Day after day, Bob Tulipan led teams of relief volunteers to the areas hit hardest by Superstorm Sandy. One day the Rockaways; Staten Island the next. There was a mission dubbed “Operation Muck-Out” because scores of willing hands banded together to clean the residue and mold from homes that were damaged but still standing. As power outages stretched past a week, the assignment became delivering badly needed supplies. And when a powerful Nor’easter packing freezing winds and snow brought more damage and misery, Bob (above) and his squads of Good Samaritans picked up donated sleeping bags.

“We fanned out with hundreds of the bags,” says Bob, 64, of Verona, N.J. “Especially for the elderly, the cold snap was a disaster on top of a disaster. I could relate. I’ve been through loss of power and heat and water myself more than once. I’ve been sharing that with the Sandy victims so they know I understand what they’re going through.”

Organizing big events is also nothing new for Bob. He worked in the entertainment industry for 25 years until he and his partner sold their business. The day after Sandy slammed the Northeast, Bob found himself taking a course for volunteers with WorldCares, a disaster-response-training nonprofit organized in the wake of 9/11. When the call went out for people to lead volunteers into the field, Bob stepped forward.

“I’m comfortable coordinating large numbers of people, stocking enough food and water, ensuring the health and safety of the group, and creating teams so the work gets done,” Bob says. “Those are precisely the skills required to spearhead WorldCares relief efforts, so I raised my hand.”

See also: AARP Foundation Relief Fund

Bob learned at his father’s knee the value of reaching out to others. “My dad was an enlisted man in the U.S. Army stationed in Germany in 1945, and he played a significant role in the exodus of concentration camp survivors,” Bob says. “He was humble about it, but he received numerous accolades. Many times during my childhood I heard people thank him. That’s why I care so deeply about encouraging everyone to do something for others. And that’s why I make every effort to do exactly that myself.”

Reflecting on his involvement with WorldCares, Bob has a message for people who can spare some time. “When there’s a need in your area, help in any way you can,” he says. “You can make a donation, sure, but you won’t believe the emotional reward you’ll feel if you do anything from sweeping a sidewalk to calling on knowledge you’ve acquired over your lifetime.”

See other parts of the Surviving Sandy series:

• ‘I Thought My Mother Was Going to Die’
• ‘One Saving Grace … I Had My Car’
• ’10 Years of Hard Work and Sacrifice … Gone’
• ‘We Thought We Were Safe This Time’

Photo: Anna Solo

This is the fourth in a series of profiles of New York area residents whose worlds were upended by Superstorm Sandy.

On Monday evening, Oct. 29, Liz Bennett heard the distant wail of fire engines outside her modest frame home on the thin Rockaway Beach peninsula that juts out of the borough of Queens. Liz (above) yelled upstairs to her husband, Bill, who at 67 is retired from his job as the superintendent of a building in Manhattan. Then she ran to a window.

“I looked out and the whole ocean was coming up the block!” the 61-year-old hotel cleaning woman says, awe and fear still tingeing her voice almost two weeks later. “The next thing I knew, the basement door was ripped off and the washer and dryer went up in the air. We had decided not to evacuate because we left in 2011 before Hurricane Irene and nothing happened. We thought we were safe this time.”

Yet like scores of their fellow New Yorkers, the Bennett family was in fact in danger. The power failed, plunging them into darkness as the surging seawater filled up the basement. Liz, Bill and their five-year-old grandson made their way up to the second floor. Right behind them were one of their four daughters and her husband, who had been allowed to come home from Afghanistan in anticipation of needing to help his loved ones after the storm.

While the five of them huddled together, Liz was consumed with worry about her other daughters. They live in the area, and one of them has an 18-month-old baby. Liz couldn’t contact them because the phone wasn’t working.

Liz finally found out in the days that followed that all of her daughters and the baby did survive. Sadly, though, a dear friend on the next street was not so lucky. “She drowned in her own home,” Liz says. “She was in her 70s. They found her body. Horrible.”

Though Liz, Bill and their brood rode out the storm, the damage to their home (above) was devastating. “We lost a brand new boiler that we could barely afford in the first place,” Liz says. “And the washer, the dryer, the furniture, everything down there is gone.  The walls and floor are ruined and there’s mold. The smell is awful.

See also: AARP Foundation Relief Fund

“But you know what’s amazing? People came to help. They brought food and cleaning supplies and they got the muck out and sprayed disinfectant. My daughter thanked one of the volunteers, and he just smiled.”

