Good morning. It's Friday. We'll visit someone who has lived with the effects of Hurricane Sandy's damage and destruction for a decade. |
 | | Andrea Mohin for The New York Times |
|
Debbie Ingenito slipped the little box with the Christmas ornaments out of the plastic sandwich bag she keeps them in. |
She got the Christmas ornaments on the day that then-President Obama toured the muddy wreckage from Hurricane Sandy. That was a couple of weeks after the storm had ripped through the New Dorp section of Staten Island where Ingenito has lived since she was a child. |
The story about the Christmas ornaments goes like this: |
The storm knocked down a holiday-size evergreen in their yard. Neighbors pulled it out front — "the men, they were all comforting one another," Ingenito said. They helped string up lights and connect them to a generator. |
Her husband was serving as a one-person neighborhood watch, keeping an eye on the block from the unheated second floor of their house. On the day of Obama's visit, he would not leave, not even to meet the president. |
When she told all that to Obama, "he hugged me a second time," she said. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand called to her and handed her the Christmas ornaments she keeps in the plastic bag. Michael Bloomberg, who was the mayor then, gave her another one. "The price was on it," she said. "It was $7.99. It didn't matter. It was the thought." |
And now it's 10 years later. |
I quoted Ingenito in the article I wrote about the mess Obama saw and the people he met. I wanted to know how Sandy had changed her. I wanted to know how much she still thought about Sandy after so many years. |
 | | Debbie Ingenito with President Obama in 2012.Luke Sharrett for The New York Times |
|
"Everybody who went through this storm has a scar," she told me. |
"Things are, you know, somewhat getting somewhere near normalcy back," she said, sitting in the same second-floor room where her husband had stood guard. The storm flooded the basement and first floor, but not the second floor, and somehow the house remained structurally sound. |
Other houses in the neighborhood needed more than a cleanup — "Some people, it took years before they got back into their homes," she said. |
One of the 838 homes that the city rebuilt on stiltlike columns to keep the next destructive wave from washing it away now gleams in the sun. "But there are still two houses, the house next door to me and the house across the street, that are still like ghost houses," Ingenito said. No one has lived in them since Sandy, she said. |
The city says that construction work for its Build It Back program for single-family homeowners has been completed in all five boroughs. The city rebuilt 492 houses. Another 6,742 needed "moderate rehab," and the city bought 247 that were not worth fixing up. In all, New York City spent $135.2 million on reimbursements to homeowners. |
Now the concern is that climate change could bring another huge storm before resiliency projects can be finished. "In the decade since Superstorm Sandy made landfall in New York City, the likelihood of future storms that will bring devastating coastal flooding has only grown," declared a recent report by the city comptroller, Brad Lander. He warned of "the plodding pace of progress on resiliency." |
He said many coastal projects were years from completion. This week, Mayor Eric Adams broke ground on a project to install flood walls and flip-up barriers to protect the neighborhood between the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan Bridge on the Manhattan side of the East River. It will not be ready until 2026. |
Adams also called for a federal coastal infrastructure funding program that would provide $8.5 billion for other resiliency work. |
For Manhattanites who remember that days after the storm, the power was out from Midtown all the way to the Battery, Lander's report contained another eye-opener: Much of the city's essential infrastructure lies in the floodplain, which will only expand with climate change. Just under 80 percent of the land for electric and gas utilities is in the floodplain now, along with airports, bridges, docks, rail yards, tunnels and highways, the report said. |
So is 46 percent of the city's industrial and manufacturing area. And 17 percent of public housing is in flood zones. |
It took days to realize that Sandy had killed 44 people in New York, mostly in modest sections of Staten Island like Ingenito's, and in Queens. Some who did not evacuate drowned in their homes. Some died trying to escape the wave that the storm drove in. "Because Sandy was such a massive storm, it generated a massive surge," a city report said later. Some 17 percent of the city's land mass, 51 square miles, flooded. |
Ingenito's husband and son were fortunate. They managed to get out. She said her husband "gets himself all worked up now because he never wants to deal with that again." |
"When they saw the water coming up, my husband said, 'Come on, Brian, we've got to go,'" she said. |
Parked in Ingenito's yard these days is a 1996 Chevrolet Tahoe. A clunker now, it was their escape vehicle then — and later a hauler. |
"That truck carried stuff, building supplies for the homes around here," she said. "Flooring, toilets, everything." And mattresses: "He had somebody put them in the truck and he brought them back to go to whoever was in need." All from emergency centers set up in the days after Sandy, she said. |
And Ingenito herself? She rode out the storm at her sister-in-law's house on the other side of Staten Island. |
"It wasn't really raining there," she recalled. "It was just a little windy." |
Enjoy an increasingly cloudy day near the high 50s. At night, it's partly cloudy, with temps around the mid-40s. |
In effect until Tuesday (All Saints Day). |
The candidates for governor faced off in a debate on Tuesday, political ads are everywhere — and tomorrow, early voting begins in New York. You can also vote on Sunday, all next week and next Sunday, Nov. 6. And of course on Election Day, which is Nov. 8. |
The deadline for requesting an absentee ballot online has already passed, but you can still apply for one at your county board of elections office until Nov. 7, the day before Election Day. |
 | | Alvin Bragg has become an issue in the race for governor.Benjamin Norman for The New York Times |
|
It was 1987, and I was having a dark winter. I was in a deep funk and on the phone with my mother. |
"Put on some lipstick and go to Macy's," she urged me. |
"If I go to Macy's I'll need a Valium," I replied. |
"Then put on some lipstick," she replied, "take a Valium and go to Macy's." |
Glad we could get together here. See you on Monday. — J.B. |
| Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment