Hurricane Sandy

A new city law would hit looters who commit “crimes of opportunity” during disasters like Hurricane Sandy with tougher penalties – but some critics fear the measure won’t be much of a deterrent.

“I don’t know whether any rule saying, ‘Thou shalt not loot’ is going to stop the incident from happening in the case of an emergency,” said Chuck Reichenthal, district manager of Community Board 13, which includes Coney Island.

Coney Island, like parts of Staten Island and the Rockaways, was hit hard by the October storm – and then by looters and other criminals.

Pre-Sandy, looters could get hit with fines of up to $1,000 on top of possible time behind bars. Under the new law, signed by Mayor Bloomberg, looters face fines of $2,500 during a state of emergency and $5,000 in an evacuation zone. Newly created civil penalties would cost criminals another $5,000 during a state of emergency, and $5,000 to $10,000 in an evacuation zone. The fines and civil penalties would be in addition to any jail time.

Prevent Defense

But some said the stiffer penalties probably wouldn’t stop thieves unlikely to know – or care – about the new law.

“How is the average looter going to know the fines are higher?” asked Grant Brenner, a psychiatrist who specializes in disaster relief. “Is Mayor Bloomberg or the chief of police going to get on TV and say, ‘There’s harsher fines for looting, we want to remind people this bill passed, we’re going to have people on every block to prevent looting?’”

The bill passed in March by the City Council only addresses the increased penalties, not ways to publicize the new law. “Other than just doing what we’ve done, like send out press releases and have the media cover it, that’s pretty much it,” said Michael Panteledis, a spokesman for Councilman Peter Vallone, Jr. (D-Queens), a co-sponsor of the bill.

Brenner believes the law will provide some psychological relief for victims of Hurricane Sandy, but will have little practical impact.

“When a disaster comes, the structure of society is gone for a little while. For a lot of people, it gives them a kind of high,” Brenner said. “A lot of the looting comes out of what people do with that crisis energy.”

But in Reichenthal’s experience in Coney Island, “criminal opportunists” were motivated less by the thrill of the crime than by necessity.

“Whatever looting that might have happened after Sandy may well have come from the fact that people had no water and no food because we were just cut off from everything,” he said.

A Tragic Example

Backers said the law is intended to reassure those living in evacuation zones that their property will be safeguarded during natural disasters. Some people stayed home during Hurricane Sandy out of fear their houses would be looted.

Councilman Vincent Ignizio (R –Staten Island), a co-sponsor of the measure, cited the case of Staten Islander George Dresch, who remained in his Yetman Avenue home, which had been burglarized after Hurricane Irene. Dresch and his 13-year-old daughter, Angela, were killed when their home was washed away during Sandy. His wife, Patricia Dresch, was seriously injured.

“They stayed and paid the ultimate price,” Ignizio said last month at the Committee on Public Safety’s hearing on the bill.

The New Jersey Assembly is poised to pass a similar anti-looting bill. In New Orleans, which was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Isaac, a dusk-to-dawn curfew is imposed during natural disasters. Louisiana looters can garner three years in prison, as well as a $5,000 fine.

Despite criticism of the New York City law, Midland Beach Civic Association President Yasmin Ammirato is optimistic the measure will help. She lost her home of more than 40 years during Sandy, and witnessed an onslaught of looting in her Staten Island neighborhood.

“When you’re in this kind of a situation where you don’t know what to do, they take advantage, and it’s terrible,” Ammirato said. “[The bill won’t deter] everybody, but it will deter some people. And hopefully we’ll never have to go through this again.”

For artist and tree house architect Roderick Romero, Hurricane Sandy supplied much of the inspiration  – and much of the material – for his latest work.

The sprawling “Sandy Remix,” billed by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden as a tree house, looks more like a giant bird’s nest. Romero built the structure almost entirely out of pin oak, persimmon and other storm-salvaged wood harvested from within the garden’s 52-acres after the October superstorm.

“The idea is that this was way up in the garden a little further away and then Sandy came in and just took it and it went flying and then landed here,” said Romero as he traced the 200-square-foot tree house’s imagined trajectory. “Then the stairs just kind of broke out.”

Eye on Art

From a bird’s eye perspective, Romero sought to recreate the eye and shape of a hurricane emanating out of the tree house’s deck, which stands five feet off the ground and is accessible by two sets of steps.  “You know how they have those kind of tendrils that come off them?” he said. “That’s the staircase.”

Romero counts children’s author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, the Japanese-American landscape architect Isamu Noguchi and the French surrealist Marcel Duchamp as major influences on the design of the “Sandy Remix.” He patterned the steps off the Giants Causeway, a series of stair-like basalt columns off the coast of Northern Ireland.

Romero, who has designed tree houses for Sting and Julianne Moore, constructed the “Sandy Remix” mostly out of trees downed by hurricanes Irene and Sandy. He also repurposed leftovers from “Natural History,” an earlier Patrick Dougherty installation housed at the garden.

Differing Views

Not all the visitors saw the hurricane or the bird’s nest, however.

“My little one says it looks like a train, but he thinks everything looks like a train,” said Phoebe Damrosch, who took in the tree house with her children, Django and Finn.

