...residents of the Rockaways in Queens continued struggling without power, heat or food for a sixth day as their neighborhood slowly descended into chaos.
With little police presence on the storm-ravaged streets, many residents of the peninsula have been forced to take their protection into their own hands, arming themselves with guns, baseball bats and even bows and arrows to ward off thugs seeking to loot their homes.
It has been reported that crooks have been disguising themselves as Long Island Power Authority workers and coming by homes on the peninsula in the middle of the night while real utility workers were nowhere to be found.
...'We booby-trapped our door and keep a baseball bat beside our bed,' Danielle Harris, 34, told the New York Daily News... The woman added that she has been hearing gunshots likely fired in the nearby housing project for three nights in a row... Meanwhile, local surfer Keone Singlehurst said that he stockpiled knives, a machete and a bow and arrow...
Most of the grocery stores in the area have not reopened since the storm, and the neighborhood has been left cut off from the rest of the city, with no trains or even shuttle buses servicing the residents... the Red Cross and FEMA were still nowhere in sight... The Borough President of Staten Island called the reaction of Red Cross - or lack thereof - to the devastation caused by Sandy an 'absolute disgrace'...
'My advice to the people of Staten Island is do not donate to the American Red Cross,' said Mr Molinaro. 'Let them get their money elsewhere... It's an absolute disgrace in a county that has always responded to disasters all over the world... Katrina - we sent them down four trailer loads of food, water and one trailer load of generators. No one's responding to us... Of the 22 people across New York City that have perished, 15 of them died in Staten Island. The borough is still underwater.’
...In a Coney Island apartment block, where tenants huddle together in one room and human waste spills out of the toilet, tenant Jeffery Francis despairs that help is not getting to Brooklyn faster.
In what has become a ritual, the president did not deign to answer questions about the humanitarian crisis unfolding in the Northeast.
Answering questions is for mere mortals, it would seem, not an iconic cult figure bent on retaining his white-knuckled grip on power.
