Narrative Essay Hurricane

Six years ago, my family and community were devastated by the uncut strength of mother nature. Superstorm Sandy, the storm of the century, decimated a large part of the Northeast Coast. My home was lucky enough to be a raised ranch where the main part of our home was on the second floor. But because I live less than a mile from the ocean, we were slammed with twelve feet of storm surge. It was enough to flood my entire basement with six feet of saltwater and was just one step away from submerging the main floor of my home. Knowing this and how many lives it affected, changed my perspective on hurricane damage. When I found my bicycle out in front of my house, I didn’t know if I would be prepared for how my basement would look. When I walked through my now decimated garage door, what I saw was soul sinking. My entire downstairs was put through a blender without a lid. Superstorm …show more content…
My life changed after that and I knew that. I wanted to help people avoid the aftermath of hurricane damage in some way because of all the heart-wrenching emotions I felt when I saw my home and community destroyed. Even though I was too naive to develop plans to mitigate the impacts of hurricanes, I wanted to do something, I assisted in the recovery efforts in my neighborhood. With the support from some of my fellow Boy Scouts, we helped gut and clear out several homes for folks that were not able to do it themselves.
Homes in my neighborhood are still not rebuilt to this day. We felt the pain that everyone went through. I wanted to do something to keep this level of damage from recurring. I wanted to design a solution so that no one else would need to have this great of loss when hurricanes strike. I needed to know more to be able to explore this problem and generate some ideas. I considered ways to keep back tidal flow but all of my ideas needed to be scaled up to stop powerful flood