As welcome as that help was, however, Liz is overwhelmed at the thought of how they will ever recover financially. “I have arthritis in my back and my knees, so I was going to take my Social Security next year when I’m 62,” she says. “Now I’ll have to hang in there. What can you do? But I keep thinking crazy things like maybe somebody will show up and donate a boiler. You can’t lose hope.”

See other parts of the Surviving Sandy series:

• ‘I Thought My Mother Was Going to Die’
• ‘One Saving Grace … I Had My Car’
• ’10 Years of Hard Work and Sacrifice … Gone’
• ‘I Raised My Hand’

Photo: Anna Solo

This is the third in a series of profiles of New Yorker area residents whose worlds were upended by Superstorm Sandy.

When Sue Saunders opened the door to her waterfront shop in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, she burst into tears. New York Printing and Graphics, the business Sue (above) had built from a kitchen-table operation into a thriving venture, had been reduced to a heap of muddy, overturned presses and soggy piles of what was once her inventory.

“I celebrated the 10th anniversary of NYPG last August, right after my 50th birthday,” she says. “I had paid cash for everything and I had no debt. Mark, my husband, works for the city, so between the two of us we were set to pay for college for our two teenage sons and save for retirement.”

She pauses, still choking back sobs weeks after the storm had stolen her source of revenue along with her pride in making a go of it. Finally she takes a deep breath and manages to say, “Ten years of hard work and sacrifice . . . gone.”

See also: AARP Foundation Relief Fund

The previous day, Sue had attended a meeting with representatives from New York City’s Small Business Services. The officials were slated to offer options for relief assistance.

“But all they talked about was loans,” Sue says. “My friend Mike Ikhmies, who owns Eye Graphics & Printing, spoke for all of us when he said, ‘We don’t need loans. We need money.’”

Because of the neighborhood’s location, no one in the room had been able to get flood insurance. Yet, as Sue puts it, “How can you take on loan repayments when you don’t have the cash flow to cover your living expenses?”

Sue says that she and Mark have always counted on two incomes. When their boys were little, Mark’s expertise in graphics inspired Sue to launch her company. She set up a single press in a little storefront in Manhattan’s tony Tribeca section and did the administrative work at home.

By 2005, when Red Hook was emerging from a gritty past and transforming into a burgeoning business district, Sue took a gamble: She moved her business there. “As of Sunday, Oct. 28, I had five presses, a long list of clients, six regular employees and some seasonal workers,” she says. “As of Monday, I had nothing. It’s surreal.”

Then Sue begins to think out loud. “A FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] loan,” she says. “Maybe I’ll have to take one after all. And the boys, instead of going away to college maybe they could stay home and enroll in the City University of New York. I don’t know. It’s too overwhelming.”

Her voice trails off and she’s silent for a while. Then, with the same drive and determination that had carried her through a decade of running her own business, she musters her resolve. “Somehow, I’ll get back on my feet,” she says. “I have to. I can’t let my family down.”

See other parts of the Surviving Sandy series:

• ‘I Thought My Mother Was Going to Die’
• ‘One Saving Grace — I Had My Car’
• ‘We Thought We Were Safe This Time’
• ‘I Raised My Hand’

Photos: Anna Solo

This is the second in a series of profiles of New York area residents whose worlds were upended by Superstorm Sandy.

Sandy’s wrath turned the Staten Island street where Carlos Cruz lives into a river. Carlos (above) watched in disbelief as cars bobbed like toys on the wind-whipped waves. Stranded in a second-story rental apartment, with food rotting in the fridge and freezing temperatures threatening his fragile health, he and his son lived on Spam and Vienna sausages. Rescue boats had come by, so Carlos’ wife had gotten out and gone to stay with their daughter and her family in a New York suburb. But Carlos was afraid to leave the apartment empty because of a fear of looting.

See also: AARP Foundation Relief Fund

Day by day, the stash of canned goods dwindled. Worse yet, so did Carlos’ supply of insulin. By Friday, he was down to one dose but he didn’t have enough money to renew his prescription. Medicare had sent him a letter saying he had reached his limit of payments so the copayment was raised to $95.

“I only had $25 left in my bank account,” says Carlos, a 65-year-old Filipino immigrant. “I use a debit card and I don’t have any credit cards. I never could get a steady job so I worked in marketing for various places. I don’t have savings.”

Carlos’ Social Security wasn’t due to come until the following Wednesday and his wife’s would come a week after that. His son didn’t have any cash flow, either. He works as a DJ in Lower Manhattan and only gets paid if he has gigs.

