Jessica Lee talking:
I’ve had sort of this triple hat the last week. I’ve been a resident in Red Hook, also stepping in as an organizer, and also a journalist. So it’s been an interesting experience.
But what happened was, I think this flood in Red Hook has been a mirror for our community to see ourselves. And the organizations that were already in place, the networks, the friendships that were already there, just sprung into action, right the morning after the flood. I think about two-thirds or three-quarters of our neighborhood was flooded by about three or four feet of water, so we’re talking every building, basement and first floor, is wet and needs to be cleaned. Almost all the businesses in Red Hook have been affected by this. And people knew that the morning after, and nobody waited for the city. No one waited to hear anything. They started organizing.
The story of the Red Hook Initiative, which I think has made the news, is really beautiful, because they had no plan. What I heard was that they woke up, they found that the water had come within inches of their building, and they had—still had power. And people started calling them, and they just took action.
So, that started Occupy Red Hook, connected to Occupy Sandy. We got volunteers the next day. Down in the commercial district where I live, on Van Brunt Street, every single business needed help, and neighbors just started helping neighbors. There was no question of we’re waiting for anything. I’ve still not seen the Red Cross. I’ve not seen the city. There’s been some assistance with FEMA paperwork, but really, neighbors all weekend working together with hundreds of people who bicycled to Red Hook.
It was underwater for only a few hours. It drained away. So, what’s left is very wet furniture, flooring, everything. The walls have to come down. The floors have to come down. And right across the street from my house, actually, this volunteer center sprung out. And I still am not quite sure who’s organizing it, but hundreds of people were down all weekend. And I—they didn’t have a printer, and so I was printing fliers for people to canvas the neighborhood and talk to residents about their needs, whether it was food, medical, whether they needed certain tools. And they would bring that information back. They would reorganize, send volunteers back out. And this is all happening without really anybody knowing who’s in charge.
Mike Burke talking:
What’s remarkable, when we were in the Rockaways, we did see the National Guard, and they were giving away food and some water. FEMA was there, but no one could really quite figure out exactly what they were doing. It almost seemed like they were signing people up for future—for future aid. We did not see the Red Cross anywhere in the Rockaways. We were there for several hours on Friday.
And as I mentioned before, one of the most active relief operations was by Occupy Sandy. And I happen to live in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sunset Park, which fortunately was not damaged very much at all during the storm. But a local church in Sunset Park, St. Jacobi, opened its doors to Occupy Wall Street organizers to transform the church into this relief center.
And I stopped by there on Saturday and Sunday, and it was a remarkable sight. On Saturday, there were so many people coming to volunteer that there was actually a line snaked around the block of people waiting to go to an orientation to learn how they could help. In the church, there was—they were taking in donations of food. They were preparing literally thousands of hot meals for people in Red Hook, people in the Rockaways, people in Staten Island. They were also collecting clothes. They were collecting blankets. They were collecting cleaning supplies. And they were organizing caravans to go out to these neighborhoods that have been forgotten.
one organizer I spoke to, Michael Premo, who was—he was very involved with Occupy Wall Street back when it was in Zuccotti Park, and he started—he was one of the key people that helped get the ball rolling on Tuesday, along with, I should mention, 350.org, the organization founded by Bill McKibben, as well as Recovers.org. But we have a brief interview that I did with Michael Premo.
Michael Premo: My name is Michael Primo. I’m from Brooklyn. Right now, we are standing in the church basement space of St. Jacobi Church in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. This is one of two distribution hubs that we have for accepting donations and delivering donations, as well as volunteers, to sites that are set up around the city. Basically, volunteers can come here, as well as donations can come here into this spot. And from here, we load up cars that people line up on the street. Those cars go out full of people and goods to upwards of about 20 recovery sites that are scattered throughout Zone A flood zones throughout South Brooklyn and Staten Island, Red Hook and Queens.
it’s kind of hard to tell. We’re still getting a sense of all the people that are involved in this effort so far. Yesterday we got about 38,000 unique hits on our website, OccupySandy.org in the morning. And we have a rough estimate that we sent out at least 2,500 volunteers carrying about 15,000 hot meals that were delivered in roughly 120 carloads that were—went out to all of these recovery sites. And those are just kind of like the lowball estimates based on like, kind of like the pounds of food that have been coming through that we’ve been able to like keep a track of.
Over the last year, there has been a lot of deep bonds that have been built around these shared values of mutual aid and lateral or horizontal organizing structures, where it’s all about communities building communities. It’s all about individuals building individuals, and supporting up just a rising number of leaders standing side by side. And so, because of that, there’s a huge number of people that have worked together over the last year, that when this tragedy hit, we were able to like just move in to address what needed to be addressed.
– source democracynow.org