2013.039

Staff, Produced by

Produced by Staff

Museum Collections

2013 - 2013

Date(s) Created: 2013 Date(s): 2013

Notes: Archives 2013.039.0003 THE HOBOKEN HISTORICAL MUSEUM HOBOKEN STORIES: REMEMBERING STORM SANDY INTERVIEWEE: JOHN CAREY INTERVIEWER: ALAN SKONTRA LOCATION: HOBOKEN HISTORICAL MUSEUM DATE: 12 SEPTEMBER 2013 Track #1 AS: What is your connection to Hoboken? How long have you lived in the city? Approximately where in the city do you live? Who do you live with, if anyone, and what is your professional background? JC: I moved to Hoboken in 1987. I came here because it was convenient to work. At the time I was working as a construction superintendent at Ellis Island. For twenty years, I've lived very near the library on Park Avenue, in the middle of town, and for the last six years I've been living on Thirteenth Street. I've only been married the last six years. We got married after spending time as a bachelor. My wife, Sandy O'Conner and I, and my step-daughter, Rhiannon, live at our home on Thirteenth Street, 209 Thirteenth Street, between Park and Garden. AS: When did you first hear the words, Hurricane Sandy? JC: Being a weather geek of sorts, and having taken climatology and meteorology classes, I probably had that on my radar screen at least a week before, maybe farther, before it actually hit here in Hoboken. I was following it regularly on the internet and the weather channel, and in the news. AS: What did you expect the storm to be? JC: Well, three or four days out I expected it to be pretty bad. I had, at the time of Hurricane Irene -- we had kind of a precursor to what could potentially happened. That storm didn't pan out the way it might have, the scenarios. I can remember (and these are things I'm interested in, having taken a lot of physical sciences) watching a History Channel or something -- the Discovery Channel -- within the last few years, well before Sandy, I had seen a story about ultimate disasters or something in the United States. There were things like the giant earthquake off of Puget Sound, or the Columbia River Gorge, that would send tsunami waves out, and fires in different places, and various things and other earthquakes, but one of them was the hurricane that hit New York. The scenario which they portrayed at that point was very much in line with exactly what happened here, at Hurricane Sandy -- an extreme low-pressure storm, even though this was only marginally a Category #1, coming up the East Coast, hitting New Jersey, with its counter-clockwise wind, and a huge wind field. I was well aware that, even without somebody telling me, this was the scenario in which a huge amount of water would get pushed in between Sandy Hook and Long Island, and push into New York Harbor. All that combined -- which became evident when people were talking about you had high-tide cycles; you had a full moon -- these were all scenarios for disaster. Which panned out. So what did I expect? Two days out, I thought it was going to be really bad. I had prepared, personally, and I had talked to my family and some of our neighbors. I was lucky enough to have a generator at my home, that isn't normally hooked up. A friend who lives across the street is a contractor, and he was leaving town with his three young girls. He asked me if I ran a generator at my house, whether I would back-feed his sump pump in his basement, if power were to go out. We had a similar arrangement during Hurricane Irene. We had heavy rain during Irene. We didn't have the surge the way we did for this, and I don't think anyone expected to have a scenario where all three PS&G -- the power grid would basically go down. So I had prepared in that I had a generator, with Mike's help. I drew out $500 in cash -- because I expected that, if the power went down, the cash machines would be out. I had twenty gallons of gasoline. I had emergency supplies. I had a crank radio. I had taken several cases of bottled water and put them in my freezer. So I had a huge thermal mass to keep things cold, in coolers. I had brought some food in, not particularly -- I made sure we had bread and butter and things like that. But that was reasonably assured. I had some canned goods. There was a question as to whether we would leave town. We were fortunate enough to have a cabin out in the Poconos, which is at 1,700 feet, so I didn't think that would flood. But there was the potential, obviously, for heavy rainfall out there, and losing electricity. So that had its own scenario; that you might get out there and have trees down, and not be able to get back and forth. So my wife and I, Sandy, made a decision that we would all stay in Hoboken. I thought about where parking cars -- and having been a geography and cartography guy in college, and a construction guy in my present-day life -- I was well aware of what the grades in town were, and what the elevations were. I had moved our cars to, I think it was, the intersection