2013.039

Staff, Produced by

Produced by Staff

Museum Collections

2013 - 2013

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

Notes: Archives 2013.039.0007 THE HOBOKEN HISTORICAL MUSEUM HOBOKEN STORIES: REMEMBERING STORM SANDY INTERVIEWEE: HANK FORREST INTERVIEWER: ALAN SKONTRA DATE: 9 AUGUST 2013 AS: What is your background in Hoboken? How long have you lived here? Where do you live, approximately? Who do you live with, and what is your profession? HF: My wife and I moved to Hoboken in the summer of '87. We spent our first six years on Madison Street -- Third and Madison -- which was still a pretty dicey area when we first moved in. Six years later, we moved here, on Jefferson Street, only a few blocks away but it's a different ward and a different world, here on Jefferson. I am an architectural lighting designer. I work in the city. So Hoboken has always been -- we fit the pattern of being a bedroom community. We don't have kids. I think that's it. AS: When did you first hear the words "Hurricane Sandy?" HF: I believe it was weeks before. It was well before the event. I guess at that time of year it seems that weather has started to dominate the news, in a way that it hadn't a few years ago. And I guess maybe with Irene, the year before, it put hurricanes on our collective map. So it seemed like, I guess, there were always hurricanes going on in the news; finally, there was this one, that everyone was talking about, that was going to actually hit us and impact us. So a few weeks. AS: Based on that, what did you expect Hurricane Sandy to be? HF: I automatically went back to Irene. I mean, Irene -- I couldn't help but keep thinking of Irene. Irene was the first hurricane, I think, since -- I remember I had a hurricane my first day of first grade. It was more the way everybody was acting about it -- but that was kind of my context for hurricanes, until Irene came. With Irene, there was a lot of prep, a lot of thought about it, then it kind of blew through. So when Sandy started to come in, I just automatically started to think of Irene, and like, "Okay. This is something to take seriously," but I didn't take it that seriously, because Irene -- we did not lose power in Irene, as opposed to Sandy; the streets got flooded in Sandy, and in Irene they didn't. So my whole context was really driven by us being spared, I think, during Irene, and not having it prove to be as bad as everybody was predicting. Of course, with Sandy -- what Sandy brought with it, which I didn't think about at all, was storm surge. In the aftermath, I had no idea what storm surge was. I really didn't think about that at all. I just thought of the Hudson rising, with all the water coming down from above, and the water levels would rise. But with Irene, Jefferson Street was completely dry. The only places that flooded, in my context, seemed to be the places that often flooded in bad rainstorms, at the south end of town, and the far west part of town. Things like that. But Sandy turned out to be something completely different. AS: How did you prepare for the storm? HF: Again, for Irene, I had these large, 10-12"-wide scaffolding planks that are really heavy and long. I stood them on their ends, and created kind of a damn in front of my garage door. We have a wide, 14'-wide garage door in the front, and a front door. So, essentially, I set up these planks, I covered them in tarps, and I weighed them down with concrete blocks, for Irene, thinking that the garage door did not come tight to the ground, and would keep any water from trickling in. It turns out, I didn't need to do anything. None of that was necessary. So, in this storm, I just decided not to do that. So, effectively, I think my honest answer is -- other than we did fill up our bathtubs with water; we filled up our sinks with water; we had water on hand -- but that was probably the limit to what we did for Sandy. We didn't buy extra food. We didn't try to create any sort of dams or water protection around the doors of our building. That was it. AS: What were you doing as the storm hit? And what did you do after losing power? HF: What were we doing when the storm hit? Monday morning -- we had already decided we were going to ride it out and not leave town. We rode out Irene, even though, again, in Irene, there was a terrific amount of outreach by the city -- city volunteers going around town. Of course, Irene was in August, and on the weekend, and the storm was going to hit that night, just like with Sandy. But in Irene, by that afternoon, it was kind of ominous. There was no real rain, but the city had turned into a ghost town. All the cars had been cleared off the streets. There was no one around. For Sandy, it was already windy, and I believe it was somewhat rainy but not really hard. But it was getting windy. We walked down to the waterfront at 9:00 that morning, to just go for a walk, figuring we were going to be stuck inside that evening, for a