Back in 2012, over the course of two days, water, wind, and rain flooded my neighborhood.
At that time, I was living in the Baruch Houses on Manhattan’s Lower East Side while working as a babysitter in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Unlike the families I was working for, my neighbors and I didn’t have the luxury of leaving our homes to seek refuge in a safe place. So we stayed.
That night I watched as a green flash cracked across the sky before everything went dark. I didn’t know it at the time, but I later came to find out the Con Edison plant just six minutes away from my building had exploded. The feeling of loss and fear that day didn’t just happen to me: Over 69,000 units were damaged and lost, thousands of New Yorkers were displaced…