of Thirteenth and Bloomfield, because it's about as high an intersection as you can get at our end of town, without being too far to walk, and try not to park them under a tree, where branches might come down. Things like that. So I think I was reasonably keyed in, as far as preparation goes. AS: What did you do on that Monday, before the storm hit? JC: The weather forecast for the storm indicated that it was going to be severe. I had thought about the surge, but I didn't think it would be quite what they predicted. I expected heavy rain, but understood -- because maybe we were far enough away from [Unclear] that we wouldn't get as much as we might. We're also on a street that, historically, we don't have flooding issues. We had some people with wet basements, but I wasn't concerned the way someone might be who was back on First and Harrison, or over by Shoprite, or some of the places down on Garden and Second, or other places that we all know flood. I'm sorry -- what did I -- ? AS: What did you do on that Monday, before the storm? JC: I had gotten some supplies together. We had set the generator up. That had been done largely with my buddy, Mike, his people. I think I had gone out and purchased some extension cords. I made sure we had supplies where we needed them -- candles. I had already made sure that I had an extra bottle of propane, in case we were going to barbecue and somehow the stove was out. I was going through, in my mind, what the utility situations might be. I'm an old Boy Scout: I'm prepared for certain things. So I was trying to look at that. I did make a point of taking my wife and daughter out, at the morning high-tide cycle. As I do even now, I'm often on a website that will indicate some of the meteorlogic issues. I'm also on the Stevens Institute website for the buoy that's off of Castle Point, I was looking at, and I had the weather channel on. We went out in the morning, the three of us, about 9:00 I the morning -- so twelve hours before the storm hit -- and we went behind the Tea building. At that point -- and it was right about the morning high-tide -- the water was right at the lip of the concrete, coming over to the walkway. I knew it was going to go back down, but I also knew, from indications and from conversations, that the evening high-tide was going to be substantially worse. I believe I'd heard that it was going to be at least six feet higher, or some order of magnitude along that, and I just said -- I knew, and I told my wife, "This is going to be bad. This is really going to be bad. Water is going to come into the city horribly," and I wasn't talking about rain water. I suspected (as did happen) that the river was going to come up, and it was going to push over our higher ground, that's adjacent to the river, and into the back of the city. So I did that, and I talked to Sandy and Rhiannon, my step-daughter, about those things, and I let them know that this could be severe. Also, later in the day, we took a ride around town. One of the -- I don't know if it's amusing, but interesting things -- is my wife's named Sandy. All over town people had boarded up, and there were big signs saying things like, "Sandy go away," "Don't come here," and I have a few photos someplace (maybe I've lost them, I'm not quite sure) of my wife standing in front of all sorts of establishments with signs. One of them, amusingly -- I think it was the Wilton House -- actually had a sign that said, "Sandy, go away," in spray paint over their windows. Then, in small writing, adjoining it, it said, "And take John with you." I don't know where that came from, but we were both howling. I also went up to Stevens Point, and was up there sometime mid-morning. This was before Sandy. My wife and I had driven around later in the day. I stood there and was looking at the chop on the river, and how high it was. You could see the water was coming way up over. I guess this was later in the morning, after we'd been out behind the Tea building. But it was coming way up over, into the park -- Maxwell Park -- and the trees were blowing heavy. There were two, huge Army Corps of Engineers ships that were just blowing around in the middle of the river. There was very little other river traffic. I also saw things that I started to suspect (and did come to pass). The docks here at the marina, on Thirteenth Street, the floating docks that are anchored with vertical pilings -- I suspected that they were going to float over the top of that, and later that did happen. So I was thinking things that were going to happen that pretty much did. [Unclear] So we prepped, and then I don't know if we had a meal. We made some family phone calls. People were calling us. We listened to the radio and the TV, and we kind of hunkered down. AS: And as the storm hit, where were you, and what were you doing? JC: Sandy, Rhiannon, and I were home with our dog. As I said, we decided that we weren't going to leave town. In