Me, Myself and Irene
An essay I wrote for my previous newspaper, The Long Islander, about covering Hurricane Irene on Long Island in August 2011:
It seemed crazy, the idea of driving home to Long Island the weekend of a hurricane. Friends, family, even journalist colleagues urged me to stay back in Pennsylvania, to put personal safety over professional curiosity, to schedule a visit for another time.
Before Irene, the weekend home had been planned as a reunion with my parents and visiting grandparents. As the storm neared, it morphed into a hybrid of family time and reporting time. My dad, a journalist for more than 50 years, suggested covering the storm first-hand for The Citizens’ Voice in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., the newspaper where I’ve covered courts and politics since December 2007.
My editor agreed, and off I went, packing cameras, computers, rain gear and as many batteries as I could find. Driving along Interstate 80 not far from Wilkes-Barre, the signs of the approaching storm were already evident: heavier than usual westbound traffic, tree-trimming trucks with Ohio license places racing eastbound and half-hour waits in line at a Walmart just off the highway in East Stroudsburg.
In New York, the signs were even clearer. Overhead message boards on the Cross Bronx Expressway and the Cross Island Parkway, in Queens, warned of mandatory coastal evacuations. Supermarkets on Long Island were wiped clean of bread, water and batteries and Best Buy ran out of radios. Targets and Walmarts across the Island planned temporary closures.
Irene was coming, the threat was real and I had arrived in the middle of it.
Forecasters were predicting a direct hit for Long Island and untold damage to the Island’s barrier beaches and inland communities. Irene would be the worst storm to hit Long Island since Gloria, which left hundreds of thousands without power for more than a week and led this reporter to remark, at age 1, “No yights, yet!”
On Saturday, after bagels with the family, I ventured to the South Shore to report on preparations and get a grasp of the attitudes Long Islanders had toward the storm. I drove as far south on the Robert Moses Causeway as I could. The state park police had blocked the path to the causeway’s second span, but still allowed access to Ocean Parkway and Gilgo Beach.
There, about two dozen people watched as waves crashed against the shore. Like me, they explained, they were curious and wanted to see for themselves the early effects of the storm. I recounted the scene later in a story for Sunday’s issue of The Citizens’ Voice:
The curious flocked to Gilgo Beach on the Atlantic Coast of Long Island on Saturday to experience first-hand the early effects of Hurricane Irene. They watched from the tops of dunes and along the ever-narrowing beach as waves crashed in the distance and the foamy surf crept closer.
“This is awesome!” Jeannine Guenther said as she snapped pictures of the scene: overcast skies, white-capped waves and a surf that resembled the frothy, crème-colored top of a cappuccino. “Very rarely do Long Islanders get to see waves like this. You’ve got to check it out.”
Covering Hurricane Irene’s impact on Long Island for a newspaper in Pennsylvania afforded a unique opportunity to introduce my home region to a new audience, to educate readers about our great communities and the people who live in them.
One of the great benefits of reporting is the opportunity to meet and speak with almost anybody, all in the name of news.
Within an hour on Saturday, I had met Ms. Guenther, who planned to attend a friend’s birthday party Saturday night despite the storm; an upbeat liquor store owner named Ram Matlani, who strived to keep his store open on a normal schedule; and Pedro Contreras, a El Salvadorian immigrant living in Brentwood, who took his family to the Bay Shore ferry docks for a little fishing before the storm.
“Hi, my name is… I’m a reporter with…” is a great ice breaker.
As the day wore on, I became curious about the storm preparations in Northport, a community I used to cover, and for which I still have great fondness. Though Northport is on the North Shore, forecasters were predicting a heavy storm surge out of the Long Island Sound and, combined with a near simultaneous high tide, the potential for flooding in low-lying areas.
Northport Harbor appeared placid that afternoon, with sailboats moored far from the docks, precautionary sandbags placed around the entrance to St. Philip Neri church and a sign on another church reminding worshippers that there would be no Sunday mass, due to Irene.
By the next morning, the placidity was gone. Trees were down across Northport and the rest of Long Island. On Laurel Avenue, a 13,000-volt power line burned and hissed for hours, occasionally exploding.
I stood across the street from the sparking power line for 20 minutes in one of my first stops after the worst of Irene had passed on Sunday. The explosions were terrifying. Bright balls of white, blue sparks and the fear — perhaps irrational — that the electricity would somehow arc and harm me and the people around me: firefighters and a family that had stopped by to watch the electrical show.
I spent Saturday night into Sunday morning at my parents’ home in Commack, turning their living room into a veritable news bureau. I monitored storm-related Twitter feeds, radar and tornado warnings on my laptop, police and fire calls on a radio scanner and switched the television between local news coverage of the storm and The Weather Channel.
I stayed mostly wide awake, driven by the adrenaline of a major news event and the fear that sleeping would compromise my family’s safety if a tornado struck.
By Sunday morning, as the worst of the storm seemed to be passing, our power failed, forcing me to a back-up plan for Sunday’s coverage. After several hours out on the road reporting, with stops in Northport, Oceanside and Long Beach, which had become the focal point of national coverage, I returned home and started on a Rube Goldberg process to get my photos and story from Long Island to Pennsylvania.
I wrote and edited on my MacBook and then, without an internet connection, transfered my work to two other battery powered devices: an iPad and my iPhone. Once it became clear the iPad’s AT&T network had been compromised by the storm, I tried sending with the iPhone, on Verizon. Sending a photo, a process that takes several seconds with WiFi, took upwards of 10 minutes.
Writing a story, with little light to read notes and no Internet to check facts, such as the latest number of power outages or the status of evacuation orders, proved frustrating and enlightening. Without power, the physical task of writing and editing became more difficult — a reminder of just how dependent we as journalists and as a society have become on technology and electricity.
Still, regardless of impediments, the underlying tasks remained the same: telling stories, reporting the news. I am proud to have had an opportunity to cover Hurricane Irene and meet the many people who helped shape my stories. Driving to Long Island in the face of a hurricane was the right decision, even if it did seem crazy.
An award winning photojournalist and reporter, Michael Sisak worked full-time at Long Islander Newspapers in 2004 and 2005 while he was an undergraduate at Hofstra University. A Commack native, he is currently a reporter for The Citizens’ Voice in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. He returned to Long Island last week to cover the arrival of Hurricane Irene, and to visit with his parents in Commack.