'The calm before the storm was much too calm, which should have been a clue' It's been 10 years since Hurricane Sandy hit New York City
The calm before the storm was much too calm, which should have been a clue. Forecasters had been talking about a potential Halloween hurricane—the Frankenstorm was its headline-ready name—for two weeks. They thought it might be bigger than the hurricane of 1938; its barometric pressure was already a few ticks lower.
Finally, Manhattan itself began to be submerged. Water poured over the esplanades that are one of Bloomberg’s most impressive legacies, swamping bodegas on the East Side, lapping the High Line on the West Side. At ground zero, 30 feet of water poured into the famous bathtub—submerging our last disaster. But that was only the beginning. Because then, the lights went out.
And the absence of phones and Internet further cut our ties. In New York, many of us live partly vicariously. We’re image processors, symbol manipulators. Things that happen elsewhere are evaluated and reworked and sent back out. After the gusts, there was a sense of airlessness, which was the absence of information. Cell phones drained to 45 percent, then 37, then 8, a metric that augured the end of connection itself. “It’s almost like you’re dead,” said a downtowner.
The borderland is not the most appealing of neighborhoods in the best of circumstances. But at the dividing line between darkness and light, residents of SoPo engaged in a hellish 10 a.m. scramble for coffee and bagels, or queued up in long lines for Korean-deli steam tables, as the morning patrons of Muldoon’s on Third Avenue had their smokes and watched. The most desperate search, of course, was for outlets to charge cell phones.
In some ways, Sandy confirmed our communitarian values, underlining the importance of a government that makes a point of helping out—and that global warming was a problem to be dealt with. But no New Yorker can stay a sentimentalist too long. It didn’t take much time before the complaints and bickering began, and everything turned darker as the real misery became more apparent.
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