Irene, Sandy and Rhiannon felt we didn't need to. We had supplies. The worst-case scenario -- I always said, because of where we were -- I said if it really did get bad, we were going to make it to a point where we're going to make it to the Fourteenth Street viaduct. That's the way out of town. You walk up the hill. But we were there. At 6:00 -- we weren't to be out after 6:00. I was. A friend of mine who lives on Fourteenth Street -- he and his wife are near Baja, on up the third or fourth floor, and the power has gone off. He is a chef in Manhattan, and he needed to be at work. His wife, Susan [unclear] Sandy -- my friend the chief, Sandy, was in working at the hotel and his wife was here in Hoboken. They had only moved back here from Hawaii, actually, a few months before. So we were concerned about Susan. The power went off over there. I talked to my buddy. I knew that between some friends that we'd make sure Susan was okay. So I went over to her place -- well, first, actually, at about 6:00 -- about 5:30-quarter of 6:00 I was behind the T-building. It was at 5:30 I was behind the T-building. The water was as high at 5:30, against the wall behind the T-building, and was starting to come over the top of the wall -- as it was at the high-tide in the morning. And we were three and a half full hours before the high-tide. With that, it seemed like this was going to be really severe, because, basically, the water hadn't receded from New York harbor and the Hudson River. So from there, there was a 6:00 moratorium, and I ended up going over -- having had a phone call from Susan -- over no Fourteenth Street, and went and helped her out of her building, in the dark. Their power went off a few hours before a lot of other people. Then I walked over here to the shipyard, and dropped her off with a couple I know here, where Susan could stay through the storm. It was just easier for her to be over here, than to come over to our house. So I did that. I stayed here -- I stayed in the shipyard. I think we had to drink Irish whiskey, and I called another friend who was upstairs, on the fourteenth floor, and I was looking out at the marina, and wondering when the water was going to breach the sea wall here. It was over the dock, I think, at that point, at the Thirteenth Street pier. It was about to crest over it. The waves were pretty heavy. The boats were bouncing around in the marina, and the wind was howling from the northeast, and it was really coming around the edge of the building, bad. I had seen a couple other heavy-wind situations, but this was all funnels. I probably left here, in the shipyard, about 7:15 or so -- I'm not sure exactly -- and then headed home. My wife and daughter were there and the lights were on. They were watching TV. What happened then? I went back out. My wife was on the phone with a family relative here in town -- my stepdaughter's grandma -- and also, we went over to -- I can't remember the sequence exactly. Rhiannon was playing some electronic games. About 8:00 or so -- maybe it was later, 8:30 -- I went out, not having been out for quite a while, and walked around the corner, on Garden Street, and went up by Gino & Harry's. I could see at that point that the water had come southbound on Garden, by the new parking garage. At that point, the old parking garage was still there. We were still an hour or so before high-tide, and the wind was blowing to push the water up on our side of the river. I walked back on the cobbled area, where the Farmer's Market now is, and then went around the corner by CVS. There were some other neighbors who were out. I was there by CBS, looking over toward the diner, and the water was already pushing up on the front of the Malibu diner. I was concerned that the water would come higher. I knew, at that point, that this was really severe, because I knew that that was relatively high ground. I could see the water flowing over toward Willow. I suspected it was probably flowing from the south end of town, where, earlier in the day, I had been down at the rail yard. The television cameras had been there, and there had been live broadcasts and things, showing it come up by the train yard. But I suspected, at 8:30 at night, that not only was the back of town going to get severely, severely, severely flooded, but it might hit our house. So I ran back to the house, got over there, and very abruptly -- in my way -- went in and told my wife to get the hell off the phone (not in the nicest manner), and Rhiannon, I told her, "Come downstairs, put your shoes on. This is serious. Something big's going on." I realized, in a bit -- I went back out -- I kept saying that high-tide was at 9:06. I guess that's something I knew from the Stevens website. The water, in my mind, could come up -- that was the peak -- or it would be slightly thereafter, because of the way the wind was blowing, and things pushing into the harbor. But basically, that was going to be the