Mark Lennihan/AP
Breezy Hook, just after Sandy and a year later.
Even a city as mighty as New York sometimes takes a punch to the gut. So it was one year ago when the hurricane with the friendly name walloped patches of our populous land with a force unlike any in our lifetime.
On this anniversary, with thousands still mourning, thousands more building back what was lost and every last one of us living in Sandy’s reshaped city, we reflect on what the storm took — as well as on what sprouted from the wreckage.
First and irreplaceable were the lives lost: more than 100 people killed throughout the region, including 43 in the city.
Among them: George and Angela Dresch, 55-year-old father and 13-year-old daughter, drowned on Staten Island.
Lauren Abraham, a 23-year-old who stepped on a downed power line in Richmond Hill.
Lorraine Gore, 90, found dead in her Coney Island home.
Artur Kasprzak, a 28-year-old NYPD officer, who, at home on Staten Island, led his family to safety, then returned to the basement, where he was likely electrocuted.
There are too many tragedies to do justice to them all. The pain will not subside.
Sandy’s storm surge covered a mind-boggling 16.6% of the land in the five boroughs, reaching 76,000 buildings containing almost one in 10 of all housing units. Nearly 100,000 homes on Long Island were severely damaged or destroyed. And:
Subway tunnels drowned, still at least a year from full repair. A power system crippled, its vulnerabilities revealed. Billions of gallons of sewage released into waterways. Boardwalks and beaches erased. Businesses destroyed and displaced (including this one).
The official government loss tally: $ 65 billion.
But we don’t bow to storms. We weather them.
New York City residents, and neighbors on Long Island and in New Jersey, have traveled a great distance in a short time.
Federal money — after an insultingly long delay for approval, and painfully long delays for arrival — has helped. So have countless volunteers, pitching in to repair wounded communities.
Go to the Rockaways, and you’ll see resilience amid difficulty. Go to Red Hook, and you’ll hear more stories about rebirth than loss. Go to Staten Island, and you’ll see progress, tempered by understandable frustration.
And now, together, we rethink how to shape a city that seemed at a truce with the surrounding sea. We are forced to assume that, in a world remade by climate change, 100-year storms may now be, God forbid, 25-year storms or worse.
Perhaps we install doors that seal the subways; perhaps we enlarge the island of Manhattan to dampen surges. Certainly we engineer more resilient power equipment and rebuild higher.
The question is not whether the city remakes itself, only precisely how and at what cost.
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via Great Local News: New York http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info
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