The streets were black aside from the distant flashing red and blue lights of fire trucks and police cars responding to Hurricane Sandy.

"We haven't seen any looters yet," said Silveira. "But I suspect that's why there are cops everywhere."

Six blocks north, on 8th Street, flooding was inexplicably worse between Avenue C and B, where a slew of police cars were submerged. Residents poked their heads out their windows several stories up and watched water rushing down the street, carrying along bicycles, mattresses, and other debris.

"It's like a funnel," someone remarked, standing thigh-deep in water on the sidewalk.

And there was no news at the Newseum: its sidewalk glass cases were displaying worldwide newspaper front pages from yesterday.

Despite the extreme weather, a few hardy souls were gathered in the torrential rain on the National Mall, across from the Capitol, seemingly in no hurry. "We wanted to take a picture," a drenched Wand Yu-Hon explained, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. They had come from China.

“It took us so long to get here," her friend Olga added. "We don't have so much time."

They soon rejoined a bus of 16 Chinese tourists, whose next stop is Boston—which also is being hit hard by the hurricane.

Not only do polls show President Obama still ahead (albeit by far less than his 14-point margin from four years ago), but Tammy Baldwin, a liberal Democratic congresswoman who represents the college town of Madison and was assumed to have an uphill battle on her hands, has drawn even in the polls in her bid to take out popular former Republican governor Tommy Thompson in the U.S. Senate race.

The Republicans predictions of a new era of conservative hegemony after public-sector unions failed to recall Gov. Scott Walker now seem were more than a little premature in a state that lasted backed a Republican presidential candidate in 1984.

Wisconsin political insiders and longtime observers of the state’s elections don’t dismiss out of hand the possibility of a Romney upset, but given that George W. Bush came up a few thousand votes short here both in 2000 and 2004 (while winning neighbor Ohio), a last-minute sprint by Romney suggests fear that the electoral college math just isn’t adding up in some of the swing states he originally intended to win, like Ohio, Iowa, and Virginia.

More than email or mass transit or your favorite diner, all of urban life depends on plumbing—defined in practical terms as the effective provision of clean water for drinking and the regular removal of waste to a place nowhere near the source of clean water. The ancient Romans with their Cloaca Maxima were able to rule the world because of their attention (OK, obsession) to this elemental fact. Pliny the Elder considered their plumbing to be the greatest accomplishment of the Roman Empire. Clean in and waste out, in and out, in and out—that’s how civilization grows. Societies that accomplish this flourish while those that cannot generally struggle to move beyond the most rudimentary hand-to-mouth subsistence.

Yet most of today’s survival tips out there have only to do with keeping your food from spoiling or your ice icy. Sure, food is mighty important, but food is easy. No one will starve here (except those inexplicably ignored persons who already are starving). We might suffer through—gasp—some days of dull cuisine, stuck with goodies like PBJ on white bread, scrambled eggs for dinner, or boiled noodles with ketchup. Tough, I know. But the problem is not one of food shortages but, alas, one of excrement. Raw sewage. Shit. In your water supply. 

The usual sequence when the water supply is disrupted is to use bottled water. In resource-strapped countries like Haiti after the earthquake or in New Orleans after Katrina, the clean bottled water runs out or isn’t supplied widely and consistently enough. And similar to those two now-legendary disasters, if the pipes are not fixed and a return to faucet-based life restored, infections begin. People drinking dirty water contaminated with, say, cryptosporidium or cholera or E coli, or whatever extra awful microbe is around. It kills thousands after every major natural disaster, unless the old in-with-the-fresh, out-with-the-waste rhythm of the Cloaca Maxima can be restored. 

With 11 feet of water set to crash onto the shore-hemmed city of New York, what assurances do we have that New York City will not become Milwaukee-by-the-sea or, more disturbing, something like Port-au-Gotham? Plenty—New York City and, I suspect, other urban centers, has a forward-thinking approach to the water supply informed with hard-earned lessons from Haiti and New Orleans. New Yorkers use 1.3 billion gallons of water each day, sending it downstream across 7,400 miles of sewer pipes. That’s about 160 gallons per head per day. The Department of Sanitation sees it in basic terms: fresh water in (mostly from the lakes and reservoirs) and used water out. Logic and civic planning prevail. This is your government actually working (!). 

