Sandy One Year Later

When Sandy started strengthening in the early morning hours of October 29 I was stationed in Sea Bright, a little pocket of Coney Island. The picture above was snapped about 2pm (and slightly enhanced on Instagram)...after I'd been doing liveshots for about 10 hours straight. A row of homes was just about 30 feet behind where I was standing when I snapped the picture. They were later completely washed out by the storm.

When the brunt of the storm made landfall, I was trying to catch a couple of hours of sleep at the Best Western in Bay Ridge. The fire alarm went off amidst the smell of smoke. The other guests...mostly evacuees, were all panicked and scared of what had happened to their homes.

At 1am we packed up the live truck and headed for Breezy Point. My assignment editor sent me there after hearing scanner traffic about multiple house fires. We were the first news van to pull up and had no idea the magnitude of the situation beyond the dark flood waters and flashing police lights. More than 125 homes were burning to the ground, hundreds more were under water, and countless memories had been lost.

Fittingly, at 2am tomorrow morning (yes...2am)...I'll be on my way back to Breezy Point to report on where things stand one year later.