During and after Super Storm and Hurricane Sandy, my neighborhood had a lot of strange unusual things happen. I live right off Atlantic Avenue in Queens, about a mile away from the Van Wyck Expressway and 15 mins away from the JFK Airport; you can tell by the location that it’s a very busy city. It wasn’t much of a busy city anymore when the hurricane hit. There were very minimal cars on Atlantic Ave, and streets were quiet. When the storm first struck all you heard was wind, and pieces of debris hit against the house. As it started raining and the wind gusts picked up branches starts to fall off trees and were tangled in the phone and power line, my family was afraid we’d loose power because of the tall tree across the street that had its branches intact with the power lines. Fortunately, we did not loose power even though the lights flickered ever so often.
We started to hear noises like fire crackers bursting close by and from far off distances. I did not know what the sound was until news reporters on the news said those were “transformers” sparking. It was frightening to know that a fire could start, since we were hearing the crackling close by. In an event, we were somewhat prepared to run out the house in case of a fire.
From the view of our house we could see the pole line slanted, threatening the gas station it was hovering over; 3 blocks away, as a result the gas station was blocked off.
After the storm, Monday morning we were able to analyze the damages around our house.
The roof tiles of our house had flown off onto the ground, as well as the neighbors garage’s roof tiles. Our gutter was unattached to its other pieces and floating. a phone line was hanging along our driveway. We also had a few minor leaks that needed to be tended, which made us glad our basement did not flood.
The day after, when we were able to go to far distances, on Wednesday, we saw that the streets and blocks before and after ours were heavily impacted. Trees were down all over the place, where as my block had mainly debris, branches, and power lines down. I also heard from friends not far from my place that they has no power.
A couple of days after, as people started to return home, there was increased traffic across the Atlantic Ave. towards Brooklyn. And for a week now, I see a long line of cars waiting for gas across Atlantic Ave, when gas is received. The amount and length of cars are just ridiculous to describe.
Overall, I feel very fortunate that my family and I were not extremely impacted as compared to others. And I feel deeply for those that have been impacted and have lost a lot due to this storm.
One of the good things I got out of this disaster was that I was very observational about the damages and their causes. I even took a look around at the Brooklyn Bridge Water Front and some areas surrounding that were heavily impacted and took photographs.
As an architect student I feel that there’s a lot of things that can be done to avoid such damages. For example: why are trees so close to phone and power lines, why aren’t that branched off away from those lines? And why isn’t there a better housing system for protecting them from damages? I feel that this storm has made me think a lot more about my work, and what I should really pay attention to according to this event.
This is my story.
