The smells of gasoline and ocean brine fill the air as residents of Belle Harbor, N.Y., attempt to rebuild their lives in the wake of Superstorm Sandy.
The Rockaway Peninsula was battered by the post-tropical cyclone on October 29, along with the southern shore of New York and New Jersey. Governor Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency on October 26, following which all railway lines, airports and bridges were shut down or closed.
Directly after Sandy cut a destructive path through the South Shore of Long Island and into Staten Island, cleanup efforts began in earnest, with volunteer groups and residents teaming up to remove sand and debris from their homes. Many, especially in Breezy Point, had gone up in flames.
But now, more than a month later, the streets have emptied except for residents remaining in their powerless, heatless and waterless homes and those who are trying to provide them essential aid.
“We’re 30 days out and people in the surrounding areas are back to their normal lives, but people down here don’t have homes, heat, hot water, no food or anything like that,” said Jennifer DeLuca, 29, a volunteer from Ozone Park. “There’s no stores here to go purchase anything, so without these donations we have people going hungry.”
Small businesses all along the peninsula have suffered. Volunteer and Rockaway resident Evan Abel, 29, calls the conundrum of shop owners and their customers a “chicken and egg” problem, saying, “Even when people move back there’s no businesses open, and the businesses are afraid to open because there are no residents to support them.
Rose Cha, 57, the owner of Harbor Cleaning, has been a Rockaway resident for 24 years. The basement and first floor of her home flooded, but the real devastation came in the form of her business, where she lost everything as it burned.
“Everything is so mess, and so hard,” she said. “I don’t know when I have to reopen the store. I don’t care about my house, but my store, what can I do?”
The loss of her computer inhibits Cha from determining which of the clothes she removed from the cleaners are whose, and reflects a greater theme that has been prevalent throughout recovery and cleanup efforts: an inability to communicate.
Coordinated cleanup efforts between the many grassroots relief organizations working in their immediate communities was very hard to organize in the early days of the disaster, according to New York Cares staff member Whitney Seiler.
“For a time, cell phone service was really difficult, many of us don’t have Internet access at our stations,” said Seiler, a Brooklyn resident. “More and more now we are coming together and really trying to reach out to each other, really trying to create a unified relief effort so that when Winter comes we can work together to stretch across the Rockaways and help a larger community all together.”
Seiler is stationed at St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church, a central location in Belle Harbor that has sought to aggregate volunteer and government resources in one place since the earliest days of the disaster.
While many of the predominantly Irish-Catholic residents surrounding the parish have taken up the task of recovery for themselves, St. Francis de Sales is, according to Seiler, “largely staffed by people who came from other places, saw what was happening here and just stayed and decided to help.”
One exception is Rockaway resident Evan Abel, 29, who returned from India to help his hometown recover and rebuild after Superstorm Sandy.
“I’ve been working to coordinate efforts between the different groups that are here and to basically take care of my smaller neighborhood in terms of connecting dots with resources,” said Abel. “Giving electricians, plumbers, mold remediation, contractors’ names to people that are still looking for them.”
To facilitate communication within the community, volunteers at St. Francis routinely go door-to-door to distribute information to residents, but sometimes even that turns out to be faulty. Information that may have been true two weeks ago, according to Abel, quickly becomes misleading as conditions and circumstances change.
“You can’t get a clear answer here,” he said.
While both volunteers and residents lack access to the Internet, information is difficult to spread. Community meetings are held each Sunday at the church, at 3 p.m. for residents and 5 p.m. for businesses. Weekly meetings for grassroots volunteer organizations are used to give updates and share information, but the government has so far been difficult to coordinate with.
“I don’t know what they’re doing and I don’t understand their timeframe,” Abel said. His concern is that much of the government organizations are doing the same work as the civilians are, but not working together stops the progress of the entire community.
Whitney Seiler, however, believes that the grassroots organizations and government efforts all play their own part in the “Relief Ecosystem.”
“We’re all driving different-sized vehicles, we’re all going to be arriving at different times, and we’re all going to be contributing different amounts to the effort,” she said. “But we are all working together to do that, and as a result I think it gives the Rockaways the best chance of rebuilding if we all understand that we all play different roles in it.”
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Wade Bagwell, 8, looks over concrete pillars that formerly supported the Rockaway Boardwalk in Queens, N.Y. The second-grader’s bungalo on Beach 101st Street was flooded during Superstorm Sandy, driving Wade and his father Will, 47, to stay with a friend on Beach 90th Street. Photo by Rebecca Tapio.
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Rockaway residents collect essential supplies like toilet paper and batteries in the gymnasium of St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church. The church has become a center for relief efforts in the Belle Harbor neighborhood. Photo by Rebecca Tapio.
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Residents of Belle Harbor in Rockaway, Queens, collect clothes and donations being distributed at St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church. Most homes have neither power nor heat in the destructive wake of Superstorm Sandy. Photo by Rebecca Tapio.
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Clothes, shoes and toys were distributed at St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church in Belle Harbor, N.Y. to residents whose homes lacked power and heat in the wake of Superstorm Sandy. Photo by Rebecca Tapio.
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Houses along Rockaway’s coastline were pummeled during Superstorm Sandy. One resident said that the water of the surge had capped the roof of his house, which remained standing. Photo by Rebecca Tapio.
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Houses along the water on Rockaway Beach in Queens, N.Y. were destroyed in the path of Superstorm Sandy. The storm decimated many parts of New Jersey, Staten Island, and towns along the South Shore of Long Island. Photo by Rebecca Tapio.
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The Rockaway Boardwalk was destroyed by Superstorm Sandy on October 29, ripped from its cement pillars by two waves and then thrown against oceanside buildings, according to one resident. Photo by Rebecca Tapio.
