Wrestling with Sandy

I am happy (and incredibly lucky) to report that - at least for the moment - our lives have pretty much already recovered from the devastation of Hurricane Sandy.  Our house lost power for 142 hours (just under six days), but we seem to have had our power restored around 7 pm tonight (Sunday evening).  The house, which dipped down to a frightening 52 degrees during the last night we were willing to spend there after the storm, is currently warming up into the low 70's.  In the storm, we lost several large branches from the trees outside our house, but none of them landed on the house (most landed just off to the side).  Our neighbor across the street did lose a huge tree, which landed across our street and in our neighbor's driveway, ripping a power wire in the process.  Any of these factors could have gone in a different (and more damaging direction).

Below is the power line, which landed on the sidewalk outside our house.

The experience of riding out the storm itself was... well, incredibly frightening.  It was perhaps the most scared I've ever been of anything in my life.  The wind was already howling early on Monday morning, and only became worse throughout the day.  This was just a manageable tease, however (I was even able to nap on the couch for a bit between 7 and 7:30 pm).  Starting at around 8 pm, as the storm made landfall in southern New Jersey, the winds shifted to the east and havoc was wrought.  The front of our house faces east, and we do not own a storm door.  Our front door has a single locking mechanism, and with each, more ferocious gust, the door began to curve inward.  Looking down from the upstairs (where the below picture was taken), I could actually see outside through the door when the gusts were at their worst.

I suspected that if the door busted inward, we'd experience the type of damage that would ruin our home (if not permanently, certainly for a long time).  So I improvised a fix, buttressing the door with all of the heavy boxes I could find in our garage at the bottom, and bracing the top with two extendable paint roller extension poles that I used for a previous project.  Under pretty stressful conditions, this may have been the home improvement hack of my life, because the bracing worked as I planned and the door survived the night.

At its worst, the storm felt like I was at cruising altitude on a plane to hell.  My sinuses were cracked and dry, my head kept popping, and the insides of my teeth (at least the ones with fillings) hurt.  I called my father, who had made it through a terrible storm called Hurricane Dora which directly hit Jacksonville, Florida in 1960, to ask him about this feeling.  He claimed this was normal, a result of the incredibly low barometric pressure which accompanies hurricanes.  During Dora, he said, it felt like the hairs on the insides of his lungs were tearing.  That was a Category 2 storm, at landfall.

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Tuesday was even worse than Monday night.  Walking outside and surveying the damage, the only sound we could hear was a far off siren.  No one, it seemed, had power, and we resolved to live off the perishables we had purchased before the storm as well as the lanterns and other gear we had purchased after Hurricane Irene.  The tree that landed in my neighbor's lawn, which would eventually be cut into cord wood, was the talk of each neighbor that passed by (in a disaster, everyone talks to their neighbors).  We wondered aloud how long power would be out - we were the last customers in our utility's service area to be restored after Irene, waiting almost three days to get our power back.  With deadly accuracy this time around, we guessed about a week.

We did somehow make it out of the house on Tuesday to get dinner, and Wednesday I worked for a while from my office (my company had its power restored ridiculously early, perhaps by virtue of being in the same shopping center as a grocery store).  I snapped this picture while stopped in traffic in Flemington, NJ on Wednesday, while driving home from work.  The line stretched as far as my eye could see, and these were the hackers trying to get a shortcut with their red gas cans - the line of cars on the highway stretched for miles.  This was the beginning of the current fuel panic.

Through the generous hospitality of others, we were never forced to spend a night at home.  We stayed with friends on Wednesday night, and family on Friday and Saturday night.  At each stop, we carried the dog in and dealt with her messing a strange house (she gets nervous when things change, and everything was in constant flux this past week).  We were exhausted after five days of shuffling back and forth from house to house, and - honestly - the only things that kept me going were the knowledge that we'd get our power back eventually, and when we did, we'd actually have our house back (unlike some, less fortunate, people). 

I routinely followed PSE&G's Twitter feed, checking for updates even though in the aftermath of such a disaster, misinformation always seems to rule.  At one point, PSE&G's total number of customers without service increased by about 50,000 over a twelve hour span (which struck me as nonsense). 

Even though I selfishly wanted my own power back, the stories I was reading about the conditions down the Jersey Shore were scary.  My mom, who still lives in Middletown, was fine for the most part - her basement flooded a bit and they lost power until Thursday, but she made it through with the help of a neighbor's generator.  More low laying parts of Middletown and the Shore in general, I read, were completely decimated.  It hit me like a ton of bricks when I read a list of areas and locations that were completely wiped out by the storm on the Asbury Park Press' mobile site.  When I realized that literally every place I went with girls while in high school to hang out by ourselves (and, sometimes, make out) no longer existed, the gravity of the disaster took full effect.

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One of my favorite all-time books is Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, the bestselling firsthand account of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster.  I've been meaning to re-read this book for a while, so forgive me if my memories are fuzzy.  But one part of the story that I consider especially germane right now is toward the end, when Krakauer returns home to the United States and begins to re-acclimate himself to the creature comforts of home.  He recalls getting up to use the bathroom at night barefoot, and climbing back into bed alongside his wife.  These were things he once took for granted, and now almost moved him to tears because of the practically inhuman conditions he endured atop the world's tallest mountain.

Being back at home, typing on my desktop PC and drinking a homemade beer in my warm and bright house, I maybe understand 10% of this feeling - tops.  But there are literally tens of thousands of people down the Shore who will not know what "home" is for a long time, and - in deference and in respect to my childhood,  my memories, and my past down there - I've never felt more personally motivated to help make something right in my life.  All that I can do with my meager hands and my sometimes-even-worse-than-meager checkbook, I will do.

I am sorry if this is mean, but I could care less about the millionaires who lost their vacation homes.  They are very likely to be insured, and independent of this, they are sufficiently well liquidated to handle the repair costs no matter what.  The extraordinarily wealthy Long Beach Island - where my friends and I have happily gone on vacation each summer since 2006 - will be back in roaring fashion by summer 2013, I have no doubt; money makes the inevitable happen faster.

But scrappy, working class places like Keansburg and Keyport, Union Beach and Highlands will need our help.  These places were struggling before the storm, and the people who live there often necessarily lack the resources to manage such a complex and difficult situation.  More importantly, they need their homes rebuilt.

I don't know how to build houses.  I can barely fix my own (as anyone who's read this blog over the past year and a half should know).  But I see this disaster as an opportunity to help other people and help myself learn how to do this kind of work at the same time.  I think I would like to help rebuild these areas.

If you're reading this and you can give me any information on how I can get started, please leave it in the comments section or reach out to me privately.  I also plan to spend some time this week researching groups, such as Habitat for Humanity, online. 

But above all I hope that tonight you are warm and comfortable in your bed, and perhaps (like me) a bit more aware of the creature comforts you previously had taken for granted.