Photo illustration by William Joel / The Verge; photo by Anthony Hamboussi
Tevina Willis taped up her windows as Superstorm Sandy neared her Red Hook, Brooklyn, home. Outside her apartment, hurricane winds pushed a wall of water into the city. The storm surge swept boats from the harbor onto streets turned into rivers. Willis rode it out. “I had been through hurricanes in the projects when I was a child,” she says. “I knew just to be calm and sit away from the windows, away from glass.”
Two days later, the storm subsided. But for Willis and others in Red Hook, the disaster was just the beginning. New York City’s infrastructure was mangled. Power and telecommunications lines — even cellphone networks — had gone down. Her building inside the...