peak of the surge. So I kind of had in my head that within an hour the worst of the water that was getting in was going to get in, then it was going hit us -- my house -- it was going to be sometime before that. Then, in going back and looking, the water line that was intruding was kind of stable. It wasn't coming southbound on Park beyond the Malibu. I walked over by the Sunoco station -- Dean Marchetto's office -- and it was flowing past there. It wasn't coming farther, it wasn't coming closer to our home. But I knew -- that was fine for us, but it had to be absolutely horrible elsewhere, and I was going through these scenarios in my brain: "If the water is in front of the Malibu, it must be all the way to the bridges by Weehawken, and the south end of town has got to be absolutely inundated. That appears to be what happened. So that was kind of up to the peak. Then the power went out. AS: Did your generator work when the power went out? JC: It was a 5,000-watt generator. It had to be manually started. I could have turned it on right away, but, frankly, I didn't want to. I didn't need to. Track #2 JC: I was saying about the power going out. So the power went out. I had a generator. Now probably -- I don't know exactly what time -- because time was a bit of a blur, and it wasn't pre-eminent; it was just what was going on. So I could have turned the generator on; I didn't need to. I ended up -- I had set up extension cords. The generator was directly in front of our house. We've got a piece of property that is twenty feet wide. I had four foot to the gate. I had a generator underneath a little shed there. I had my gasoline and what not. I didn't need to turn the lights on. I had flashlights, I had flashlight batteries. The refrigerator wasn't going cold. I also, frankly, didn't want everybody -- for me to be sitting there with lights on, going, "I'm okay." There was no need to. I kind of got to a point where, after it appeared that the worst of it was over, it wasn't going to get any worse, and the power was out, it was kind of time to go to bed. We were tired. I don't remember exactly. I may have been up the whole night before, in my hyper state or something, but we were tired. I suspected it was going to be a long day the next day. I didn't know how long the power was going to be out. I didn't know that the power was out through the city, totally. We didn't have internet. We had cellphones. I think some people were calling in. I don't know. It was just kind of like, "Get up in the morning and see what's going on." I did have a conversation, I guess, with my buddy, Mike, who was out -- I know I did. I had a conversation with him. He was out in Warren County, where they were staying with his family, and I said, "Hey, the power's gone out. Do you want me to turn --" I asked him if he wanted me to turn the generator on. I was going to back-feed -- take his sump pumps off his house power and use the extension cord that we'd draped across the street, in the trees and into his basement, and change that cord around so his sump-pump would run automatically when the power was on. We decided, no, we didn't need to do it that night; that I'd get up and I'd get over there by 7:00 in the morning, or something, to check it out when the sun was up. So that's where that was left The next morning -- AS: Yes. What did you do the next morning? JC: The next morning I did get up, and I was all wired up. I can't remember if I had the radio on or whatever, and I didn't turn the generator on right away. There was enough light to get around the house. It was going to be light. I'd read the riot act to my daughter -- "Don't open the refrigerator." We had water. We had gas in the stove. We even had hot water. I wasn't quite sure if that was going to work. I should know this, as a construction guy, but I knew there were certain things that weren't going to work. The heat wasn't going to work, even though it was gas, because the fan wouldn't push the air around. There were various things that I knew wouldn't work. I also had a lot of firewood. I think I got that a couple days before. Oh, yeah. We'd been away all the weekend before. I'd forgotten about that. So we were coming back from Connecticut, at a family event, so basically I rolled -- to go back -- we had been away, and had just come back from a few days away. We didn't get back until late on Sunday, and I knew that there were things to do, but some of them I've already done already. So let me get back to -- what were we saying, Alan? AS: The next morning. Tuesday morning. JC: Okay. So Tuesday morning. So I got up, had my flashlight, had all my spare batteries and stuff. I went across the street into my buddies house; went down to the sub-basement, and it was like, "Oh, shit!" Excuse my expletives. There was water in his basement. There had not been any water on our street. There hadn't been any water within, oh, 200 feet, probably, and there was only a slight