Brownstone Brooklyn neighborhoods like Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens were able to celebrate Halloween as usual, but just blocks away, many residents of the Red Hook Houses, the city’s second-largest housing project, are without electricity, heat, or running water, and growing increasingly desperate.
Red Hook, like other areas with overheard power lines, could wait another ten days or longer for juice, according to Con Edison. So far, Red Hook has received little help from the city or FEMA, and a team of Occupy protestors have been heading relief efforts.
In an outcropping of 30 buildings, some of them high-rises of 14 stories, the Red Hook Houses hold some 6,000 tenants, and about half the buildings remain without power.
“It’s very third-world,” said Laura Papadimitropoulos, a pediatric emergency-medicine physician working as a volunteer medic. “I worked in a clinic in Honduras, and it was exactly like this.” She was sending Rick Malo, an emergency nurse from Bethlehem, PA, who volunteered in New Orleans after Katrina, as a medical runner to about 100 homebound people. “This is an already needy area,” he said, “that is now higher-need.”
“It’s crazy,” says Rasheed Johnson, who works at RHI as a youth ambassador. “My building is pitch black. No one wants to leave their house. When I go to the store for my mother, I have to knock in code or jingle my keys three times when I come back so she knows it’s me. I know people that have got stabbed and robbed for a flashlight.
“Rats and raccoons are taking to the hallways at night,” Desmarais said. “The basements are flooded, so they don’t have anywhere else to go.” And if the power stays off another week? “I’m terrified,” she said flatly.
No comments:
Post a Comment