Carlos tried calling his doctor’s office and got the answering machine. Then he called the Red Cross but he couldn’t get through. “That’s when my son said we had to go to Starbucks and search the Internet,” Carlos said. “Our one saving grace was that I did have my car and some gas. I had left the car in Queens when I drove to a prayer meeting before the storm. A friend brought it to me after the water went down enough that the roads were passable.”

Carlos says he had never been to a WiFi hot spot before and his son helped him. “We found a number for the Beacon Christian Community Health Center,” he said. “The medical director herself answered the phone! I couldn’t believe it. Dr. Janet Kim is her name, and she is the nicest person. After I told her my situation, I went in so she could check my sugar. She said I could get my insulin at Walgreen’s through a sliding scale program for only $2. Then she loaded my car with free cleaning materials. I called my other daughter in New Jersey and asked her to get some donations for gas so I can drive around and hand out supplies to my neighbors.”

His daughter came through. She called back to report that she had raised $20 to send to him. “I’m the only one around here who still has a car,” Carlos says. “This must be God’s way of letting me give back.”

See other parts of the Surviving Sandy series:

•  ‘I Thought My Mother Was Going to Die’
  
• ’10 Years of Hard Work and Sacrifice … Gone’
• ‘We Thought We Were Safe This Time’ 
• ‘I Raised My Hand’

Photo: Anna Solo

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of profiles of New York area residents whose worlds were upended by Superstorm Sandy. We were moved by the heartbreaking stories of loss and the inspirational stories of kindness and wanted to share them with you. Knowing that the effort to rebuild lives, homes and communities will take months, the AARP Foundation established the AARP Foundation Relief Fund. This fund will give the nearly $1.3 million already raised to select organizations working to support victims and communities impacted by the storm, including organizations dedicated to serving older adults. Donations will be given nationally to the American Red Cross and locally to organizations in these seven states: Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Rhode Island. Consider donating, even a small amount, if you can.

Joyce Little was in Maine visiting her son the Sunday before the storm made landfall. Joyce (above) got a message from the Menorah Center for Rehabilitation in Brooklyn, where she’s a nurse. “It was an all-hands call,” she says. “For Irene, we evacuated but this year they were going to move the first-floor residents up to the second.”

Joyce, 54,  jumped in her car and drove for nine hours straight. At 9 p.m., she reached her Belle Harbor home in the Rockaways in Queens. “I changed clothes, kissed my husband good-bye, and headed for the nursing home,” she says. Once there, she called her mother’s number in Breezy Point. Eileen Giglio is 83 and has Parkinson’s, so an aide, Margaret Amo (with Eileen below), is with her 24/7.

“I told Margaret I’d call after the storm hit,” Joyce says. But she wasn’t worried. Joyce thought this storm would be a repeat of Irene. She put her mother out of her mind and focused on her patients. “I slept on the floor that night, ” she says. “But I thought the storm would blow over and I’d be able to go home soon.”

That was before Sandy roared in with a vengeance on Monday afternoon. “The second surge was a wall of water,” Joyce says. “I got frantic about my mother. I called Margaret and she said the water was up to the front step. I called again and the water was up to the second step. Then the third step. Margaret said they would have to leave but she didn’t know how they could.”

Joyce called her husband. By that time, he was trapped with three feet of water sloshing against the house. “He works for the NYPD, so he called Dennis Dier, the director of safety in Breezy Point,” Joyce says. “He said, ‘My mother-in-law is still in there and you’ve got to help.’ They couldn’t get in with cars so they sent boats.”

See also: AARP Foundation Relief Fund

Joyce called Margaret back. “She said the trap door had blown open and a geyser was shooting up. She put my mother on the kitchen counter but the water was up that high in no time. I was screaming and crying. I thought my mother was going to die!”

What Margaret did next was nothing short of heroic. She hung up the phone, put Eileen Giglio on her back, and swam to the front door. Once she pushed it open, the boats pulled the two women aboard. Joyce would not hear about this until Tuesday when she finally got in touch with her mother at a shelter in a high school in Queens.

“I stayed at the nursing home for three days and nights,” Joyce says. “Then I went home to find that my husband was OK but our house was badly damaged. All that matters, though, is that my mother is still with us. I will be forever grateful to Margaret Amo. What she did was unbelievable. She found a way to save my mother’s life.”

See other parts of the Surviving Sandy series:

• ‘One Saving Grace … I Had My Car’
• ’10 Years of Hard Work and Sacrifice … Gone’
• ‘We Thought We Were Safe This Time’
• ‘I Raised My Hand’

Photos: Anna Solo