Metro

Complacency, defiance contributed to Staten Island’s storm devastation

After waiting until 9 p.m. Monday to respond to warnings about the storm, Glenda Moore hastily strapped her two young boys into car seats, packed their Halloween costumes into the family’s Ford Explorer and sped from her home on Staten Island toward Brooklyn.

Fleeing the hard-hit neighborhood of Great Kills, she planned to cross the Verrazano Bridge and take refuge at her mother’s house, but on Father Capodanno Boulevard, Sandy’s surge swamped the SUV, pushing it into the mud.

Moore jumped from the stalled SUV with Connor, 4, and Brandon, 2, and carried them to a tree, then to a house, where she pounded on a door.

“She’s struggling, and the owner didn’t answer,” said a city official who spoke to Moore.

She went around back. Desperate and in thigh-high water, she picked up a clay pot, planning to break a window. But in that moment, she loosened her grip on the kids and they were swept away by the raging brown foam.

Moore called out to them throughout the night, screaming in the dark for hours.

Cops found the tiny bodies three days later, in a swollen marsh a quarter-mile away.

THE SEARCH FOR THE MISSING CONTINUES

The two boys were among 22 people who died on the South Shore of Staten Island — more than half of the city’s entire tragic toll of 41. Because of ignored evacuation warnings and poor flood planning, the least populous borough paid a high price during the hurricane’s rampage.

Other communities, particularly the Rockaways, were hammered by the storm, but none suffered as badly as Staten Island. Hundreds of neat, winterized bungalows were reduced to rubble in Midland, South and Oakwood beaches and Ocean Breeze.

“People are rummaging through garbage where their houses used to be,” said Charlene Wagner, district manager of Community Board 3.

“The only time I’ve seen devastation like this,” said City Councilman James Oddo, “is in the movies.”

In the days before the storm, there were repeated dire warnings — and much skepticism — in these communities, populated by blue-collar workers and city employees, many of whom pulled around-the-clock shifts to see New York through Sandy.

Their aging, one-floor bungalows, wedged between the soft sand and marshland, are now dwarfed by new, sturdier McMansions. Few residents enjoy sweeping views of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, but all can walk a few blocks to the miles-long FDR Boardwalk and Midland Beach promenade to relish the wide beaches, salty air and spectacular vistas.

It’s a slice of the city that’s unfamiliar to many New Yorkers.

It was once a summer playground and featured first-rate hotels and amusements. But mostly this was where working immigrants settled — the Irish in Midland Beach and Italians in South Beach.

“These are small communities — mom-and-pops, little houses, firemen, policemen,” said Borough President James Molinaro. “This is the middle class of America, right here.”

It’s also one of the city’s most vulnerable areas. Most of the island sits at or below sea level, and storm surges have long plagued its shores. City and federal plans to protect Staten Island from water have been in play for more than 50 years — with little to show for it.

In 1960, a study by the Army Corp of Engineers led to a $9 million blueprint to build dunes, levees and stone jetties from Fort Wadsworth to Tottenville, a 13-miles stretch of the eastern and southern coast. Work was set to begin in 1965. It never happened.

“They’re going to have to answer for what happened to those plans,” Oddo said.

In 1979, the city put in a new storm-sewer system that helped reduce flooding, and in 1992 a berm was built to protect Oakwood Beach. But the ambitious “Bluebelt” plan — where the city preserves and tailors existing ponds and wetlands to soak up storm and floodwater — has never reached its full potential.

Still, Staten Islanders had not seen a truly devastating storm hit its semi-sheltered shores since the 1992 nor’easter. And last year, according to elected leaders, an air of invincibility followed Hurricane Irene.

Residents were told to prepare for disaster, but the storm passed relatively quietly.

“Nothing happened,” recalled Midland Beach resident Joseph Herrnkind, 50. “The weathermen cry wolf so many times.”

Seven days before it struck New York, Sandy took shape as a tropical storm in Jamaica before churning up the Eastern Seaboard.