while, so we'd just go for a walk. We went down to the waterfront and we saw that there was -- Lackawanna Plaza was already filled up with water, and there were cops standing between Lackawanna Plaza and Pier A. That was roughly where the water was starting to lap up onto the land. They were more or less looking at each other, and wondering, "Well, all right, maybe -- what will we do?" There was that verbal, like, "Should we stop people from walking past a certain point?" We went up to Pier A. We could see that the water level at Pier A was pretty high. But, basically, we just went for a walk around town, and then just came back. Funny. With Irene, in the hours before the storm, there were fire trucks driving around, making announcements: "Last chance to get out of town." What started as ground-floor apartments should be evacuated. They started announcing that first-floor apartments should be evacuated. There was a real kind of fear, I thought, instilled -- not inappropriately -- but they were scaring people into leaving town. Which turned out to be a good thing, but in Sandy there was nothing. There was nobody making these announcements. The streets were filled with cars, and it was clear that it didn't seem like, really, almost anybody had left town. Everybody was still here. So there wasn't so much of that ominous feeling as there was for Irene. So I think all of us -- I sensed -- felt like, "Well, all right. We've been through this before." With Irene, I was always thinking that the worst thing that would happen was that we would lose power, and would be stuck in the house, stuck in some hot house without air-conditioning, without TV or lights. But, again, we just carried on. We just figured, "All right. We're just going to have to wait this out." So that's it. We really didn't do anything out of the ordinary. AS: Did you home suffer any damage? HF: No. Not really. Our back yard was filled with water and it came right up to -- we have a deck, and some steps from the deck up into the house. That was all covered in water. But by the time the water drained out -- realistically, and even this spring -- we lost very few plants in the back yard. That's the level. The back yard was fine, other than it needed to be cleaned. And our garage, we lost -- I didn't really have anything of value stored in the garage, on the ground. We lost some things you store in the garage, but in terms of the house itself, no. It was just really just cleaning things. I think we were really fortunate in terms of actual, structural damage. This house is a concrete block house. We have no basement. The house was built in '84. So we were fortunate in that regard. It was really just a clean-up act, afterwards. AS: Were you able to get out onto the street and survey the scene? HF: No. We lost power at 9:30 Monday night. We were watching TV and the power went out, and I said to my wife, "Okay. Let's go to sleep. There's nothing else we can do." But it was pretty loud outside, in terms of the wind. There wasn't that much rain, but the wind was still making things pretty loud. My wife couldn't sleep, so she just started pacing around the house, until finally I heard her yell, from downstairs, something like, "Oh, no!" So I knew she was seeing water in the garage. The water was coming into the garage. So at that point, I just stood up on my bed and looked out. There's an alley next to us, so I looked out the alley and I could see Jefferson Street, looking down the alley, and I could see the water covering the sidewalk, and start to come into the alley. I guess between 10:00 and 10:30 it seemed like the water in the garage went from three to six inches, up to a foot and a half or two feet. The water rose very quickly, in maybe a half-hour period. So when we stood at the door of our garage, looking out into the dark garage, with the water out there, we would hear noises outside, and water kind of splashing up against the garage door. We had no idea what was going on outside, but we were too scared to open the doors and see what was going on. I think the next day we realized what it was; it was vehicles driving down the street, throwing waves of water up against the house. When we got up the next day, the water level in the garage had gone down to about six inches, something like that. So that's the garage, and like the front vestibule down our stairs. At that point, we opened up our front door, just to look out, and we could see that there was just water from our bottom step, right across the street, to the house across the street. So we put on the tallest boots we had -- and we could walk in front of the house, but as soon as we got down toward the sidewalk and out into the street, clearly the water was still up over our knees, and our boots weren't going to be tall enough, so we were basically trapped in the house. So we went up to the second floor. The front of our house has a tenant's apartment in the front. He had left, and