October 29, 2012: Hurricane Sandy

The Seaside Heights roller coaster, ruined

October 29, 2012, 10 years ago: Hurricane Sandy strikes the New York Tri-State Area, the most destructive storm ever to hit the region. It kills 233 people, including 53 people in New York and 37 people in New Jersey. The damage is especially devastating on the Jersey Shore and Staten Island. In my hometown of East Brunswick, New Jersey, power was out for a full 7 days.

The day before, on Facebook, I posted:

New Jersey Transit buses and trains will suspend service at 4:00 this afternoon, in anticipation of the effects of Hurricane Sandy.

New York subways and buses will do so at 7:00 tonight.

PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) trains will wait until midnight. I guess Jersey City think they're tougher than everyone else.

A few minutes later, the last sporting event in the New York Tri-State Area before the hurricane hit was completed. The New York Jets were hosting Miami, the city best known for facing hurricanes, at the Meadowlands. I wrote, "Well, it's official. Disaster conditions in New Jersey. Dolphins 30, Jets 9."

The New York Giants beat the Dallas Cowboys on the road, 29-24, and I wrote, "I wonder if the Giants were able to fly back home. I certainly wouldn't want to be stuck in a crummy city like Dallas." (They were able to fly home.)

On October 29, we were hit by hard rain and heavy wind all day, but the power stayed on through daylight. My Facebook postings went like this:

* So far, here, it's no worse than an ordinary, if windy, autumn storm. A mess with the fallen leaves, but that's it. As long as we have power and food, we're okay.

* This hurricane is hitting Central Jersey like we're Jeff Weaver. (A reference to the Yankee pitcher who threw away the 2003 World Series.

* Accuweather.com is saying which hours over the next few days have such-and-such percent chance of rain. But not what kind - drizzle, shower, thunderstorm, cats-n-dogs - nor what speed of wind we can expect.

It's like a menu saying, "We have meat, vegetables and drinks, and it will cost you some money." And that's it.

* Based on what I'm reading off Channel 6 Action News out of Philly, Sandy should start crawling up the Jersey coast at around 8:00 tonight. The worst of it will hit my area at around midnight. Hopefully, by that point I'll be ready to fall asleep, so losing power won't be as big a problem - if it happens. By the morning, the wind should be significantly reduced, but there's going to be rain for much of the day.

Then it's just a matter of when NJ Transit will resume normal service.

* (A reference to the Obama vs. Romney election, 8 days later) At times like this, a CEO is useless. What's he going to do, fire the hurricane? Transfer it to another city? Outsource it to another country? Offer it stock options if it'll do something helpful? Offer it a "golden parachute" if it'll go away?

A CEO can't help us now. A community organizer is exactly what we need - before, during, and after the storm.

* (At 5:30 PM) Just heard on WCBS 880: Sandy has made landfall, in Cape May. 134 miles away.

I was beginning to think we were going to get away with it. But at 7:00 PM on the dot, already dark, the lights went out. We had flashlights, candles, and fully-charged phones, and the phone charger in the car still worked. And, while we were one block from a river, we were on relatively high ground, so flooding wasn't an issue. I typed:

Well, that's it. The power is out. Just as I was sitting down to dinner, too.

Since my phone's battery drains rather easily, I'm going to have to be very judicious with its use. This may be the last time you hear from me until the morning when I get to work - if, that is, bus service is restored by then.

Good luck, everyone.

On November 3, after shopping at the first nearby supermarket to reopen, I wrote in Uncle Mike's Musings (on the road, using my phone):

Although my home base is still without power, 5 days later, I did get through Hurricane Sandy all right.

New posts will have to wait until I can use a computer other than my smartphone for more than a few minutes at a time.

But I did make it through. I didn't want anyone to worry...

Until I can type for longer, I hope you all made it through as well, and that we'll all have power again soon.

Power returned on November 5, after 7 days. We were lucky. A lot of people weren't. On March 24, 2013, 5 months later, the family took my 5-year-old nieces to Point Pleasant Beach for the annual Palm Sunday Easter Egg Hunt. The town had replaced the parts of the Boardwalk that had been wrecked.

Point Pleasant Beach is at the top of a sandbar, separated from the mainland by Barnegat Bay, which includes the famous (or infamous) Seaside Heights, and also South Seaside Park, where my father's parents had a bungalow where they spent Summer weekends, and where my parents watch the 1st Moon landing on TV in 1969.

