By Michele Korkhov
This is an excerpt from Baruch student Michele Korkhov’s Nov. 29 blog post.
Every year for the past 6 years, when the news forecasted a storm coming our way, my dad, the self- proclaimed survivalist living in Zone A, would go into our garage, flip over our canoe and fill it with life jackets to make it ready for use. He would lecture me and my mom about his elaborate escape routes to higher ground and we would snicker. For years he gathered what he considered necessities and mom considered the hoarding of junk. My garage was filled with lanterns, ready to eat meals, furnaces, batteries, electric blankets, paddles, inflatable rafts and hand warmers…
At about 6 p.m. … the television flickered a few times. My dad rushed to get his flameless candles from the garage and we sat on the couch in the dark listening to his bulky international radio. The radio began to broadcast news of a 14 foot storm surge approaching. For the first time I felt a little bit nervous especially since we live three blocks from the beach in Staten Island. By 6:30 p.m., a rush of water hit against the sliding glass door of my dad’s office, and then water just instantly started shooting up out of the floor. I ran upstairs and looked outside, all I saw was a massive brown sewage tide rushing towards my street from the ocean, and then the power gave out. It came so fast that there was a limited time to react. My mom suggested we move the cars to higher ground and fast. She and my dad scrambled to the cars and drove off through what was already a foot of water. I was left standing on the stoop of my house watching the water creep from the curb closer and closer up our driveway. My neighbors, who were only a minute or two late in their reaction to move their cars, got stuck and were forced to abandon their flooding cars in the middle of the street and run back inside. After 15 minutes I started to get very anxious. Where were my parents? Were they coming back? First the sky was bright neon green, then it was red and I heard explosions. Those were the fuse-boxes giving out. Everything went black and I grabbed my cat, shoved her in a box, and ran down the street in waist high water. Trees were falling everywhere, cars were dying in the streets, and desperate people were running down the block with their families clutching children in their arms. Finally I saw my parents half swimming, directly into the flood, to get back home to me. They motioned to me that there was nowhere to go, we had to go back…
By 8 or 9 o’ clock we saw that the small bungalows across the street were submerged and we could not see their rooftops. The road had become a river of raw brown sewage water and so had my first floor. From the third floor we could see an orange flame in the near distance rising to the height of the Empire State Building. I saw my dad scared for our lives. The fire was spreading quickly and getting closer. We could smell the smoke. There was no way to be rescued. The firemen could not get through the flood and the home would have to burn until the fire died on its own. That could already be too late. We thought for sure that this was it. My dad’s escape plan began to take place in real life, I could not believe it. My dad shouted at me to blow up the inflatable raft since it was now impossible to get to the canoe in the garage. He said he would break the window on the second floor open with an ax and we would lower the raft out on a rope. When the water got high enough we would climb out into the raft, cut the rope and float away. I remembered all those stories about the people in Katrina who went out on their boats into the water and were electrocuted by fallen wires. I could not believe I was now reliving their experiences. I began to cry uncontrollably. I found no comfort in my parents who yelled at me to get myself together and to blow up the boat. My dad said if I panicked we were all going to die. With shaking hands I pumped the air into the rubber boat over and over again in pitch darkness by the dim light of my mom’s flashlight…
Looking out the window I could only see the silhouettes of people sitting on the rooftops of their one story houses. They had sat there in the cold through the whole night. One man had a dog on his head….My dad finally got into his canoe and rowed out of our garage. This was a sight I never thought I’d see, tragic but slightly comical. His dream had come true. He rowed down the block to see where there was higher ground. My mom and I stared out the window and saw him coming back with a strange woman in his boat. They headed straight towards the green house. We later found out she was the daughter of one of the old woman inside…
