Dick Zigun was ready for a two-foot flood. In three decades at Coney Island, every hurricane he had seen blew through like a tourist passing the board...

While there is still optimism about rebuilding, it is now tempered -- by defiance and determination -- as well as by an accumulation of memories, filmed, told to, listened to, overheard, strung like pearls and worry beads on our all too human necks.

Two weeks after Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc across the Northeast, and more than a week after power returned to Lower Manhattan, many public housing residents in Brooklyn's Coney Island were still without electricity, heat and hot water.

The new grassroots organizing group People's Relief and local residents have taken control of Hurricane Sandy relief efforts in several Coney Island public housing developments where government agencies' performance has been inadequate.

The situation in public housing projects in Coney Island, Brooklyn remains a "humanitarian crisis" in which the government and the Red Cross have been nearly completely absent, according to Eric Moed, a volunteer aid worker with Occupy Sandy.