stayed in the city that night, so we just kind of went into his apartment to look out his window, from the second floor. From there, we could look up and down Jefferson Street, and see that the whole thing was a lake. Cars were all still parked. It looked like nobody had left, and we would see other people looking out their windows. We were all more or less trapped. There were a few people that you'd see their legs and pants wrapped in garbage bags, and they were kind of wandering around. But at that point, also, we would see, occasionally there would be fire trucks that would come down the street, city pickup trucks. There was the occasional car -- SUV -- that would come storming down the street and throwing water, but for the most part it seemed like it was city vehicles. A couple of times I yelled out to them, saying "What's going on?" One city worker yells back to me, "We don't know. Nobody tells us anything." A fire truck came storming down. They were just driving down. They weren't making any announcements or anything. The fire truck -- I yelled out at them, "What's going on? What's happening?" And they just said, "Talk to your mayor. Nobody tells us anything." Three times, I yelled out to the firemen and twice to the city workers. All of them had what seemed to be an almost kind of political response about what seemed to be about the city and the mayor not communicating, and they were given no direction. All of a sudden, I started to get really antsy; that here we were, trapped in the house, and there had been no warnings or anything leading up to this. I just felt the city had really collapsed badly; that the city government had collapsed badly, and just abandoned the citizens. Obviously, they couldn't have prevented the storm. They couldn't have done anything about the water that was coming into my house. But at least in terms of communication, and giving us some sense of not being -- because here we were, isolated in our house; not knowing what was going on with the power; when were we going to get power back? Was the whole town like this? Was this something that was just in our part of town? We were given nothing, because we had no access to news or anything. We were completely abandoned. So it was disheartening. If I ramble on and don't answer your question, you're going to come back and ask me again, right? AS: Do you feel as though your neighbors were prepared? And how do you think they handled the storm? HF: I did not think -- there were a number of positive things about the storm. Among those positives were the fact that we got to know, or got familiar with many more of our neighbors than we normally are, even though we've been on this block for almost twenty years. There's been a fair amount of turnover on the block in the last five or ten years, so we don't actually know a lot of the people on the block. But I think for all the people that we do know, and all the people we met and got acquainted with, I got a sense that we were all in the same boat (no pun intended), all kind of blindsided. Most of them had basements there were completely flooded. But they were great. I'll tell you, as freaked out as we all were in our various ways, I thought that all the people we met, and all the people we met through those people on the block, were very community minded and were very willing to help out and share. I think, like us, they felt like any support or communication from the city completely collapsed, and we were on our own. Any help we were going to get was only from each other, and that seemed to be something that kind of brought us together, in that regard. So we didn't have any negative experiences whatsoever, with any of the people we came across in our block. And even as we finally start to wander around town on Wednesday, everybody was kind of pulled-together at that point. AS: How would you rate the city's preparation for Hurricane Sandy, versus it's preparation for Hurricane Irene? HF: Well, Sandy, as I've already stated -- I would be pretty comfortable giving them a zero on a one to ten scale, ten being the best, and one being nothing. I don't think we got -- if this were a third-world country, I don't think we would have gotten any better or worse support than we got, since we got no support whatsoever. Irene, I would actually give the city good marks. As I said, Irene -- the fire department -- there was more of a sense that the various municipal departments -- not just the city hall department, but the fire department, the police department -- you had a sense that there was actually some coordination, and that they were talking to each other, and that they collectively had some sort of plan -- the main plan being to just get people out of town as much as possible, and get all the cars off the streets. After Irene proved to be not as bad as we were told it could be, some people felt like, "Well, there they were. It was overblown," and this and that. I'll tell you, the