Hurricane Sandy- New York City

What more to be said about Hurricane Sandy that has just devastated lower Manhattan and most adjacent boroughs? It’s akin to war zones where one reads of yet another death and the fact is relegated to a statistic by most who are not next of kin and who are far from the scene. Remarkably there have been very few deaths caused by Sandy. And if you’re not where the action is it’s hard to imagine the havoc and trauma wrought by such a blast from nature. Study the uprooted trees: it's not that far from assessing the impact of a land mine.

Given that New York is unlike almost any other city in the world it’s remarkable that there is so little chaos after the event last night. All mass transit is suspended, all lower Manhattan subway tunnels flooded and unusable for at least 4 days. There is total blackout in lower Manhattan for all streets below 39th due to the flooding of Con Ed’s power station at E14th. Explosions lit up the night sky. Check the map! That’s a HUGE chunk of Manhattan that has been crippled. You would expect looting and chaos. Yet there is calm and consideration. What a difference one street block makes. A wine merchant doing brisk trade this morning on 41^st said that he’d lose $10,000 per day if he’d been ‘the wrong side of the tracks’. Whilst a deli owner just below 39th claimed $2,000 a day in lost trade. Do the math. It's frightening!

The crane that had partially collapsed on the upper floors of a 57th street midtown luxury apartment development thankfully followed the rules of gravity and its vertical weight (though scarily precarious) kept it from swinging further in the 100mph winds. The pause for thought in all this is, though,  that the New Yorkers who can least afford to be hit are the ones who’ll suffer from Sandy’s might. And that’s the very strange paradox of New York City. A Republican Mayor Bloomberg (concise, calming, apolitical in his press briefings) presiding over a (for the Manhattan isle most part) Democratic populace. A city that thrives and survives arguably on the wealth of a very few- the real estate deals, the parties, the stock exchange, the glamour. When what REALLY makes NYC a city at all are the small businesses, the ‘little’ people, the public workers without whom NYC would just not exist. Are the very few willing to dip into their pockets and save New York from future storms? I think not. And how, anyways pragmatically, do you shore up a city that for the most part is shoreline?

The category 1 Hurricane Sandy became a category 3 hurricane because of the peculiar wind/tidal patterns of the ‘New York bite’. Add a full moon and high tide at the time of landfall and nature’s armada became invincible. In all of its 108 years NYC’s subway system has never known a worst disaster. And the impending event was incredibly difficult for many: should I stay or should I go. Mayor Bloomberg’s mandatory evacuation of the low lying Zone A areas was not legally enforceable. And you can well understand many good citizens’ trepidation at moving from the comfort of their own home to a crowded shelter. There is a very regrettable selfish, conceited hard core of people in New York who revel in the reflected glory of their ‘goodness’. But it’s very doubtful that the people of the housing projects, shopkeepers and others financially debilitated by this event would ever fit that description. It’s so like Ang Lee’s latest film Life of Pi: everyone has to share the same boat – both man and tiger-and the concluding story one lives to tell is usually just too, too unbelievable.