“It’s destroyed my business,” says Rizzo, whose mother, Elsie Rizzo, is the owner of Miss Freeport V, which for the past 12 years has chartered fishing trips and party cruises. “Sandy ruined two boats, ruined the office, and ruined all our storage,” he says. “We were counting on winter business, but I don’t think we’ll have any business now. The way Long Island has been destroyed, I don’t know who’s going to be doing parties.”

Rizzo has applied for FEMA relief, but he isn’t sure it’ll be enough to help his town, which has been badly battered. “There are piles and piles of clothing and furniture in the street. No heat, no hot water, and no gas. It’s living like a caveman,” he says.

Barnett, of the Codfather, says he’s lucky that his boat survived Sandy at all. He left it in the water, where it weathered the storm, but his neighbors were not so fortunate. Many fishermen had put their boats on cinderblocks in preparation. But “the water came up so high,” Barnett says. “It was like nothing we’d ever seen before. It knocked boats off the blocks and they traveled and ended up on people’s front lawns. It was one big collision in the boatyard with no one there.”

Barnett was counting on this week and the one before it. It’s traditionally the busiest period for his business. “This is usually a time where you see a full run of fish.”

But his one unscripted moment was far more telling: an unannounced trip to the devastated Rockaways on Saturday that happened to be caught by a camera crew with local news stations NY1. A local woman, part of a furious crowd of people who felt abandoned by the city, was held back by the mayor’s security detail, as she yelled at him: “Where’s the help? Where’s the fucking help?” (Azi Paybarah of Capital New York has raw video of the confrontation, and the backstory here.)

Outside of the city’s affluent precincts, New Yorkers have felt abandoned by the ultra-mayor who’s deemed New York a “luxury product” as days have passed and help has remained distant.

On my first day off since Sandy hit, I headed to Staten Island as part of a relief effort to do my bit after a can-do business owner in my corner of Brooklyn put out an email, asking for supplies, arms, and vehicles with gas: “I think this can be easy, no receipts, no tax deductions, no cameras, no politicians, no news.” 

The first friend placed the watch down on a table beside the contents of the wallet, which were set out on paper towels to dry. The watch continued marking the seconds that Vogelman and all the others killed in the storm would never see.

Each second was also one closer to the next extreme weather event, disasters certain to come ever more frequently as a result of climate change.

Each second was also one closer to the time when it will be too late to do anything about it.

The next critical moment will come on Election Day, Tuesday, when Vogelman would have voted at Public School 321, directly across the street from his Brooklyn home.

Mitt Romney’s political director also stopped by Fox News Sunday, arguing that this year’s presidential race won’t come down to ‘Florida, Florida, Florida,’ despite Axelrod’s claim that the GOP is “vulnerable” in the crucial swing state. “At the end of the day,” Rich Beeson said, “Governor Romney is going to carry Florida by a significant margin.” In fact, Beeson is confident that his candidate will take enough key states to win the entire election: “It looks like the map is expanding drastically in our favor,” he said. “I’m just sitting here trying to imagine what Mr. Axelrod is going to look like next week without his mustache,” referring to the Obama adviser’s wager to shave his facial hair if Obama loses Michigan, Minnesota, or Pennsylvania.

Cantor: Obama ‘Full of Negativity, Character Assassination’

The battleground states will decide this election. And the tightest swing state race, according to POLITICO, is in Virginia. So Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who represents Virginia’s 7th congressional district and the interests of the Tea Party, took to Meet the Press to bash President Obama and back up Romney’s bid for the presidency. “Mitt Romney has a plan,” Cantor said. “The president doesn’t. The president is full of negativity, character assassination, and attacks.”

It’s a good start, and an easy way to prevent flooding in an unexpected downpour, but it won’t do much against several feet of storm surge, as we saw with Sandy. Flooding like that calls for something along the lines of Bangkok’s subway entrances, which are elevated over a meter above street level and have built-in flood gates. The Bangkok metro continued to operate even as a foot of water lapped at the entrances during the 2011 monsoon.

The subway also needs more pumps, and better pumps, and they need to be on backup power. “One of the stories that’s emerging is that all infrastructure is interconnected,” says Radley Horton, a climate scientist at Columbia University who served on New York’s climate-change adaptation panel. “When the power is out it’s hard to drain the tunnels—that’s had a lot of impact on the subway system.” The power outage is also partly responsible for the gas shortage, he adds, which has made it impossible for many stations to keep pumping. Not that the current system could have held off Sandy anyway. The subway’s 700 pumps of varying vintage must drain 13 million gallons of water on a normal day; when there’s a storm, even a brief one like 2007’s, it can quickly be overwhelmed.

Robert Puentes, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, recommends “mundane but obvious” fixes like higher entrances, storm hatches, and a more resilient electrical grid, as well as more speculative projects, like a giant balloon that can be inflated to plug tunnels. The giant plugs are being developed by the Department of Homeland Security to protect subway tunnels from terrorist gas attacks, but the manufacturer claims they can work for floods as well. Though they wouldn’t be able to hold back all the water, they could limit flooding to a level that the pumps could handle.

“We can cork a wine bottle, so why not a subway tunnel?” says Lisberg, half-joking. He saw the plugs on Twitter but says he has no idea if they work. The MTA did try something similar on the west side yard of Penn Station: a giant tube full of water known as an aqua dam. It burst, but Lisberg says it helped reduce flooding.

