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.

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. 

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 (!). 

That’s his job, of course. But he now has the chance to perform it under the unique spotlight of a national disaster that, fairly or unfairly, has left Mitt Romney with little running room in the final week of an extremely tight presidential campaign.

Romney canceled an event in Wisconsin on Monday and his schedule for Tuesday rather than push against the storm’s gale-force wins. He said he was acting “out of sensitivity for the millions of Americans in the path of Hurricane Sandy.”

That was the sensible course, because the hurricane’s impact goes well beyond shutting the candidates out of crucial Eastern swing states. Even if Romney had gone ahead and campaigned, how much attention would he have gotten with the media’s attention riveted on the monster storm? The truth is, he would have been blown off the screen.

The anxiety increased as the storm drew closer and the city approached the hour that Mayor Michael Bloomberg warned would be the worst.

An added feeling of being trapped came as the closures were extended from the subway to the bridges and tunnels, and people were advised to stay inside. Where we had once stood spellbound by the sight of the burning towers, we now listened to the unholy roar of the wind. Windows and doors rattled, and sirens wailed in the gathering night.

Only this time the sirens were not converging toward one place. They were going in all directions, and to hear them was to imagine dire emergencies of every kind, everywhere.

If 9/11 was about what we saw, then 10/29 was about what we heard. And even when we cannot fully believe what our eyes behold, they are far better than our ears at gauging the true magnitude of a threat.

While you were stocking up on water and staying away from windows to be safe in the storm, this guy went out for a jog in Washington, D.C., with no shirt on and a horse mask on his head. Hilarious hurricane hero? Drunk idiot? Either way, the shirtless jogging horseman has just become Sandy’s mascot and Wednesday’s most topical Halloween costume.

Jet Skiing in New York Harbor

With Hurricane Sandy just 90 minutes from making landfall on New York, this genius took his Jet Ski out in Manhattan’s New York Harbor. To recap, forecasters call for surges of six to 11 feet and unprecedented wind speeds, and this man heads out into the waters on a vessel that appears the size of a rubber duckie next to those waves. Summed up New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn: the man is “out of his mind … out of his ever-loving mind.”

“The real flooding is going to come tonight,” Mayor Bloomberg said at an 11:30 a.m. press conference. “Eight o’clock so going to be the worst and that’s only a few hours from now.”

Back down at the harbor, the tide was still going out to sea where Hurricane Sandy had begun its slow turn toward land. The storm was hundreds of miles wide and it was whipping up winds as high as 100 mph. It was itself lumbering at only 18 mph, but that made it all the more dangerous because when it finally arrived it would not just be roaring through.

To stand at the churning harbor’s edge and see how high it was and then consider how much higher it might rise was to sense the magnitude of the approaching force. Not just some wave but the sea itself would be rising.

In the meantime, the supposedly great powers of Wall Street could do nothing more than what the city was doing at subway entrances. The New York Stock Exchange and the portal to the R train both had piles of white sandbags, though the latter also had sheets of plywood.

“We live on the 9th floor so we’re not worried,” said Terrance, 28, and his girlfriend, Cailey, 26, who were calmly walking back to their apartment on South End Avenue with beer and paper towels.

The scene was a bit more frantic a few blocks south at the Gateway Plaza. The residence's general manager Gregory Tumminia said he was taking extra precautions and had been warned by Con Edison that the building might lose power around 5:00 p.m. “We’re securing all the furniture at dock entrances, ensuring that everything is tethered down and covering electrical grates so water can’t infiltrate at a quick pace,” Tumminia told The Daily Beast, adding that more than 50 percent of the building’s residents had evacuated.

Meanwhile, construction workers were frantically unloading sandbags outside the Goldman Sachs building and piling them up in front of the entrance of the financial firm’s sleek, steel-and glass headquarters. Across the street at the World Trade Center site, where Bloomberg expressed concerns about flooding on Sunday, a few workers could be seen tying down construction materials.

Thrill-seekers at South Cove Park climbed over yellow caution tape blocking off the Hudson River promenade to take pictures of the barely visible Statue of Liberty and rolls of waves crashing against the piers. But by 2:30, as winds began picking up and water spilled over into the streets, police were on the scene urging onlookers to leave the area.

As Sandy approached, Jackie said, “In our case, I called the man who takes care of our house and he put up storm doors, closed the attic window and made sure the grill was inside. Most of the houses [in the Hamptons] are built to hurricane standards or better and can weather a pretty dramatic storm.”

“Right now, there’s nothing I can do,” she said. “We have a new roof, I hope it’s on well. All I can do is sort of hope ... at the end of the day, we’re insured with a super-high deductible—but you roll the dice in life. We’re some of the luckiest people in the world who have a second home in a beautiful spot despite being in a vulnerable area. I adore my house, I treat it like a baby, I keep it maintained, and we have wonderful people who work for us, and if something goes wrong they fix it and we pay for it.”

Holly Phillips, who has a house north of I-27 in Bridgehampton, was taking it all in stride. “I’m not worried about my house,” she said. “It survived Irene, it will survive this.”

Meanwhile, in New York City, some residents used the closing of subways, tunnels, bridges and businesses as an adult snow day. Knowing there would be no work on Monday, impromptu parties popped up, bars were open late, and residents of Macdougal and Sullivan streets in SoHo were gifted with an impromptu cheerleading performance by a group of drunken women at 4 a.m. on Monday. That particular party went on until 5 a.m.