Experts soon realized that a rare convergence of weather could turn it into a monster. The hurricane and two other storm fronts from the north and south were converging, and the “Frankenstorm” was set to arrive at high tide, which would be two feet higher than normal because of a full moon.

What scared them most was that a wall of high pressure in the north Atlantic could force the storm sharply northwest — a big hook swinging straight at the city.

“She kind of got stuck in the worst possible place,” said Dan Hofmann, meteorologist with National Weather Service.

“It looked like it was almost heading out safely to sea, but then that hard left happens first thing Monday morning, and that’s when things started to go bad.”

While Irene struck at a glancing blow, Sandy came directly at New York. When she arrived at about 8 p.m. Monday, the storm tore into Staten Island head on, pushing a 13 1/2-foot-high tidal surge.

Yet many simply thumbed their noses at the looming threat.

Molinaro said that on Monday, during a tour of shelters, he was shocked to see row after row of empty cots. At the Todt Hill facility, “there were 43 people there and they had cots for 400,” he said.

Thousands of people — all in the shore’s mandatory evacuation zone — simply refused to go.

“We had a hurricane party,” said Teresa Guido of Midland Beach, who invited guests for dinner and wine.

The festivities were soon over when a wall of water came crashing in.

“Cars that were parked here washed down the block,” she said of Father Capodanno Boulevard.

Bill Kruger, of Quincy Avenue in Ocean Breeze, was in his house listening to a radio broadcast by the mayor when suddenly his wife, Rose, ran downstairs to the basement, hoping to protect their wedding album.

“All of a sudden, I heard a loud crash,” he recalled.

“Rose, now!” he screamed. “We got to go now!”

She came up the stairs just as the surge walloped their basement.

“It was a matter of three seconds that she turned that corner,” he said.

Not everyone was so lucky.

Ella Norris, 89, succumbed to hypothermia in her daughter’s arms after icy, chest-deep waters flooded their home in Ocean Breeze. John Filipowicz, 51, and his 20-year-old son, John, of Oakwood Beach died in their basement, their bodies locked in embrace.

When storm waters swamped her bungalow home on Grimsby Street in Midland Beach, Lucy Spagnuolo’s first thought was to get her 80-year-old mom, Beatrice, out.

So she told her to put on her boots and wait. “Ma, Let me pull up the car,” the postal worker said.

But after trekking to her Cadillac sedan through knee-deep water, Spagnuolo watched in horror as a power line hit the water.

“I was afraid that I would get electrocuted.”

So she drove to her boyfriend’s house for help.

On their way back, still blocks away, the couple spotted cops and begged them to rescue Beatrice.

“They said, ‘It’s too dangerous. No one is allowed in.’ ” And they were allowed no further.

Police did not reach the house until 2 p.m. the next day. They discovered Beatrice dead, sitting in a chair, the high water line above her head.

Her next-door neighbor, Anastasia Rispoli, 73, was also found dead.

The push of water was a lethal surprise — waves were high enough to reach the top of one-story houses. The mix of water and falling trees knocked out power to 133,000 of 174,000 Con Ed customers on the island.

By early Tuesday, Staten Island — long called the “forgotten borough” by its 450,000 residents — was devastated.

Rescue workers had been out within hours of the storm’s arrival, but no relief came to the newly homeless. Food, water and clothing were lacking.

On Thursday, elected officials toured the area, and a handful of Federal Emergency Management Agency workers offered phones to residents. The National Guard set up in New Dorp Beach with food, water and blankets. On Friday, FEMA opened a help center, and Red Cross workers showed up. None had information about shelters.

Even so, victims had to rely more on each other than from relief agencies.

“I have nothing,” said South Beach resident Jadwiga Lynko, whose house was destroyed.

She survived the storm by balancing herself on top of her kitchen sink for six hours — and praying.

Will Staten Island be better prepared for the next storm?

Many aren’t sure.

“People chose to live by the water,” said Dennis Laurie, an EMT who lost his home in Ocean Breeze. “It’s a chance you’re going to take. You just cross you’re fingers and pray.”