And right now they don’t have to push particularly hard. After all, before Sandy dominated the headlines, there were already headlines about fungal meningitis due to a mold called Exserohilum. In fact, when the FDA went into the infamous New England Compounding Center, the pharmacy linked to contaminated steroids that have killed more than two dozen people, and cultured the equipment, they found several different types of mold and other fungi. It was everywhere. The place was grossly contaminated by lots of living things—including the mold that ended up in the many patients tragically harmed by the outbreak.

But there is a substantial difference between the mold found in the spines of the 404 poor souls affected thus far and the mold that many people have in their walls, books, and carpets, the type that thrives in moisture and post-Sandy conditions. And it’s not the species of mold, either—that doesn’t matter at all, really. It’s where the mold is, anatomically. You could inhale Exserohilum all day long (in fact you may well be doing this), you could drink it, you could rub it onto your skin, and not be harmed. Consider this: people at NECC didn’t get sick, though we now know the place was crawling with mold. Nor did the doctor injecting the stuff or the other people in the room as the medical procedure was taking place.

No, to get sick, you had to have a large amount of the fungus injected directly into a small area of the back with a poor blood supply—the poor blood supply, which is advantageous to provide a depot for medications that won’t wash away quickly, is a disaster if an infectious microbe enters the space. Without a blood supply, there is an extremely limited capacity for the body to respond with a healing inflammatory response. Beyond those with anatomic inoculation, the only other persons at risk are those with immune systems severely compromised by such medical interventions as bone-marrow transplants. For completeness, one must also consider the large group of people—the hay-fever crowd—who are allergic to mold. Some are so reactive to mold that they develop asthma, though it’s cockroaches, not molds, that are driving the current epidemic of inner-city asthma in children.

In a fact-based society, the lessons of the fungal-meningitis outbreak would be used to quiet concern about any health risks due to the moldiness sure to follow Sandy. But as Ronald Reagan’s most famous Freudian slip has it, facts are stupid things. I suspect that rather than assurance, we will enter the Mold Wars era, where these slimy, villainous-looking microbes will take over for the more general “germ” as the object of public fascination and censure. In this role, however, they surely are miscast—now there’s a problem the Gipper could understand. 

The U.S. has 215,000 miles of high-voltage power lines; 70 percent of those are more than 30 years old. The huge system requires a lot of manpower and funds—an estimated $1.5 trillion in the next 20 years—just to maintain as is.

Experts say a better solution is to throw it out entirely. Instead of revamping grids that don’t meet the country’s power and voltage needs, they argue for implementing a digital smart-grid system.

Smart grids work as a two-way conversation between homes and electric companies. Unlike today’s electrical grids, which can leave whole areas in the dark after a storm until the power company is called to fix the problem, smart grids automatically alert utilities when there’s a glitch, and fixes can often be made remotely.

Despite the benefits smart grids offer, the U.S. has been slow to adopt the technology.

Rapaport and Lander put out the message on Facebook and Twitter that the soup kitchen needed volunteers. Even as the city still struggled to slough off the effects of Sandy, nearly 100 showed up, peeling potatoes, dicing squash. They delivered 200 lunches of eggplant and pasta that day and made twice that many chicken and meatloaf dinners. By Wednesday, their stocks were depleted, so they put out another call on social media; more donations came in. At week’s end, they were still making hot meals for evacuees and volunteers all over the city, delivering hundreds of meals to a command post in the flood-ravaged Seagate neighborhood in Brooklyn. All of this while the regular lines at the soup kitchen are growing longer.

“A lot of people who would never eat in a soup kitchen are now staying with someone who let them in, a distant friend or a distant relative,” he said. “We have a lot more middle-class people who are at a loss, who don’t even know where to put their head down.”

Does this mean that the ultra-Orthodox reputation for insularity is a false one? “I don’t know,” Rapoport said. “My agenda is to feed people. If you want to find a new cultural trend here, that is up to you.”

When the facility’s lights went dark, the Office of Emergency Management installed a portable generator outside the building. Inside, on green cots stamped in gold with the seal of the City of New York, mothers, husbands, and children slept soundly under blue fleece blankets, because Gorgoglione and his fellow workers did not.

“They had nowhere to go,” Gorgoglione said of the people who left their homes in Evacuation Zone A.

The lifelong New Yorker’s own wife and three adult children rode out the storm safe on higher ground on Staten Island—a consolation for Gorgoglione, for whom the work was nonstop. Three meals a day had to be served, countless questions answered. The only person Gorgoglione didn’t have time for was himself. On Wednesday morning, with about 120 shelterees remaining and volunteers shutting down the shelter’s top floors, there he was, wearing a scraggly three-day beard, still on his feet.

Barzey-Ramos has been volunteering for decades, ever since she moved to New York at age 14 from the Dominican Republic. She teaches Saturday morning Bible classes for children at her church, St. Joachim and St. Ann Parish in Queens Village, and volunteered in shelters in New York after 9/11 and Hurricane Irene. “It was wonderful to see how many volunteers of all ages got together. I became friends with many of them and we still talk,” she says of her years of volunteer work. “I always feel that my responsibility is to New Yorkers in need.”

For fun, she organizes softball teams with her co-workers at the Human Resources Administration. “I’m a medium player but a good organizer,” she says.

“New Yorkers always stick together, especially in times of crisis,” she says. “We become one.”

There was no room in the boat for the firefighters, save one to steer, so the rest of Swift Water team held onto the sides of the boat as they returned to high ground.

What LaRocco would talk about afterward was not his team’s heroism, but the divine luck of them being there. He says the rest was just what any firefighters would do. “We have our moments now and then,” says LaRocco.