The fury of 'Ida' is primed with the "basement houses" of New York: "In a minute they had already drowned"
The passage of tropical storm Ida through New York has not only left a trail of death and destruction, it has also revealed the precariousness that hides in the capital of the world; the dramatic reverse of neon signs and skyscrapers. A dozen deaths —the majority in the mestizo district of Queens— and countless material damages constitute the bill to pay for a hidden, parallel reality: the existence of innumerable basements converted into substandard housing, unhealthy or precarious accommodation, of dubious legality, in basements that in many cases they are no more than cat flaps, if not dummies, with small windows at street level through which a child would hardly pass. Stays with little control or supervision of the Department of Housing; informal arrangements between landlords and tenants.
In one of those low, in Woodside, one of the neighborhoods of Queens, the three members of a family drowned on Wednesday: the marriage and a 19-month-old baby. "It was seen and not seen, everything happened in a minute, it was impossible to react," explained this Friday Kumchoo Sherpa, a Nepalese immigrant like the victims and a resident on the third floor of the building. “My parents were at home and they were paralyzed with panic because of the deluge, I was working. The water poured into the basement, because the force of the rain was coupled with the fact that the building is at the end of a steep slope, topped by a concrete wall that separates the street from the highway. That is why the water overflowed and entered the house even more furiously. The woman asked the landlady for help on her cell phone, and she yelled at her: 'Get out of there, get out of there now!' But after a minute no one answered the phone. The three had drowned, the water had reached the ceiling.
Sherpa is still in shock, a few meters from the dump that became a tomb, in the dead end street before which a police car and another from the Housing Department stood guard this Friday. In the courtyard, the Stars and Stripes flag hung at half-staff, along with a couple of banners reading “God blesses our troops.” A garland of Buddhist banners strung the fence, as a sign of identity for the neighbors. The landlady, also Nepalese, remained locked inside the building. In the garage of the adjoining building, a row of sandbags propped up the metal fence, half ripped off by the impact of the storm. But just 100 meters up the street, the thoughts of an exquisite flower bed made it possible to think that Wednesday night was a bad dream. Just as misfortune goes through neighborhoods – New York knows this well – the stratigraphy of fortune corresponds to the social scale: the lower, the closer to misfortune.
2) let's all hold one another as being sacred/important to one another 3) we all belong, or are related to one anot… https://t.co/oziGA4Gxss
— Duttering Dan-ley Fri Apr 19 22:38:22 +0000 2019
The few neighbors who ventured through the streets of Woodside this Friday refused to answer questions. But Faruk, an affable immigrant from Guyana, confirmed that many like him, a garbage collector by profession, live in narrow basements "because you have to live somewhere, rents are very expensive in New York." "My house has no more ventilation than the front door, and we saw how the water went down the stairs, look," he says, showing a video of the flooding of his home, in Jamaica, another neighborhood in Queens, for which he pays $1,500 a month. “Although it is very dark because it has no windows, this time we were grateful that there was only one hole through which the water could enter. Fortunately, just in front of the entrance, the landlord has a kind of storage room, which stopped and diverted part of the flow, and only a trickle of water entered my house. As soon as it stopped raining, he stopped coming in.”
At least 45 deaths in four states (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut) is the human balance of Ida's tail. A consistent tragedy in any of the ranches that crowd the outskirts of large Latin American cities, but as strident as it is inexplicable in the Big Apple. President Joe Biden on Thursday approved the declaration of states of emergency in New York and New Jersey and ordered the sending of federal aid. In New Jersey, the death toll rose today to 25, after two bodies were found in the mud and rubble, while six people are still missing. At noon this Friday, more than 14,000 homes were still without power between New York and New Jersey, in addition to another 20,000 in Pennsylvania.
The mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, announced a reinforcement of the alert system and the evacuation operation when the weather forecast recommends it, with officials warning residents door-to-door in "neighborhoods with high concentrations of residential basements." The ad itself is a tacit assumption of the hidden underground existence of tens of thousands of New Yorkers. Kathy Hochul, the governor of the State of New York -where at least 15 deaths have been registered-, pointed out this Friday that the balance of damages will far exceed 30 million dollars, the threshold required for the federal government to approve the declaration of catastrophic area and release more money to compensate for the losses of individuals and the damage to infrastructure.
Like the belongings of Marcos, the thirty-something son of Carlos Soto, a basement tenant under his parents' home, at the other end of Woodside. “He lost everything, the appliances, the clothes, the memories of him. But he at least he kept his life, ”explains Soto. “Do you know where to get help? My son lost his job due to the pandemic and now he is left with nothing,” asks the man, along with two neighbors who, made up of a willing crew of workers, carry their few household tools in plastic buckets to lend a hand with repairs. . Two blocks away, a couple of vans from the district's parks and gardens service give a break to the shovels and rakes, also mobilized for the emergency.
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