New York Post-Sandy Is a Lesson in How Social Injustice Will Amplify the Ravages of Global Warming

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/environment/new-york-post-sandy-lesson-how-social-injustice-will-amplify-ravages-global-warming


A policeman carries blankets donated by Ikea for people affected by Sandy in the Brooklyn borough of New York City.
Photo Credit: AFP


Sixteen and a half days after Hurricane Sandy sent an 11-foot wave surging over the boardwalk, Coney Island is slowly resurrecting itself. Workers carry sheetrock into gutted bodegas on Surf Avenue, the street closest to the ocean. A block inland, a hammer resounds inside the United Community Baptist Church on Mermaid Avenue, rebuilding the wrecked pulpit. The church took on five feet of water, and “nothing in here was salvageable,” says Pastor Connis Mobley, but he hopes to have power and water restored by the spring.

The Surf Neighborhood Gourmet Food bodega is restocking, the sandy sidewalk out front piled with plastic-wrapped pallets of paper plates, cups, Clorox Wipes, and beer. It’s the first grocery in the neighborhood to reopen, says manager George Fox, and everything has to be replaced. “What was good we donated to the community. We threw out everything else.”

The neighborhood’s supermarkets are still closed. The nearest open one is on the Brooklyn mainland, more than a mile away, says Tiesha, a 42-year-old mother who just picked up donated food in the parking lot next to the minor-league Brooklyn Cyclones’ ballpark. About 50 people are lined up there. Women pushing strollers with toddlers in pink parkas fill shopping carts with cases of bottled water and tiny school-lunch cartons of milk and orange juice, boxes of crackers and pasta, cans of beef stew and jars of spaghetti sauce. An orange-vested volunteer calls out “Next!” and “Keep it moving.”

On a chilly Thursday afternoon more than two weeks after the storm, almost 6,000 Coney Island residents still don’t have heat and hot water. They were among more than 14,000 of the city’s public-housing tenants who didn’t, including about 1,800 in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn and 2,200 on the Rockaway peninsula in Queens. Lower Manhattan, also badly flooded, got its electricity turned back on in four days, but in the projects of Coney Island, Red Hook and Rockaway, more than 4,000 people had to wait two weeks to get their power back.

[napoleon_in_rags]

1. And how OWS *delivered* on reversing that trend.

With its disaster preparedness mentally. At this point, I can't imagine an organization I'd be prouder to be part of than OWS: delivering blankets to elderly people hit by the storm, while even the Red Cross stands mired in the bureaucratic mud of a dysfunctional status quo.

Never has the willingness of the people to take care of each other been as important than in these difficult times.

[hobbit709]

2. Happens everywhere. the poor are always last.

When I lived in OH, the rich end of town got its streets plowed even while snow was still falling. On our end of town, it might take a week.