Hey Friends,
It's hard to really measure the timing of a decade, let alone the start of the events which happened beforehand. We have leap-years which means something isn't *quite* 365x10 days after it happened. Then, you have to ask whether the damage from an event starts accruing when - say - it generates waves that chip away at protective dunes; or, whether you start from the time a storm makes landfall. It certainly doesn't depend on whether or not it's still called a "Hurricane," or if it's now a "Superstorm" or "Frankenstorm" because technically it doesn't fit the profile it used to.
If you're a Long Islander, you know I'm talking about Hurricane Sandy, a topic that's still hard for many to talk about. If you're unfamiliar, I urge you to check the Wikipedia article to understand it's national impact.
If you're a reader of The Weekly Freeporter, you know that we (in this case, myself, and my friend/occasional co-conspirator Jason Bass, who controls the Youtube page) chronicled the storm from the first warning calls to being on the ground the day after the storm did its worst, all the way to checking in on the community when a Nor'Easter slammed us and froze us out right after Sandy.
I want to be up front: I'm sorry for any offenses caused. We've all grown a lot since then, and some of our approach/commentary may have been wrong and/or disrespectful.
So How Does The Anniversary Make Us Feel?
I can really only speak for myself, and a lot of it I've already said in a different way.
So let's start with the community.
To begin with, no, Freeport has not forgotten the damage that Mother Nature can do to a community if she decides to throw her weight into a punch. Some people have surely got PTSD; I read one conversation on Facebook recently about how just telling the story is painfully taxing. I completely understand that feeling. It's hard to talk about what we went through, especially to those who might not understand the damage it did.
The community seems to have survived the incident relatively well? But that sentiment comes with a question mark for a reason Some buildings are now super-tall and it's a little hard to figure out why at first glance. To be perfectly clear, there are still houses in South Freeport that are waiting to have their re-construction completed. My dad lived down the block from one. And, since this cannot be left unsaid, many people were permanently displaced from the community, being forced to move to other towns and even states, either because they couldn't afford to rebuild here, or because others they cared about had to move out.
As far as prevention and mitigation goes...? It's hard to say. Sadly, we lack those (not-quite) futuristic, now-far-off sounding things like flood-prevention systems briefly discussed in this article. I'm sure that the various dunes and ecological barriers we have to prevent us from having future flooding have been worked on and improved, but at the same time climate change has led to rises in sea level, offsetting their effectiveness. We now know what to expect when a big storm is coming, and preparedness is important.
How About On A Personal Level?
Well, I...My thoughts immediately run to one thing:
As many of you are aware, my father passed away on December 3rd, 2021. He fell to the eventualityof a liver disease he was diagnosed with in the immediate aftermath of Sandy. He began getting sick soon almost exactly at the same time as the storm hit. At the time, he had been working at the Freeport Schools as a maintainer, and he'd been lining up sandbags at Giblyn elementary (which would prove to be less-than-successful at keeping water out), so we feared maybe he'd contracted some kind of waste-water-bourne pathogen.
It turned out to be far worse; Hepatitis C-induced liver failure. He danced with death more than once,. He survived a liver transplant from a benevolent soul (Seriously, consider being an organ donor - I am! And while we're at it, bring down the cost of drugs like Harvoni that cure Hepatitis C!!!), but it took damn near ten years for that shit to kill him.
Sadly, kill him, it did.
I have an awful lot of thoughts on the eventual outcome of Sandy's aftermath, and my experience post-Sandy. It was one piece of a much larger mental puzzle that ended...Hmm. For now, let's just say it ended BADLY. Some day, maybe soon, I'll write more about that.
But I do still have feelings about it, and always will. For me, it's heavily-compounded trauma from multiple directions at one critical point in my life.
All Of This To Say
With the ten year anniversary arriving to remind us of things lost - and, perhaps, still broken - it's worth giving you the reminder that it's okay to feel things. It's okay to reach out to a mental health professional if you find yourself having trouble with the trauma that Sandy smacked us with. That's all totally fine.
The best part of this entire disaster is that we have, as both individuals and a community, grown. Freeport is far from perfect, and to my knowledge it still has at least one dystopian law it needs to change, but it's still a great community. We come together in times of crisis and support one another. You know, except for the seemingly-weekly debate over which pizza place is the best.
Here's a hint on that one, by the way:
Try 'em all, and then it's the one you like the best.
Jesse Pohlman is a sci-fi/fantasy author from Freeport, New York, and while The Weekly Freeporter is certainly no-longer weekly, it documents and reflects on critical events within the Village.
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