A Week in Our Lives-November 5th

I'm very happy to say that we have survived Hurricane Sandy. It was scary at times, just devastating. I was emotionally worn down. But we made it through. We weathered the storm. Here's our story:

Thankfully on Sunday night, both of our company's cancelled work for Monday. They didn't want anyone commuting or being on the streets. Hoboken instituted a curfew and had mandatory evacuations for basement and ground floor apartments. We were on the 2nd floor so we just sat around and waited for the storm to come. We took it easy and caught up on the shows on our DVR. Then, around 5 PM the lights went out. 

Bartek set up his little study area and read by candlelight. We miraculously got power back for two hours, but it was too good to be true. Just an hour later, the power was back out. I made Bartek help me move our mattress into our living room, so it would be further away from the windows. At 8:30, I glanced out the window to see a horrifying sight. Water was rushing in to the street below us and it seemed to be getting high quick. That's when my heart started racing. Car alarms were going off as the waters filled up inside. Bright flashes of transformers blowing lit up the sky. We checked the stairwell to see the water coming up to the first landing of the stairs, about 3 or 4 feet high. It felt like the Titanic movie, when Leonardo DiCaprio was facing his impending doom at every stairwell he encountered. I was so scared that the water would reach our apartment. Our plan was to go up a few flights of stairs and camp out in the hallway if we had to.

Mid-way through the night, our alarms started going off. At first, it was a strange alarm for our Verizon box. Then our fire alarm started beeping. With our bed set up right under it, we had to deal. I stuffed cotton in my ears and managed to get about two hours of sleep. We woke up to this river in our street.

This was before the 8 AM surge came in, pushing the water back up to 3 feet. After this morning surge on Tuesday, we knew we were in the clear and wouldn't get any water up in our apartment.

The next challenge was trying to figure out how to get Bailey, our dog, to go to the bathroom. At first, our emergency plan was to have him go on our balcony. But, being the awesomely trained pup that he is, he refused to do it. Bartek eventually found that the door to our courtyard, which is also on the second floor, was propped open when it was supposed to be locked. So Bailey, excitedly, did his duty on the grass there.

Equipped with his flashlight 

Later in the day on Tuesday, we found that we could access the roof. So, flashlights in hand, we went up five flights to the top of the building. A lot of people were up there, trying to get service on their phones and surveying the damage of the streets around our building.

The scary thing about this water was that it was contaminated with oil and gas from the cars that were flooded. You could see the oil slick in the water from above. When we looked in the stairwell, there was still about two feet of the contaminated water at the bottom. We couldn't go anywhere.

So, we did what we could to entertain ourselves. We played build-a-plastic-cup-castle-as-high-as-we-can-before-the Landon Monster-knocks-it-down. Bartek played a lot of Temple Run on the iPad and we realized that we could charge our phones with the charge that was still on the laptop. 

Tuesday night, we saw a beacon of hope. Cars driving through the flooded street under our window. We saw the same two cars driving by. It had to mean that was the mayor or some city official trying to figure out how to help us. Then, we saw a bulldozer drive right by. We went to bed and woke up to a dry street below us. Some miracle happened overnight!

On Wednesday, we finally left the building. The lobby still had about 6 inches of water in it. Unfortunately, Bailey got some of the oily water on his paws that we later spent a good hour cleaning off him. We found that the glass walls of our management office had been shattered. At first, we thought it was looters but then realized that it had to be the force of the water rushing through.

We decided we would go pick up our car and somehow get back to civilization. Bartek had parked it in a parking deck in Weehawken on Sunday when we saw that all the Hoboken garages were full. On our way to Weehawken, we came across this sailboat that wound up on the walkway along the river. On the side, someone spray-painted, "GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL".

We got to our car and found that it was safe and dry! Thank God! Later on in the day, Bartek was getting calls and texts that said he had to come into the office. If not the NY office, he had to go to the Jersey City office. He had to trudge through the flooded streets to JC and go to work soaking wet. He did the same thing on Thursday and Friday.

I decided that the best thing to do was to bring Landon to my parents' house because our apartment was starting to get cold. They didn't have power, but they did have a generator and a wood-burning stove. It was the safest thing for Landon. My brother and his family were there already and my parents fed us and restored my sanity.

Nap-time with cousin Delainey. Landon had his legs resting on her. 

My dad found that my grandmother's house still had power. It has been on the market for a few months since my grandma passed away. Although it was somewhat empty, we all relocated there on Friday so we could take showers and live a little bit more normally. It didn't have any TV service, so we couldn't stay very connected but it was much more ideal.

Cousin bonding time

Sharing an aerobed with Bailey 

With work being canceled all week, it was finally time to start getting back to normal. I was going back to the apartment on Sunday, regardless if we had power. But luckily, it came back on Sunday afternoon and I was determined to see my husband again. My brother took my car to wait on a gas line for over an hour so that I could get back to Hoboken.

Once I got there, we walked Hoboken to find a lot of destruction. All of these businesses and apartments on First Street lost everything. It was a blocks-long garbage dump.

Seeing the devastation through out Hoboken was heartbreaking but it was great to see the community getting together to overcome. It'll take days, weeks and months to get everything back to normal but something as awful as this helps you to realize what is important in life.

Finally reunited with Daddy!