he’d be wiping the windows with them.”

Oh, and yes, he thought they were in bad taste.

In the history of New York City disasters, Mr. Giuffre recalls only one T-shirt that became a pop sensation: “I Survived the Blackout.” Of 1977.

“Because it was the first one,” he said.

But some Times Square vendors selling the hastily made designs said business had been brisk.

(No Hurricane Sandy merchandise was available on Canal Street midweek because, as a vendor there said, it had hit too close to home. “We were closed for eight days,” he said.)

Naveed Ehmad, 32, part of a rotating crew of vendors at 44th Street and Broadway, said they did a trial run with a dozen shirts on Nov. 3. They sold out in 30 minutes and then ordered 18 dozen.

Buyers had various reasons for their purchases.

“I work in insurance and I have an employee named Sandy,” said Barry Zurbuchen, an executive from Bermuda, who bought a white shirt from Mr. Ahmed.

One woman said she was buying a shirt as a joke for her husband because they talked about whether anyone would try to make money off the storm. She paid her $10 and scurried home to White Plains.

Mr. Ehmad would not specify the distributor, and another vendor said one came by with a plastic bag of samples days after the storm hit. Many merchandise suppliers are in a five-story building on Broadway and 27th Street, in which businesses sell wholesale T-shirts and sweatshirts.

Kamal Ahmed, who is an owner of Rafia International, said he did not have any Hurricane Sandy shirts but could get them. “How many do you need?” he asked.

Another T-shirt maker in the building decided against making the product, pointing to an unsold “I Survived Hurricane Irene” sample on his wall.

But this storm has gripped people from the time it crossed into the Atlantic. Dave Schulter, 52, a vendor at Broadway and 44th Street, said a woman from Kansas had asked him if he had a “I Survived Hurricane Sandy” shirt before the storm even hit. “I told her, ‘How do you know you’ll survive?’ ”


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/ny...gewanted=print