I was just going down there to humor my mother. Having spent the previous month decompressing from my failed September primary campaign for the State Senate and after having previously resigned from my job to run for that office, I had just begun thinking about my next steps. The last thing on my mind was the weather forecast, but Moms was worried and wanted my help to prep the house in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn for the coming storm. Cynically, I doubted there would even be a need, but I figured I would lend her and Sis a hand.
After the sandbags were stacked and the windows were taped, we took a walk over to Manhattan Beach to check out the tide. Despite the howling winds and the constant spray of rain, nothing serious seemed imminent.
It was early evening and my sister and the kids were upstairs when I first heard the sound of Moms turning on the wet vac. Water had begun to seep through. At first there were just small puddles, but soon there would be several inches. By that point I had taken over, resigned to manning the pumps until the wee hours of the night.
Suddenly, over the blare of the motor, I heard Moms banging on the window.
"It's coming!" she yelled.
"What's Coming?"
"THE BAY!"
By the time I got to the front of the house, there was a steady stream. She was right. Just a block and a half away, Sheepshead Bay was overflowing and with Moms' house sitting at the center of the lowest block in the neighborhood, it was coming.
Moms and I watched in disbelief, as a sudden wave, not too different from those we watched on the beach earlier, splashed down the street.
We ran back down to the basement and tried in vain to find a way to seal the windows. By then Sis had gotten to work trying to move some valuables upstairs. My feeble attempts to stop water from coming in were thwarted by the rapidly rising tide. Like in some classic cartoon, water began to spray in through the gaps.
"Jay, what do you think?" Sis asked.
"No Bueno."
It was time to get out.
My mother, who was frantically trying to save everything that she could get her hands on, began to have that look of a captain ready to go down with her ship. After gently asking her to go upstairs and tend to the kids, I found myself barking at her to get out of the basement. With that, we ran up the stairs and closed the door.
Outside, Sis and I watched as the water level on the block steadily rose. The trees thrashed and whipped in the wind. It was only a matter of time before the snap, crackle and pop of the wires and transformers exploding lit the darkness in an ominous pyrotechnic display.
The water kept coming with no end in sight. The time had come to seek shelter, prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
It was not until we all huddled in Moms' bedroom on the second floor that I began to process what was going on and began to worry. There I was with my mother, my sister, my niece and nephew. What if the water doesn't stop?
It began to recede some time shortly after 1 a.m. The house had been flooded by over seven and a half feet of water, completely immersing the basement well through the first floor.
Since the block is so much lower than the surrounding area, the water did not completely recede, leaving at least three feet of water above our street level. By noon, the day after, the block looked like the Sheepshead Canal. In order to get my niece and nephew to a safe and dry place, we had to get them rowed off the block on a boat with Sis.
That evening, I found myself with a neighbor, shin deep in the freezing water, flipping manhole covers to speed the draining. Mercifully, the water was soon gone.
Over the next few days we would have to deal with the immediate aftermath: the pumping; the clearing; the demolition; and the cleaning. There was no electricity, no hot water or no heat and if all that had happened wasn't enough, we got a swift snuff in the face by a nor'easter just days after. My family would temporarily live in my closet-sized apartment in Williamsburg, as Bro and I alternated staying with the dog, working on the house and guarding against the threat of would-be looters.
Those were, by-far, the most damp, dark and cold nights of my life. My old neighborhood was rendered powerless for almost a month, resembling a scene from a post-apocalyptic thriller.
After the storms, the blackouts, the fires and the floods; after the candles, the gas lines and all that mold -- slowly but surely, normalcy returned. Six months have now passed and the recovery is well under way.
By no means was my family's experience even close to the worst that night or in the aftermath. There were so many of those who lost their lives, the lives of their loved ones, their homes and/or their livelihoods; too many still suffer today. Nonetheless, the storm showed us once again the resiliency of our people. Every time we are knocked down, with the help of our families, friends and neighbors, we get back up.
As we move forward we must be sure to keep in mind those who whose lives will never be the same and do everything we can to help them get back on their feet.