T he mayor was annoyed. I had taken to Twitter 24 hours before to say that New York City was slow to prepare for the impending superstorm known as Sandy. Predictions are a risky business but this one was spot on. So when the mayor’s assistant called me the night of Hurricane Sandy to let me know that they were “sheltering” survivors in the cafeteria of my local public high school just down the block from where I lived I thought she was joking. How in the world would a school lunchroom accommodate several hundred survivors who had literally been dragged out of their homes with just the clothes on their back? Yeah that first night didn’t go quite as planned.
Two things are still stuck in my mind from that fateful evening:
1) The military-style prepackaged meals that they gave survivors in many local shelters were inedible. I quickly coordinated with Masbia — the kosher soup kitchen. They generously made fresh meals for survivors across Brooklyn.
2) The survivors at my local high school had nowhere to shower. The school refused to allow survivors to leave the cafeteria area due to security concerns. Never mind that there were men women and children who had to walk through sewage to get out of their neighborhoods alive. I called the Department of Education to demand that the school’s locker rooms with dozens of shower stalls be opened. It took 12 long hours but by the next day we had clean survivors and full bellies.
