“The water is coming. I have to go. I love you.”
Those were the final words Alyssa Stefanese ’15 heard before her mother hung up the phone.
“I just started crying. I could hear in her voice that something was wrong …” she says.
It would be 18 hours before Alyssa knew her parents were safe from Superstorm Sandy, when her uncle texted her a photo taken from her own bedroom window in their Staten Island home. She saw her entire neighborhood flooded with water as high as the stop sign below.
Her parents had found refuge upstairs, where they had stayed up all night. As their own couch floated against the ceiling, they reassured the family huddled on their roof next door that it would be all right. Rescuers evacuated them by boat the next day.
Staten Island was especially hard hit, accounting for half the deaths from Sandy in the New York City area.
“I never thought it would happen,” says Alyssa.
Despite the challenges her own family faces — and to repair their own home — Alyssa volunteered with a 19-member Livingston County CARES crew of students, alumni, college staff and community members to help alleviate other families’ heartache.
The group spent a week in a Staten Island community minutes away from Alyssa’s home, clearing debris and gutting homes. It is one of several ways members of the Geneseo family, including students and alumni, have assisted those affected by the storm.
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Chuck Reyes, Geneseo’s environmental health and safety director, didn’t expect the devastation the volunteers discovered. The New Dorp area where they worked is close to the shore. Debris was everywhere. Walls ripped off houses. Basements caved in. Signs of warning on unsafe homes. One woman he saw was sorting through waterlogged photos pulled from her home.
“That was her life. That was what was left,” says Chuck. “… It was horrendous. It wasn’t one or two houses. It was streets and streets of houses. It was gut-wrenching.”
Volunteers helped clear debris in yards and gut nine homes in the week, working with homeowners arranged through Bethel United Methodist Church of Staten Island. They bunked on sleeping pads at a Jewish Community Center, arranged by Alyssa.
Alyssa worked with Associate Dean of Leadership and Service Tom Matthews, who is also a board member of Livingston County CARES, to arrange the trip quickly.
CARES has a long tradition of helping families rebuild in the Biloxi, Miss., area after Hurricane Katrina. A day after the Staten Island crew returned to Geneseo in January, another group left for Biloxi for a week. More than 700 volunteers have participated in 26 trips since 2005. CARES wanted to help New York now, says Matthews. Because of Alyssa’s interest, Staten Island was the right area to work, he says.
Twenty-eight people have already signed up for the next Sandy work group in March. “It just speaks volumes about people’s interest in community service,” says Matthews.
“Experiences like these are an integral part of the liberal education we value at Geneseo,” says President Christopher C. Dahl, who has volunteered in Biloxi. “The Katrina and Sandy work trips are meaningful examples of how our college strives to make a difference. Alumni efforts carry on that tradition.”
Sandy crew members are proud Geneseo so often demonstrates that concern.
Trevor Ramsey-Macomber ’09 always had an intrinsic desire to help others. CARES and Geneseo gave him the outlets to do so. He participated in four Biloxi relief trips, which helped him decide to join the Peace Corps working in Micronesia.
Alumni identified their own niches to provide relief as well, including Mary Kate Tischler ’96, who co-founded the Sandy Can’t Steal Christmas group to provide gifts for families on Long Island. Lauren Redmond Rafferty ’01 and her family suffered heavy damage to their own Breezy Point home, but with active Sigma Delta Tau alumnae sisters raised more than $5,000 for victims. Firefighter Brian Malone ’05 responded in the storm with his Breezy Point crew.
Through his creation of Yummy Relief, New York City chef and caterer Joseph Yoon ’97 cooked or organized thousands of hot meals that he and volunteers served in hard-hit and under-served areas.
Before break, students also hosted a wing-eating contest and other fundraisers on campus.
Such dedication to community service and opportunities for leadership are “extremely important,” to her, says Alyssa. “That’s something that attracted me to Geneseo.”
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During the Staten Island trip, volunteers met and often worked with homeowners, like Rocco, who left his home in Pennsylvania to help his mother with hers, which had completely flooded. The storm had swept chest-high piles of debris, a shed and someone else’s roof in the yard.
Chuck and the volunteers worked to clean and to remove the shed.
“Rocco’s phone never stopped ringing,” remembers Chuck. “He was helping so many different people. There’s a hero right there.”
The connections volunteers say they made with homeowners they helped — and the remarkable bonds they found with each other — will stay with them, not the devastation.
“The things you build or deconstruct are nothing at the end of the day without the people behind them,” says Trevor. “That is the eternal part of the work we do.”
Here lies the heart of their — and anyone’s efforts to assist others, says Alyssa and others.
Sandy caused some $33 billion in physical and economic loss. No one person or group is going to fix Staten Island or even the entire block Rocco lives on. But one person or group can and do make a huge difference in helping people.
With many hands, CARES volunteers completed work in two days what Rocco thought would take him two weeks, says Alyssa.
She knows how much such support and caring acts — large and small — mean. Immediately after the storm, rescuers searched for her parents. Her aunt and uncle took in their dogs. Her cousins invited them to stay in their home.
“Never underestimate the effort of one person or a group,” says Alyssa. “You make a huge difference to the person you are helping.”
• Learn more about Livingston County CARES.
— By Kris Dreessen
— Photos by Keith Walters '11