Sandys Wrath: Help comes from communities, not government

By: American Decency Staff

 

The bough was thick and wet, and his mouth a tense rictus as he trembled under its weight. But my ten-year-old steadied his hockey-stud legs and carted it off the driveway, then another 30 yards down the street. It landed with a thud in the first space he found along a growing curbside forest.

Hurricane Sandy had visited her wrath on our comfortable New Jersey town the night before, her sheets of rain a blinding afterthought in the teeth of sustained winds that gusted near a hundred miles per hour — blasts that seemed to go on forever. They had already been fierce in the late afternoon, worse than anything we’re used to in these parts, when someone hopefully said that maybe we’d dodged a bullet. Sandy, the local newscast told us, was picking up speed, approaching landfall ahead of schedule. She might outrun the full moon and the high tide. She might choose not to be the proverbial “perfect storm” — maybe lash us without wounding us.

Pollyanna’s pipe dream. No, the worst had not even begun. It waited for the black, unforgiving night. In its wake, the devastation here is epic.

Ruinous weather is not unknown to the Garden State. The shore takes a battering of sorts once or twice a year, the tail tropical-storm end of a hurricane that already spent itself in Florida or the Carolinas. Last year was peculiarly bad. First, in late summer, Hurricane Irene’s bounce up the East Coast smacked Little Egg Harbor before careening up into Brooklyn. The brunt, however, was felt upstate. The Hudson, the Passaic, and nine other rivers — saturated by an unusually rain-soaked summer — gushed over. Seven people died, homes and businesses were badly damaged, and well over a million people lost power — just a few hours for most, but several days for some.

Read More: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/332366/sandy-s-wrath-andrew-c-mccarthy

---