During the storm and its aftermath, communications also broke down. Government phone and email systems failed, and utilities both provided misleading information regarding power restoration and failed to communicate adequately with government officials and the public, leading to the dissemination of contradictory information from authorities. Confusion reigned, tempers flared, and confidence plummeted.

Aggravating matters locally were asinine, archaic, discriminatory, and probably unconstitutional laws and regulations – including one that required that local hardware stores remain closed on the day before the storm hit; in our area, Sunday is a legally mandated “Day of Rest.” Furthermore, no preconceived plan for automatic or quickly-approved suspension in case of a disaster was in place; even after the magnitude of the devastation and suffering from the storm became clear, it took until Saturday to start the formal legal process needed to suspend these ridiculous regulations (by which point many stores, the majority of which were already crippled, could no longer accommodate opening within a day). The manual process and delayed reaction also meant that any gubernatorial approval of the suspension, as required by law before stores could open, could not come until sometime during the day on Sunday, thereby wasting people’s precious daylight hours.

Sadly, the great City of New York did not perform much better.

One of the cardinal rules of disaster recovery planning is that a plan must be established and tested prior to a disaster, so that people can prepare accordingly, and so that when disaster strikes, everyone follows an explicit script, has clear expectations, knows who needs to do what, when, where, and how, and proceeds in an orderly fashion.

Two days after losing power, my wife took my three young daughters – already traumatized by the storm and by having to abandon their home