day or two after Irene, with having to move trees, and having to deal with downed wires, and the cleanup, etc., it was great that the city had done what it did, and got all those cars off the street and the people out of town. Granted it was a weekend in the summer, so I think people were in a better place to get out of town than they were for a Monday in the fall, right in the middle of the work -- Monday night, etc. Irene -- I don't know -- maybe a seven or eight in terms of a one-to-ten basis. I thought they did good. I was glad that they went a little overboard, and they were a little more cautious, and they did what they did. It still confuses me, to this day, why there was none of that for Sandy. The question I have is, what did the city actually know before Sandy? Were they aware? Did they understand storm surge better than I did? Recently there was an article -- they were talking about Stevens -- and there was a guy at Stevens who was quoted as saying something like, "Yep, we knew there was going to be eleven feet of water, and there was eleven feet of water." Now I don't know what eleven feet of water means, but it sounds like we have this maritime -- we have a highly-regarded and accomplished maritime program at Stevens, people who know about this stuff, with equipment, wave pools, and things like that, that they know about water movement, and oceans, and tidal movements, and things like that. So it's hard for me to imagine that the city really didn't know more than I did, just listening to press reports, etc. That was one of the interesting things about Irene. I realized, since we had power the whole time -- we could watch the news, etc. -- with Irene it became clear that you were not going to get any useful information on the TV, because the TV seemed to be aimed toward a regional audience. So they had to kind of report the worst-case scenario, thinking that whoever's in that area is going to be watching TV, and they're going to want to know about that. So for us, who were not getting hit with the center part of the storm, it was kind of useless information. I wasn't experiencing what, maybe, the towns along the Passaic River were experiencing, etc. The best information, then, was just going online. Because at least online, if it started to target Hoboken, if it started to target smaller areas, much, much better than you could on the news on TV. Of course, with Sandy, I had no access to any of that, but I would have thought that the city did. AS: How do you think the city handled the aftermath of the storm, in the days after the storm? HF: Poorly. My zero on the one-to-ten rating for how they prepared for the storm -- it doesn't get much better for the days after the storm. On Tuesday, as I said, we were trapped in the house. We didn't go anywhere on Tuesday. I guess by Tuesday night the water had gone down on the sidewalks on Jefferson Street. The street was still flooded; the intersections were still very flooded. But it was dark out, so we didn't go anywhere. Wednesday, when we got up -- the first thing I did Wednesday morning was to go down to City Hall, figuring out that City Hall must know what's going on, and I could get some information. So I went down there. The building was essentially empty. There was the community room on the first floor, off of Newark. I walked in there, and that seemed to be -- had the notion of mission control. I went in there and I found Joel Mestre, who, I believe, was the head of emergency management. Maybe I'm wrong. I went to the website today, and I see he's now the deputy coordinator of emergency management, so I don't know if that was his role then. But I knew he was pretty high up, and he would be somebody who, at least job-title-wise, should know more than me, and know what's going on. Basically, he was just running around with his head cut off, in there. And when I started to ask him, "What's going on? How come we haven't heard anything from the city?" he just responded, "Well, you know, I'm really tired, too. My house was flooded. I haven't slept." It was all about him. I didn't get any information from him that wasn't about him. There was no, "You might want to try so and so," or something. There was nothing. So I left there, realizing that City Hall -- I went through the building, and there was nobody around. So at that point, we proceeded to just walk the city. I started with going to the three PSE&G substations. I figured, "Okay, that's my main thing right now, as I've got no power." So I went up to the Second Street substation, up near the projects, and the substation itself was dry, but it was an island in the middle of a lake. As soon as you got to the fence around it, it was all water. And it was quiet. There was nobody there. There was no activity whatsoever. Then we walked up to Tenth Street, up to the Shop Rite. The substation was there. There, the streets around it were dry, the substation was all dry, and there was a pickup