grade. But the ground water had come up into his basement. Mike had installed a really great under-drainage system and had a couple of sub-pumps, but the water had come up. He had, I think it is, a Pergola-like wood floor, and the floor was floating above the concrete slab. Basically, I knew it was ruined, and I was kicking myself. We had made a decision not to turn the sump-pump on the night before -- waste gasoline; you'd need it for lights; save all of that. So it just was a lesson. It was the first time I was going to go turn his sump on. I didn't know what the normal cycle of it was. I understand these things, but -- so, immediately, I went up from his sub-basement, into his basement and up to -- and ran across the street, with everything quiet in the neighborhood. I didn't care if I disturbed anything; I started the generator up. It was all ready to go. I hooked up the electric, and just started pumping. So the water was drained off of his floor. Consequently, then, I back-fed things. I went over to my house, which wasn't critical, and I said, "Okay, let me plug their refrigerator in for a little while." I think we were trying things, to see if the TV worked. I didn't have any rabbit ears with the new-style TV sets. Anyhow, I couldn't get any information, and I don't have a Smart Phone so I was kind of scraping by on what info I could get. With that, basically, the days all blend in. That first day, I think it was everybody getting out, seeing the neighbors. People knew I had a generator. It was making noise. I had it on for a couple hours in the morning, when the pump had to go down. I wasn't quite sure how often you have to turn it back on. I wasn't particularly looking out, or doing anything outside of our immediate home. I don't believe we were supposed to be riding around town at that point, and I wasn't. I did, shortly after I turned the generator on -- I met some other neighbors, including some firemen who live on our block. I'm sure he was on the job. But his wife was coming out, and we ran down, up to the end of Garden Street, by the waterfront, to see what was going on, and lo and behold, there was that sailboat there, so I saw that for the first time. That kind of, in my head, gave an order of magnitude how bad it was. Because if that boat, that probably draws four or five feet with its keel -- even if it was pushed up and forced up under the water, the water had to be pretty heavy and thick, deep over the walkway. Then I didn't want to stay out long. We weren't supposed to be -- the cops had their job to do. I understand that. But in some ways I guess we all had a need to understand what was going on, or wasn't going to be going on. I guess they were concerned, later on, about anybody looting and things like this. But it was basically neighbors trying to figure out what was going on. Later in the day I know there were some issues that I was helping some neighbors out. In fact, this same friend who's a fireman -- he was off on duty -- he checked her pump in the basement, and it wasn't working. I had some roofing material that I patched a pipe in his basement, so they could at least make sure water didn't collect. There were a couple of things that I was going around, doing. AS: When did you leave your immediate neighborhood and start venturing out into the city? Was it the next day? JC: Here again, a bit of a blur. I could probably go back and look at some things, but I think most of Tuesday -- I believe I pretty much stayed nearby. We heard conversations from different people, and understood that power was out all over. I'm not sure if, on that day, I went down to City Hall. I don't believe we were supposed to be using our cars. I had my bicycle. I knew that was a great way to get around. I used it extensively later on. Later on, when we could use our cars, it was a different thing. But it was just a good way to go around and see what was going on. I think I might have gone down as far as Eleventh Street. People were out on their stoops. Different people were talking: "Did you get water? How's this? What did you see?" I started to understand that some places, some of the high-rises might have had emergency generators. Also, with my construction background -- and I was Facilities Manager, Assistant Facilities Manager to Guggenheim Museum for nine years; I've worked with emergency power systems; I've worked with fire alarms; I've built elevators; I've built sea walls; I've put up steel; I've poured concrete; I've done marine construction; all sorts of other things -- so many of the issues, emergency issues and things I was familiar with -- understanding that if you don't have a generator, the potential is the fire alarm didn't work, or that the water pumps weren't pumping water up to the upper floors, or to a tank that might help; that there were going to start to be sanitary problems. It was also just, with flushing -- it was also obvious -- I didn't know for a