‘We were in panic mode’

When it’s time for 19-year-old Rebecca to go to sleep, she does so on a living room couch in her Baldwin Harbor home. Her 21-year-old brother and 16-year-old sister are a few feet away in the dining room, where they sleep on mattresses. Rebecca’s parents, who are both disabled, spend most of their time upstairs as she runs the household.

This has been the family dynamic for years, but it became infinitely more complicated on Oct. 29, 2012, when Hurricane Sandy touched down in Baldwin.

The family left town shortly before the storm hit, but when they returned three days later, their basement and first floor were ruined. Water was still ankle-deep in the basement, Rebecca said, and everything down there — baby pictures, family possessions, Christmas decorations — was lost. The first floor was also destroyed. “The floor was completely annihilated,” Rebecca said, but still, she and her siblings kept their sleeping arrangements.

But when a nor’easter hit the area shortly afterward, accumulating snow caused a portion of the roof to collapse, forcing Rebecca’s parents to move downstairs and share the first floor. The family, she said, did not have the money to repair the roof, and had to cope with frigid temperatures. “It was so scary,” Rebecca recalled. “We never had to deal with a situation like that before. We were in panic mode. We didn’t have enough money to fix that.”

The family moved into local shelters from time to time when the temperature dropped too low, until an aunt lent them enough money to repair the roof, which took roughly two months.

Rebecca, who graduated from Baldwin High School last June, was a junior when Sandy hit. She was the one who made calls and submitted paperwork to NY Rising and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but so far the family has only received enough money from FEMA to replace the washer and dryer. “We felt hopeless,” Rebecca said.

When the family moved back home, she said, “I had to keep [them] together. “I had to keep reassuring them it was going to be OK.” Her brother works at a local grocery store to support the family.

All the while, Rebecca attended classes at BHS, but struggled mightily due to the situation at home. “I almost didn’t graduate,” she recalled.