SANDY’S
DEVASTATION
At least six people in the area
drowned, including a disabled
man with cerebral palsy who
couldn’t escape the water rushing
into his first-floor apartment
More than a dozen care facilities in the area lost power and
heat and weathered a miserable
24 hours before they were finally
evacuated. Two weeks later, thousands of residents still remain
without power or heat.
Park Nursing Home was fortunate. Its back-up generator didn’t
flood out, unlike those at other
care facilities, and its kitchen,
on relatively high ground, stayed
mostly dry. But a week after Sandy hit, it, too, was evacuated, out
of fear that another looming winter storm would damage a huge
generator provided by the Army
Corps of Engineers.
The lingering misery in the
Rockaways, and the harrowing
experiences of Russell and others
who rode out the hurricane, owe
largely to the incredible power of
Sandy. But here, and all along the
coast, the storm’s destruction was
magnified by the failure of local
authorities to prepare for a massive storm surge that scientists
had long warned was inevitable.
Before World War II, the Rocka-
HUFFINGTON
12.02.12
ways were a playground for New
York City’s middle class, an 11mile spit of white beach with hotels, spas, amusement parks and
a grand boardwalk. In the 1950s,
suburbanization and car culture
took vacationers elsewhere, and
the area became something else:
the place to send the city’s most
vulnerable populations.
On the eastern end of the peninsula, the city built huge public
housing complexes. The Rockaways contained 57 percent of all
low-income housing in the borough of Queens by 1975, though it
contained only five percent of its
population, according to a history
of the region in the publication
City Limits.
Nursing homes, many established in the pre-air conditioning
era when ocean breezes were welcome, crowd the narrow peninsula.
Today, half of all such facilities in
the city are in the Rockaways, many
directly adjacent to the ocean.
All of this construction happened in an area that had been
battered by two major hurricanes,
in 1893 and 1938, which caused
massive flooding and devastation
in the Rockaways and other beach
comm V