fact that -- I assumed that the sewer plant wasn't functioning, and I was well familiar with the inherent drainage problems here in Hoboken, with the combined storm and sanitary, and that basically everything that was in and stuck -- the water that was in the city, that hadn't gone, that was stuck, had to go out -- it wasn't going flow out to the river on its own; it had to be pumped out, or it had to go out through the sewers, and this was going to be the big issue. My stepdaughter's grandmother lives over on Thirteenth and Grand, and she has a corner apartment, a corner condo, that had quite a view. We had been talking to her on the phone. I knew, initially, she couldn't get out of her building. I think we also knew, shortly thereafter, that her car was flooded. She was concerned about her dog being there in the house. I believe it was later that day that the water got to a point where, from the south end of that building, the southeast corner, that she could walk across Twelfth Street -- because it's a little higher -- and she was able to get over to our house. With that, we knew that she'd be staying with us, and it would be our dog and her dog. I also knew we had a generator, that kind of sat back. Okay. We've got so much gasoline. I didn't know how fast it would be used. The primary reason for running the generator was so that Mike's sump-pump could de-water his basement, because the groundwater would probably continue to get up, and we benefited from that because we could charge things. I could power the refrigerator, and just make sure it would get colder. And a couple other things that we used. I guess within a day many -- being who I am, and many people knowing me, a lot of my friends knew that if they needed something they could come over, or we were having people over, at least probably the second evening, and I had the generator running for a while. We started to cook food, and just people's freezers were -- they couldn't keep the food, and they brought it over to our house, and we made big meals. So that was kind of the first day. I guess I had a feeling that a huge part of the city was flooded, and there were a lot of people who were really in a bad way, and that we were really, really lucky. I mean, I was prepared, but we were very lucky, and it was a matter of only being a foot or two higher than some people who were a block or two away. I also suspected that people who were traditionally -- that apocrypha is low; that they were hit really bad. Horribly. I thought -- I mean, there would be five feet of water in big parts of town, and I guess there was. Well, I know there was, now. I guess the next night some people came over, and people were asking questions and stuff. Then, I guess, Wednesday I kind of set it up where, "Okay, now's my day to go out and explore, and see what's really going on." AS: And when you went out to explore, where did you go, what did you see, and what was your response? JC: On Wednesday, at that point -- immediately after the storm, at the Fourteenth Street viaduct, the water had receded, and you could go up that viaduct. It was -- oh, I remember what happened. I'm confusing the days. My buddy who lives over here in the Constitution [unclear] -- it might have been the next day. He had parked his car where he assumed it was safe. It was "away from the river," quote/unquote. He had parked his car on Fifteenth -- no, Sixteenth -- north of the Burlington Coat Factory, just adjacent the kidney dialysis place. In retrospect, that seemed to be the sluiceway, where a big chunk of water was going cross-town. That might have been on that Wednesday. But the bottom line is, Rick and I hopped on a couple of bikes, and we were riding around. His car was over there. He had known it was flooded, but he didn't know how bad. We cycled up Willow Avenue in about a foot of water, beyond the north of the Hess gas station. He wasn't too sure how deep it was going to get. By where the Macy's studio was, nearby Burlington, there were police officers preventing April from going -- the water was much deeper at the base there, to go up and over to Weehawken. But we got to the bridge, and there was some gas leak or something going on over by the Shades so we weren't going over there. But he could see his car, that was there on Fifteenth, right immediately east, or west of Willow. He could see how the water had gotten in; it was almost up to the interior ceiling. So I think that was his confirmation, not the assumption that he had to write his car off. So there was a bit of that. On Wednesday -- it was Wednesday -- when the water did recede, for whatever reason, going back in the [Unclear] with the sump-pump online -- of course, nobody had power. I had sump-pumps. I had one installed in my house. I had another one that I bought. I think for Irene I'd gone out to an industrial supply house and gotten some things. So I kind of knew that I was okay,... [truncated due to length]