Been waiting for FEMA all week without seeing or hearing from them but they appear in droves for the press acting like they're helping while Christie claims they providing support in 24-48 hours
WHILST PEOPLE UNITE ...
BROOKLYN, N.Y. -- Conor Tomas Reed stood beside a flagpole in front of a pair of high-rise apartment buildings in Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood on Thursday afternoon, waiting for more volunteers. These buildings, like many in the neighborhood, were mostly still without power.
"I've been here pretty much 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.," said Reed, a doctoral student at City University of New York and a professor at Baruch College. "Last night, we just went around handing out food, dry goods, flashlights, anything people needed."
The flagpole had become a meeting place for Hurricane Sandy volunteers, and earlier Thursday, it served as a rallying center for people in the hurricane-battered neighborhood to request food, clothing and other necessities. Reed said he learned some elderly people had been stuck on higher floors of their buildings without power or running water, marooned by elevators that weren't working.
"Since then we've been walking up and down stairs, providing care packages of food and flashlights and bottled water," Reed said.
Reed and others have been volunteering in Red Hook since Sandy hit, mostly organized via "Occupy Sandy," a now burgeoning offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement, websites like Recovers.org, a social hub for organizing volunteers online, and word of mouth.
Occupy Sandy volunteers aim to help smaller communities, where government relief organizations may not have arrived, Reed said.
"Occupy has gone from general protest work to now direct community support," Reed said. "What we're trying to do is build communities, not just charity."
"We've been getting tons of donations. This is all donations in here," Sikorski said, pointing at tables. "We also gave away a ton yesterday. Stuff has gone out to the Rockaways, Sunset Park, Coney Island. There are people coming in with rolling carts, school communities have come up with truckloads of stuff and unloaded it. This is all community-driven donation right now, all of it."
Federal Emergency Management Agency workers were were nowhere to be seen, Sikorski said. She said she was told they may have been nearby Thursday afternoon. "They're not here," she said. "I don't see them."
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