Junior Lily Goldwasser and her family anxiously awaited their flight home in a New Jersey airport, knowing that the clock was ticking down the minutes until Hurricane Sandy would tear through the state.

“They started to cancel flights after seven p.m.,” Goldwasser said. “We just made it out of New Jersey. Our flight left at 6:30, so we were one of the last flights out.”

Goldwasser’s family was not the only one affected by Hurricane Sandy. All four of sophomore Max Metzner’s grandparents live in New York. His grandparents in the Upper East Side lost electricity in their home, while his grandparents in Manhattan experienced the East River flooding their entire neighborhood.

“Their neighborhood five days after Sandy was under four feet of water,” Metzner said.  “They live ten floors up in their building so they were fine, but they couldn’t go downstairs.”

Metzner said that his grandparents were trapped in their apartment for about three days.  Fortunately, they heard the warnings before the storm and bought plenty of food. They said that they could see the flooded streets out of their apartment windows.

“The East River basically came rushing into Manhattan,” Metzner said. “They said it was scary, but they just kind of settled into [staying in their apartment]. ”

Metzner said that after the water receded, his grandparents’ power was still out, so they went to stay with his other grandparents in the Upper East Side.

Senior Gretchen Aubel said that Hurricane Sandy destroyed her second cousin’s Long Island home.

“He evacuated but he didn’t take anything with him because he didn’t think it was going to be too bad,” Aubel said. “He took his car two days after the storm back to see if his house was still there, but he drove into a sand dune and totaled his car.”

Aubel said that while he was stranded, he had no cell phone service. Luckily, he met a woman who gave him her car to take back to his home, which he later discovered was no longer there.

“It was a $2 million home, and there is no way his insurance is going to give him more than $500,000,” Aubel said.

The storm not only damaged houses and towns, but also forced temporary school closures.

Goldwasser said that her cousins who live in New Jersey missed about a week and a half of school, and had to stay in their basements while Sandy’s winds busted their windows.

“[After,] they evacuated their house in New Jersey and stayed with my grandparents in New York,” she said.  “Power lines were down, trees had fallen, and there were hazards of people getting electrocuted and their homes being flooded.”

Anna Sullivan, senior, moved to Marin from Washington, D.C., last year.  She said that her friends there were out of school for three days due to power outages.
“They were describing it as the wind being so strong that the lamp posts were moving back and forth,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan said her family and friends in D.C. that the storm was going to cause more wreckage than it did, so they overprepared.

“My friends’ parents were all freaking out, so they got a ton of food,” Sullivan said.  “They hired people to board up the house and the windows.”

Sullivan’s family rents out two houses in D.C., and she said she is going back in two weeks to clean up her backyards because trees fell down and were uprooted.

“There was flooding in one of the houses because there was such bad rain,” she said. “We had people go out and fix up our houses to make sure we didn’t have any property damage.”

Metzler said that the effects of Hurricane Sandy seem more personal to him than to others who do not have family members or friends who were affected by the storm.

“You can watch endless clips of news about it, but when you’re actually talking to people who are stranded 100 feet up in their apartment who are your grandparents, that’s much different,” he said.

Goldwasser said that it is interesting to see how her family’s lives have been affected by being out of school and out of work.

“On Facebook I’m seeing a lot of my aunts and uncles saying, ‘Oh we finally got power! We can finally shower!’” she said.

Aubel said that her family was recently discussing how her cousin’s life was so drastically affected by the storm.

“They were just saying how sooner or later the West Coast is going to be hit by an earthquake, and how we don’t know what severity it is going to be, so we need to prepare,” Aubel said. “It has made my family more aware of the situation.”