For old times' sake, we went down the sandbar on New Jersey Route 35, where everything was hit by wind coming off both the Atlantic Ocean and Barnegat Bay. There was so much devastation. Houses shattered. Some seeming intact, but cockeyed and leaning off their foundations. Much of the Seaside Heights boardwalk was still being repaired. The bungalow was still there, apparently unharmed.

But, 10 years later, there are still communities on Staten Island and Long Island working to rebuild. 

After the Flood

Maybe I shouldn't have offered to be more offensive. On Saturday morning at 11, 2 trees on my street went down in that nor'easter and downed power lines. We didn't get the power back until Monday night at 10. For two and a half days, no electricity, no light, no heat, no hot water.

This was not fun. And if that had been the worst of it, it would have been annoying as hell.

That was not the worst of it. The blackout knocked out our sump pump. So when I got back from Nevada Smith's, the New York bar where I watched Arsenal beat Hull City in Premier League action, I saw that the basement was flooded.

I haven't yet been able to check to see how many of my videotapes -- in plastic bins, never found a place for them from the last time I moved -- are ruined. Or which ones. Probably ones I really wanted to save. But 2 shelves of one of my bookcases were ruined.

A lot of fantastic books got ruined. Nearly all of them are replacable -- eventually. Even if I had the money to buy them all again (and I don't, at least not more than 1 or 2 every pay period), it would take a while for them to come by mail. A lot of them weren't available in the New York Tri-State Area, and had to come from Borders/Amazon.

Some of the books that came by mail came from England. These were some of the books that helped me to understand soccer for the first time. Some of the soccer books I bought were available in New Jersey and New York City bookstores. But they're all ruined. Soaked.

"They're soaked, and I know they are."

"This game's abandoned."

"Bloody hell."

Amazingly, one book that I was sure was a goner was a 1960 world atlas that my mother got from an old family friend. The binding is already nearly shot, but the covers and pages were fine... and still are. The bookcase that one was in wasn't affected.

In the bookcase that was ruined, I lost signed copies -- already signed when I got them, so they weren't personally autographed -- of Jim Bouton's Ball Four and Dan Shaughnessy's Reversing the Curse. I lost Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Lineups and Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Blunders, and Allen Barra's recent books re-examining long-held baseball beliefs. I didn't have those four books for very long, but I loved them. Even when I don't agree with Neyer and Barra, I love that they sometimes make me think of things in a different way.

Actually, I would disagree with Barra frequently: Not only is he a Met fan, but he's from Old Bridge, East Brunswick's arch-rival. The Purple Bastards! (Actually, since he's older than I am, that would be the Blue Bastards, as the school was then known as Madison Central and had different colors.)

But I was thrilled at 2 books that survived, both by baseball players who began in the late 1940s and starred into the 1950s. What I Learned From Jackie Robinson, by his Brooklyn Dodger teammate Carl Erskine, whose nasty curveball led him to win several big games for Dem Bums, including two no-hitters (one against the hated New York Giants) and Game 4 of the 1953 World Series in which he beat the Yankees, striking out 14 batters to set a Series record that lasted for 10 years.

And Baseball Forever, by Ralph Kiner, slugger for the Pittsburgh Pirates and broadcaster for the New York Mets for their entire history from 1962 to the present (and while he's done just one game a week the last few years, he is scheduled to be back this season at age 88).

Erskine's book was the last thing my Grandma gave me before she died. Kiner's book was the last thing I gave her, and naturally, it was one of the books Mom let me take it from her house after the end.

It didn't occur to me to attach special meaning to those books before tonight. I just didn't think of it. I do now.

It resulted in my coming up with a "Yogiism": I told Mom, "It's the sort of thing you don't think about until you think about it."

This whole thing could have been a lot worse. Nobody was killed or injured -- at least, not in my house, not in my neighborhood, and probably not in East Brunswick or even in Middlesex County. But a few people in New Jersey have been killed, and elsewhere up and down the Northeast Corridor from Boston's northern suburbs to the Tidewater region of Virginia. And over a quarter of a million people in the New York Tri-State Area are still without power, 3 days later.

It sure didn't seem like it over the weekend, when I lost a refrigerator full of food and needed to borrow the shower in my sister's condo, and the whole family still needs to borrow it and her washer and dryer. Fortunately, she's letting us, because she was planning on going on vacation this week anyway. But we were damn lucky.

The power came back on last night, so we did not have to "beware the Ides of March." We might not yet get our own hot water and laundry back tomorrow, St. Patrick's Day, but we are lucky.

But then, as that great Englishman of Irish descent, John Lennon, put it, "If you really had the luck of the Irish, you'd wish you were English instead."