The media really started hyping up Hurricane Irene on Friday, two days before it would supposedly hit. My mom texted me that Thursday, telling me to buy some bottles of water and a little food to tide me over just in case. I agreed to but was in no hurry. Then Friday came, with the reports of massive floods in North Carolina and dramatizations on TV of lower Manhattan being hit with a 13-foot wave of salt water. Suddenly, you couldn’t buy a single flash light in New York City. My last ditch effort was to buy a Dora the Explorer kids flashlight that was being sold in the basement of a Walgreens, but that too sold out within 10 minutes of it’s discovery.

My roommates and I bought some food (and waited in the ridiculously long lines at Associated), two giant bottles of wine, and left it at that. Saturday came and I watched the news because I was bored and intrigued. Irene was losing power, just as we thought, but oh no! said the newscasters, it’s going to be a disaster! The MTA was completely shutting down, the Mayor was yelling at us to take it seriously in weird half-Spanish. I started getting more freaked out. I took my AC out of my window and taped it up. I started worrying if we have enough water. I filled old bottles and jugs then stashed them in the cabinets. Why didn’t I prepare more? We’ll be okay, right?

Early Saturday evening my roommates, a boyfriend, a friend, and I sat in the living room, starting to drink some wine because there was nothing else to do. The rain kept coming in waves and stores were closing so there was no where to go. Luckily I’m friends with quite a few people in my building, so we all wandered between apartments and hung out. For a brief moment we went out at around 11pm to the corner bar to catch some of the Hurricane excitement (shh… don’t tell my mother). Bored with the complete lack of an exciting scene, we darted back to our building and tried to start a game of pictionary in my living room.

My basement neighbor arrived moments later, sat on my blue couch, and said, “So my apartment is already going to start flooding and it hasn’t even hit. I kinda just want to go out and fill some bags with dirt to block off the water. I’m serious, I want to do this.”

“So let’s do it,” I said.

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. You say go, and we’ll go. We will help.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, let’s do it. Right now. Let’s go.”

I got distracted by something after this conversation, but I’m not sure by what. The next thing I know the neighbor and my roommate are gone. Confused, I looked out the window to the back yard. Sure enough, they were out underneath the big tree with a shovel and trash bags. The rain was coming down hard.

“Shit! They already started! Come on guys, looks like we are doing this, let’s go help!” I rallied the troops. The next hour can be summed up by the beginning of my childhood favorite movie, Rockadoodle:

Three people were manning the shovel, filling the bags, and dropping them off to be carried. Four other people were lining up the bags along a concrete ledge to make a 10″ wall to block the water. We ran out of IKEA and grocery bags quickly so we had to resort to trashbags. After we created a decent wall, we had to slosh the water out from by my neighbors door (it was about two feet high at the time) with buckets. At the end, 12 of us were drenched and covered in mud.

In true Brooklyn style, we finished the party and passed out just before Irene really came to crash at 6am.