Hurricanes can bring great surf to the East Coast—but not when they collide with a nor'easter, turn west, and come ashore as the largest Atlantic storm ever recorded. “What you want is a storm like Katia last year, that just sits out in the Atlantic,” said Farmer. Katia arrived just in time for last year’s Quicksilver Pro surfing event in Long Beach, disproving the many skeptics who believed New York could never host a world-tour-level surf competition. Hurricanes generate lots of waves of different sizes and speeds; when the storm stays out at sea, the smaller waves dissipate and only the largest make it ashore, sorted into sets of similar size. But when the storm makes landfall, you get the small waves along with the big, all mashed together in a disorganized jumble. Add gusts blowing the tops off waves, and it doesn’t make for good surfing.  

Down in Florida, far from the storm, it’s a slightly different story. “It took some time to settle down, but it’s been a pretty solid event,” says Watson, who lives in Florida. There were reports of 20-foot waves on Saturday, and big-wave surfers were towing into Pumphouse in Palm Beach. (It’s so hard to paddle out in waves that big that people have to Jet Ski out, catch a wave, and ride it to the channel where it dies in deeper water.) But as the storm moved closer to shore around North Carolina, the situation worsened. The winds got stronger, the waves choppier, the current faster. And it’s not just the water—there are large pieces of wood from broken piers and beach-house decks that waves can fling at you. “This is now a matter of life, property, and staying safe,” says Watson. 

The surfing outlook isn’t good for after the storm, either. Irene moved through fast enough that there was some swell left over after the wind died. Watson doesn’t think that will happen with Sandy. The storm is too big and moving too slowly. On the south of the storm, the counterclockwise winds blowing out to sea will likely knock down much of the swell before the storm passes. 

As people around the world rallied to Haiti’s aid, they brought the same fears that Drudge and Rodgers are stirring now: that survivors—especially, as the myth often has it, poor, black survivors—are bound to panic, loot, or react with violence. This fear over looming anarchy is part of what prompts authorities to favor a military-led response. At home, that means mobilizing thousands of National Guard units. In Haiti nearly three years ago, that concern is much of the reason that the U.S. military was the leading presence in the quake zone for months after the aftershocks subsided—22,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines deployed at the height. A panic over impending chaos also fueled the civilian response, with aid groups pleading for donations on exaggerated descriptions of a disaster zone with “no food” and “no water,” prompting kind-hearted donors to flood the zone with an uncoordinated barrage of bottled water, latex gloves, and in one weird case, wooden hand puppets.

Yet for those of us who called the quake zone home, it was a very different experience. The sense of community in Port-au-Prince didn’t just unravel, but became stronger in those weeks after the quake, with people across Haiti putting aside vicious political squabbles and deep-rooted differences of race and class to focus on the immediate challenges of survival and coping with tremendous loss. Though authorities and many of my colleagues in the media fixated and exaggerated isolated pockets of presumed looting, lawlessness was isolated. Inexperienced journalists spread reports of “rioting”—often little more than pushing and shoving—at aid distributions made far more chaotic by pepper-spraying U.N. soldiers than malice. Many of the most widely reported events involved people just trying to dig food out of fallen buildings.

I don’t mean to make the situation in Haiti sound benign. Life in the quake zone was hard, and got harder as time went on. But that had far more to do with Haiti’s chronic want and the unnerving drumbeat of constant aftershocks than any lack of social cohesion. Yes, there were gangs in Port-au-Prince fighting low-intensity turf wars in the slums. And one bright morning, I ran across a pair of young men bleeding in the street, freshly executed with a shot to the back of their heads—by whom, no one would say. But such crimes were, if anything, more rare than they had been before the quake. And those two men killed? Witnesses said they had been caught stealing.

Indeed, law-and-order authorities found themselves with little to do. Most of the U.S. troops, sent to contain a societal meltdown, never left their ships. Hard-hatted foreign rescuers got the headlines, but due to inflated security concerns concentrated on a few high-profile sites and rescued only a handful of people. Haitian neighbors helping one another carried out the vast majority of rescues, ad hoc. And while the relief effort did fill crucial supply gaps and provided some lifesaving aid, the price of panic was an uncoordinated, uneven, sometimes paranoid response. The top-down “command-and-control” structure overcentralized the effort, leaving whole cities unattended for days while panicking responders duplicated efforts and wasted resources. The groundwork for a long-term recovery was botched. In Haiti, where there are still no federal or local agencies competent to deal with that magnitude of a catastrophe, the result has been more suffering. This month in Haiti alone, Hurricane Sandy's floods and winds, though merely sideswiping the island nation as the storm headed north, killed at least 52 people.