Runners Embrace a Chance to Help Residents Recover

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times 10133710A
Would-be marathon participants volunteered Sunday in the storm-ravaged Cedar Grove section of Staten Island.

By JULIET MACUR and STEVE EDER
Published: November 4, 2012

If the New York City Marathon had not been canceled because of Hurricane Sandy last week, Michelle Leichtling would not have found herself in a grief-stricken neighborhood on Staten Island on Sunday, trying to salvage a stranger’s soaking-wet wedding album.


Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Runners transported supplies on the Staten Island Ferry. Many said that canceling the marathon was the right decision.

Instead, she would have been standing at the finish line in Central Park, just as she did last year, handing out medals to hundreds of runners as they joyously accomplished their 26.2-mile goal.

As it turned out, Leichtling would not have had it any other way.

“It’s an incredibly emotional experience to hand out the medals because finishing a marathon is such an amazing personal victory,” said Leichtling, the director of programming at a Jewish community organization in Manhattan.

“But this?” she said as she slipped a 1980 photo of a beaming bride from an album slick with moisture. “It does not get more personal than this. I’m glad there was no marathon. This is exactly where we were supposed to be today.”

Leichtling was one of thousands of marathon volunteers and runners who dedicated their Sunday to helping families whose houses were damaged or destroyed by the hurricane.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg canceled the marathon Friday afternoon amid a growing outcry against the race. Critics had said holding the marathon would be insensitive and a waste of city resources because millions in the area were still struggling.

“When the mayor first said the marathon would go on, we were still rescuing people, we were still finding bodies,” said State Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis, whose district includes the eastern shore of Staten Island, among the areas hardest hit. “I’m happy that the mayor came to his senses. And it’s tremendous that marathoners have decided to come help us. We need it so badly.”

At the same time that more than 47,000 runners were supposed to start the marathon on Staten Island on Sunday morning, an army of would-be runners from all over the world streamed onto the Staten Island Ferry, carrying backpacks and rolling luggage stuffed to the seams with food, water, diapers, pet food and other goods. One dragged a 30-inch suitcase weighed down with at least 75 pounds of clothing, batteries and snacks.

Some wore their marathon bib numbers. Many wore their orange long-sleeve T-shirts they received from race organizers.

“I wasn’t comfortable running the marathon while people were still suffering right here in the city,” said Neil Grencer, a high school math teacher from Poughkeepsie who was pushing a double stroller loaded with clothes, toiletries and food. “If they didn’t cancel the race, I would’ve thought they were crazy. Even before they did, I just knew I had to do something to help.”

Jes Milberg-Haydu, a Harlem resident, had looked forward to running her first marathon. But as soon as she saw what the residents were dealing with, she quickly realized that holding the marathon would have been a mistake.

Along Cedar Grove Avenue on Staten Island, she saw homes torn apart, cars tossed into front yards and mountains of garbage.

“It was the right decision to cancel, as it was the right decision to come together this way to help,” she said.

David Walton, whose wife was among the marathoners, found himself on a bike with a backpack full of garbage bags and other supplies in New Dorp Beach. Though residents were gladly taking the bags, he said he felt helpless.

“We are giving trash bags to people who don’t have houses left,” Walton said.

But the residents were grateful, so much so that some were overcome with tears.

Most residents were vehemently against the city holding a race that would have commanded the presence of about 1,000 police officers and generators that could have been used in the many areas without power.

Melissa Kruppa, who was helping her friends clear debris from their home Sunday, said she was still taken aback by the thought of having a race in her borough.

“I’m sick that they would even consider having it,” she said.
“I feel for them,” she said of the runners, “but this is people’s lives.”
Some of the runners, many of whom ran from the ferry and back, headed toward Fox Beach. Their eyes grew wider with each step. Some power lines were down. Waterlogged cars were covered with muck. Boats were toppled in front yards.

In one field were the rooftops of several houses, sitting askew in the reeds. Among them was an entire deck, with a gas grill and a table still atop it, but the house it had been attached to was nowhere to be found.

The volunteers walked up and down streets and passed one home sitting in a field, about 250 feet from its foundation. They stepped over teddy bears buried in the mud and Mother’s Day cards set in the sun to dry. They rolled shopping carts filled with food and called out: “Hot soup! Water!”

Others got their hands dirty. One group of runners helped a couple, Maryann and Sebastian Battaglia, by tearing out the soaked wallboard and insulation from the first floor of their home. The volunteers also scrubbed their stairwells clean. The couple said that what the runners did for them saved them three or four days’ work.

Only later did the Battaglias learn that one volunteer was Bente Skari, a champion cross-country skier who won a gold medal at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Games. She had come from Norway to run her first marathon.

“That’s why she had such good stamina,” Maryann Battaglia said. “God bless her.”

Skari said she had volunteered with 50 others from her group from Scandinavia because “New York is so special.”

“I will return to run the marathon here,” she said. “But first, we are here to help.”

On nearby Fox Beach Road, three bodies were found after the waters receded, including a man and his 20-year-old son who were found in one another’s embrace.

“My God, the marathoners,” said one relative of the father and son who died, before pausing to control his emotions. He did not want to give his name, he said, because the shock of the deaths was simply too raw, and he did not want his relatives to see their names in the newspaper.

“What they’ve done here is overwhelming,” he said of the runners who volunteered. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

Several miles down the beach, less than a mile and a half from the marathon’s starting line, two young children, 4 and 2, were swept from their mother’s arms by a wave.

Jaclynn Larington, a kindergarten teacher from Manhattan, had heard those stories and other tales from Staten Island and could not imagine running the marathon, though she had trained for it for months.

So on Friday morning, she set up a Facebook page, calling for volunteers to help the storm victims. About 350 people ended up signing up to join her on Staten Island. Others were dispatched to Brooklyn and Queens.

By midday Sunday, Larington’s clothes were spattered with mud, as was a face mask she was wearing to keep dust out. In helping one family clean out its home and nearly everything in it that was waterlogged and broken, she came upon a new light switch cover still in its packaging. She couldn’t hold back her tears.

“I just lost it,” she said. “It reminded me that not long ago, these people were thinking about the future, thinking about improving their house and now all of it is gone. It makes worrying about the marathon sound ridiculous now.”

One group of runners was nervous about the reception they would get on Staten Island after the marathon had caused so much controversy.
But when they ran into one beach neighborhood, residents cheered them, honked their car horns at them and gave them a thumbs up.

“We had our marathon today,” said Ceresa DiTalia, a runner in that group. “But it was just more of an emotional one.”

Marathon Runners Embrace Chance to Help Storm-Stricken New Yorkers - NYTimes.com