truck parked outside the fence, and there was a guy in there, walking around. So I yelled in to him. He was PSE&G guy, so I asked him, "What do you think? What kind of state is this in?" And he said, "Well, I'm the first one to have been in here to look at any of these. Actually, it's much better than I thought. He reported that there were some transformers blown, etc. I said, "Do you have any idea when we might get power?" He said he thought it might be in two or three days. This was Wednesday -- meaning that Friday or Saturday -- that that substation was up. So I said, "I live on Fifth and Jefferson. Am I powered off this substation?" He said, "It's hard to say. It's not as easy --" He didn't know. So I asked him about the other substations, and he says, "Well, the Second Street and Tenth Street only feed Hoboken." He hadn't been up to Second Street. He was going up there next. He asked, "So what's it like up there?" so I told him what I saw, in terms of how to access it, and the water around it. He said there was another substation up on Fifteenth Street, on the north end of town, where the Second and Tenth Street substations were fed off Jersey City from another station that was completely blown and not operable; but one uptown was either solely or jointly fed by a station up in Bergen County, that was still working. So that's why some people in town had power -- because they were being fed off that substation. At that point we had also heard that there were places uptown that had power. We seldom went up to City Hall, to City Hall/Washington Street. Washington Street was dry. It looked like a bunch of the streets uptown were dry. But it was kind of hard to say where the water stopped as we walked east. Then we walked up to the Fifteenth-Street substation. That looked dry. Then we did a big loop, up Fifteenth Street, and then came back down, I believe maybe Washington/Bloomfield garden, and that's when we began to see that people had put power strips outside. You were starting to see some people -- there weren't that many out at that point, but you started to see some people sitting there, powering their phones, etc. It seemed like maybe two or three blocks where there were maybe two or three people. It hadn't yet mushroomed into what it became on Thursday and Friday where it seemed like, not every house, but maybe one out of three houses had power cords running outside, and people started to put benches out. People started to put food and drinks out. It almost looked like a competition from house to house, of who could be the better host. I didn't get a sense, talking to any of those people, that they really had any idea of what was going on, on the west side of town. It almost felt like they were guilty for not having been flooded or lost power; their biggest conveniences seemed to be that they couldn't get to work, and that other people they were communicating with were out of communication. And so forth. But people were very nice, and it was almost, not quite a party, but it was a very positive, fun atmosphere up there. But then coming back -- that was Wednesday. So Thursday, I got up first thing in the morning, again, and I went back down to City Hall. This time I knew -- I stuck my head in the ground-floor office. The ground-floor office, at that point, now, seemed to have become, on Thursday morning, kind of a volunteer headquarters, where it seemed to be they were signing up -- people whom I didn't recognize as being city workers or anything like that, who seemed to be organizing the kind of volunteer situation there. So at that point, I went upstairs to the mayor's office. First, I started to go upstairs just to see who was there. The City Clerk's office was closed. I went upstairs. The Environmental Services, Human Services -- those doors were all shut. I saw the mayor's door was open, so I just walked in. I walked through the mayor's reception room, into the mayor's kind of meeting room there, and I saw that there were, I think, maybe three people. One of them, a guy there, eventually asked, "What can I do for you?" I introduced myself, and said, "I'm just looking for information. Who are you?" He introduced himself as Juan Melli, the mayor's communications person. He looked like he hadn't slept in a long time. I could see there was a power strip by the window, with power cords going out the window, I guess to generators down below. He's sitting there, and Michael Russo -- my councilman -- is sitting around the table with his hands folded behind his head, and he's like slouched in the chair, looking very relaxed, with his legs folded. I'm just looking at the two of them, saying, "So when is the city going to communicate outside? When are we going to learn what's going on?" I wasn't so angry yet, with him. I was just asking those things. He said, "Well, the city's website has information." I said, "How am I supposed to access --? Can you access the city website?" And I'm