Occupy Leads Relief Efforts In Powerless Red Hook

Stop The Wars ‏@sickjew

Occupy Leads Relief Efforts In Powerless Red Hook
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/11/occupy-leads-relief-in-powerless-red-hook.html …



As the lights come back on in lower Manhattan, the power imbalance in parts of the city worst hit by Sandy is more literal than ever. Brownstone Brooklyn neighborhoods like Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens were able to celebrate Halloween as usual, but just blocks away, many residents of the Red Hook Houses, the city’s second-largest housing project, are without electricity, heat, or running water, and growing increasingly desperate. Red Hook, like other areas with overheard power lines, could wait another ten days or longer for juice, according to Con Edison. So far, Red Hook has received little help from the city or FEMA, and a team of Occupy protestors have been heading relief efforts.

“I can’t take this no more,” said Alisa Pizarro on Friday, wiping tears from her eyes. The lead community organizer at Red Hook Initiative Center on Hicks Street, which has become a hub for relief efforts, she is also a resident. “It’s too much. We have no light. We have no water. We have nothing. I’ve been washing with a little bottle of water. You hear stories about people looting other people’s apartments. I have pepper spray in one hand and a flashlight in the other. I don’t want to go through another night.”

In an outcropping of 30 buildings, some of them high-rises of 14 stories, the Red Hook Houses hold some 6,000 tenants, and about half the buildings remain without power. Red Hook Initiative, which usually offers services like tutoring and college counseling, has been joined by about 15 people from the Occupy movement who have set up infrastructure and logistics for running hot-meal operations serving 500 to 1,000 people every day, bringing in medics, gathering information about people who are elderly or disabled and can’t leave their apartments or get down stairs, and broadcasting calls for volunteers and supplies from flashlights to ice for storing insulin.

(More at the link)