Her son expected it to be taller, she said, adding: “How do you explain liability to a five-year-old?”

As crowds of children swarmed about the tree house during its early April debut, older visitors called the installation a clever repurposing of the wood downed by the various storms.

“We think it’s a wonderful use of the trees that were lost,” said Jill Rothstein, who came to the garden with her family to view the daffodils. “It’s artistic. It looks really like an art project.”

Volunteer garden guide Leslie Wright, who witnessed the weather damage visited upon the garden in recent years, was thankful all the debris had not gone to waste.

“It was a really wonderful experience to be able to incorporate some of the different types of trees that were lost,” she said, noting that recent storms felled 100 old and rare trees.

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden solicited proposals from more than 30 artists for the project. But only Romero’s design envisioned using just timber from recent storms.

Return Visits

The artist and his crew took about four weeks to mill the wood on site and build the structure, which debuted April 6.

Despite working through rain, snow and cold during construction, Romero and his team only dealt with one major challenge.

“Probably the hardest thing was keeping people out of it while we worked,” he said. “They had to park security guards by us because every kid wanted to come up and it was so hard for me to say ‘no.’”

Romero, who describes the “Sandy Remix” as his best effort to date, expects to return often to view his handiwork before it is dismantle at the end of the summer.

He won’t be the only one. Damrosche will be visiting with her children as often as possible.

“It’s great,” she said. “We’re going to come back and make it our own.”

Trees are going up faster than storms are tak­ing them down in New York City.

Dozens of peo­ple lined up in a park­ing lot between some indus­trial build­ings and the Gowanus Canal in Brook­lyn on a recent sunny Sat­ur­day morn­ing to pick up stick-figure-sized Red­bud trees about four feet tall. More than half of the 100 trees ready to go were picked up within the first 45 min­utes of a two-hour stretch, said Sophie Plitt, Forestry Coor­di­na­tor of New York Restora­tion Project.

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Kisha Bari was taking pictures of Rockaway residents in a public housing unit when she was overwhelmed by the smell of mold in ground-floor apartments.

“Residents still live there,” she said, referring to locals yet to receive disaster assistance, months after Sandy.

Bari, 32, is a professional photographer documenting the ongoing recovery effort in the Rockaways in a bid to raise awareness about those who still need help. Her blog caught the attention of Sandy Storyline, one of several local groups that turned to crowdsourcing storm stories – including soliciting photos and videos – by harnessing social media and emerging online platforms.

Sandy Storyline, which has amassed about 200 stories, is slated to be featured in a new interactive program at the Tribeca Film Festival called Storyscapes. Still, other efforts to crowdsource stories of Sandy have proved less successful, underscoring the challenges of collecting digital content in the aftermath of a disaster.

A Focus on Rebuilding

Sandy Storyline, a collaboration of the MIT Center for Civic Media and Housing is a Human Right, is using a new storytelling platform called Cowbird to gather text, audio and photos about Sandy.

“We’re shifting away from the immediate impact of the storm to the storytelling of rebuilding efforts,” said Rachel Falcone, 28, one of the site’s executive producers.

Falcone noted most stories are now coming from the hard-hit Rockaways. About half the material is generated by amateur contributors, while media professionals who are documenting the recovery, such as Bari, provide the remaining content.

“We continue to get interest from people,” said Falcone. “But we also reach out to those who might not know of our project otherwise.”

​A Focus on People

Just as Falcone reached out to Bari, Bari is informing Rockaway residents of the opportunity to share their stories on Storyline.

“The poorer communities in Far Rockaway are being neglected,” Bari said. “This raises awareness. It adds a human element to the situation. Mainstream media covers disaster, but our focus is on people.”

The Brooklyn Historical Society also turned to crowdsourcing in the days following Sandy, using Storify, a curated social media site that launched in 2011. However, contributions – primarily pictures of downed trees – tapered off within the first month.

“Storify was more for dragnetting stories instead of being a storytelling platform,” said Jacob Nadal, the Society’s director of Library and Archives.

Nadal, 36, has shifted his attention away from expanding the site. He’s instead turned to collecting material from groups involved in the ongoing recovery in Red Hook, such as the Association of Personal Historians, which is working on an oral history project.

​Documentary Efforts

Still, he plans to update the Storify site about once a month, and eventually develop an online exhibit, complete with an interactive map, to mark the one-year anniversary of the storm.

After Sandy, Film Annex, an online distribution company that features short movies from up-and-coming filmmakers, began collecting storm-related videos to incorporate into a documentary. However, a shortage of submissions altered that plan.

“We are currently sticking with the short film we have and hope to build on it in the future,” said Eren Gulfidan, 27, the company’s creative director.

Dan Brown, a long-time Rockaway resident, is filming his own documentary about the area’s recovery to ensure that his community, and its continued vulnerability to storms, won’t be forgotten. He plans to offer his full-length film, called “John Cori Warned You!,” to Storyline.

“Places on Long Island and in New Jersey are already rebuilding, and we are still in the cleanup process,” said Brown, 49. “Not enough is being done. We’re just whistling in a graveyard right now.”

Check out the audio clip below from Sandy Storyline, in which Joseph Finn of Staten Island talks about rebuilding after the storm. (Audio by Meg Cramer)

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