pointing to the power strip on the window. He said, "I know a lot of people don't have power." Meanwhile, I'm saying to him, "Well, when is the city finally going to outreach and do something?" I see Michael Russo is motioning to Juan Melli, and pointing at me, in a manner of, "You see! This is what I've been telling you. Here. Listen to him. He's telling you the same thing." That was the implication of Russo's thing. So I just said, "Well, there's been absolutely no presence. The city has had zero presence on the streets -- at least where I am -- other than a fire truck would go by, the pickup trucks would go by." There was even a city worker in a backhoe, driving down the street with what looked like their cousin or somebody -- clearly not a city worker -- in the scoop of the backhoe, with a video camera, shooting videos. The only people I saw were out shooting videos; they didn't seem to be working, or doing anything. I said, "Where is everybody?" And Russo is saying to Juan Melli, "Yeah. You see?" So I turned to Russo, and I said, "Well, Michael, in all fairness, where are you? How come I don't see you back in our ward? How come I'm seeing you sitting here, with your arms crossed? Where are you? Where's the City Council? Where's anybody? Where are the directors? I see volunteers being organized downstairs, but where are the people we're paying, whose job it is kind of do something? They're nowhere." He said, "Well, it's been tough. We've been trying to organize this." I said, "Well, what's going on with the power?" He says, "Well, PSE&G is working on that. They said it could be a week to ten days." This is eight hours, or twelve hours, after I saw a PSE&G guy, and he's telling me two to three days. And he's up at the substation. So I said, "Who's telling you that? Is that from guys who are here, working on the substations? Or is that some PSE&G default response from their office in Newark, or whatever." He said, "Well, this is what PSE&G is telling me. So it seemed clear to me that while he might have been doing his best, the only information he had was that he hadn't left this room, and he was just being told this by whomever, from some other office, who hadn't left their room, who was being told -- it was all like fourth-hand. So I had no confidence whatsoever that he had any better sources for information than I did, by simply walking around town and just talking to people. So at that point, I think I ended up realizing that I wasn't going to learn anything from these guys. They didn't know anything. So I said, "All right. Well, thanks for that." I walk out, and Russo kind of walks out with me, and Russo kind of walks me out of the building and down the stairs -- basically, like, "If there's anything I can do --" Thanks, but what are you going to do. So then, at that point, as we're heading down the stairs at City Hall, I realize, "Well, I'm probably going to learn more up in the mayor's office than I am walking around with Michael Russo, so I just excused myself from him. He leaves, and I go back up to the mayor's office. I go back up to the mayor's office, and I see, as I'm standing there, they're in the middle of talking about something -- and I'm just standing there -- a woman walks in and introduces herself to Juan and some other people. She says, "Hi. I'm from Reuters. Would you give me an interview on what's going on?" He said, "Sure," so she sits down. And I'm standing there. I'm like invisible at this point. So she starts to ask him, "Well, how does the city think they're doing?" She starts asking very broad, very roundabout questions that don't really seem to relate to what's going on outside. And Juan is answering the questions, and doing what he can. Finally, at the end of her little thing, she says, "Well, all right. Is there anything else I should know, or you want to tell me?" No. So she leaves. At this point I see -- another one of the council people now is there. I forget her name. I see they're talking about something. They're now talking about how they can get "flip charts," or how they can put information out. I'm listening. "Where where are we going to get Magic Markers?" "Well, maybe So-and-So has Magic Markers." What their ideas was, they were going to get some sort of markers, and they were going to write information on storefront windows. But they were like, "Well, we have to make sure -- are they washable? We can't damage the storefront windows." And one says, "Well, what if we used flip-chart paper?" "Well, we don't know where to get that," and so forth. So finally I interrupt. I said, "Are you for real? Is that your idea of how to get information out? To write on storefronts? They said, "Well, we're trying to come up with some way." I said, "Why don't you just photocopy off a lot of a whole lot of paper. They said, "Because we're out of power. The photocopiers don't work." I said, "Well, what about Weehawken? They have power. Or wha... [truncated due to length]