Breezy Point, Battered Seaside Haven, Recalls Its Trial by Fire

On the night Hurricane Sandy hit, two dozen members of the Point Breeze Volunteer Fire Department congregated in their snug firehouse in Breezy Point, Queens, not far from Jamaica Bay. It is a compact colony of 2,837 homes that undulates along the western tip of the Rockaway Peninsula, cradled between the bay and the Atlantic Ocean.

About 6:30 p.m., two turkeys beckoned on the table. The crew members barely savored a swallow when water lashed at their knees. Forsaking dinner, they scattered to the Clubhouse, a humble community center behind the firehouse that was several feet higher. A few residents had found sanctuary there. Homes were flooding and being hacked apart. The Sugar Bowl, a favorite bar, disappeared. Before long, water infiltrated the Clubhouse.

Through the windows, the firefighters glimpsed the orange glow of a fire in the dark maw of the night. There was little rain. The water was four feet deep, bearing waves and wicked currents. “It was like the ocean was outside,” said Kevin Hernandez, 21, another volunteer firefighter. “The wind was 80 miles an hour.”

It was impossible to reach the fire. They stared at the very menace they were committed to conquering, watching it strengthen, and could do nothing. On a night not meant for humankind, they could not help but wonder if they stood on death’s doorstep.

It was about then that they began praying.

Among the many cruelties delivered by Hurricane Sandy, the Breezy Point fire has inscribed itself as one of the storm’s hellish signatures. Ranking with the worst residential fires in New York City’s history, it burned down 126 homes and damaged 22 more, leaving a conspicuous hole in the heart of this genial shore community. The storm hit Oct. 29 and about two months later, the neighborhood remains a cindery reminder of what it had once been.

In all, the New York City Fire Department counted 94 fires related to the storm. Nothing, though, approached the monster that visited Breezy Point. The Fire Department has not yet finished its investigation into the blaze. However, Robert Byrnes, the chief fire marshal, said that it had concluded that floodwaters caused something electrical, like a socket or breaker panel, to short and ignite inside the unoccupied house at 173 Ocean Avenue, random as the spin of a wheel.

Breezy Point’s residents know grief, 30 people connected to the community having perished in the Sept. 11 attacks. Yet the miracle of the torrid fire is that no one died or was seriously injured. The fire chose property and spared life.

A Threatening Light

The man unnervingly close to its origin, who saw it all, had been sleeping. Glenn Serafin, 62, is a media broker who lives in Tampa, Fla. But an 80th birthday party for his aunt in Totowa, N.J., on the Saturday before the storm, brought him north. After the party he and his wife, Josephine, drove to the two-story clapboard house they have owned for nine years in Breezy Point.

It stood on Atlantic Walk in the area known as the Wedge, implying its tapered shape, where houses practically overlap. Streets do not exist in the Wedge, only sidewalks and sand alleys for sanitation trucks and emergency vehicles. Those who live there leave their cars in common parking lots and transport their belongings in little wagons.

Long nicknamed the Irish Riviera, even as its population has become more ethnically diverse, Breezy Point is predominantly middle class and working class, home to numerous firefighters and police officers. Houses, some newer ones that stand with a certain hauteur and older ones dating back 70 or 80 years, are often passed down generations. It is a gated community, with its own security force, and residents belong to a cooperative association that owns the land. Originally the neighborhood was a summer retreat, but now its full-time population has swelled to over 60 percent. Not everyone holds flood insurance.

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Aleppo Residents, Battered by War, Struggle to Survive

The playground outside had been hit by a Syrian Air Force airstrike, which fractured the school’s walls. Now the children were smashing the furniture, prying off wooden desktops and bench seats, rushing away with what they could.

The Isam al-Nadri School for Boys was being dismantled for the firewood it contained. One sixth grader, Ahmed, clutching the kindling he had made by ransacking a room, offered an irreducible argument for looting his own school. “I want heat,” he said.

Winter is descending on Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and the bloodied stage for an urban battle, now running into its sixth month, between rebels and the military of President Bashar al-Assad.

As temperatures drop and the weakened government’s artillery thunders on, Aleppo is administered by no one and slipping into disaster. Front-line neighborhoods are rubble. Most of the city’s districts have had no electricity and little water for weeks. All of Aleppo suffers from shortages of oil, food, medicine, doctors and gas.

Diseases are spreading. Parks and courtyards are being defoliated for firewood, turning streets once lined with trees into avenues bordered by stumps. Months’ worth of trash is piled high, often beside bread lines where hundreds of people wait for a meager stack of loaves.

One of the Middle East’s beautiful and historic cities is being forced by scarcity and violence into a bitter new shape. Overlaying it all is a mix of fatigue and distrust, the sentiments of a population divided in multiple ways.

Aleppo’s citizens scavenge and seethe. And along with the sectarian passions of civil war, some residents express yearnings for starkly opposite visions of the future: either for a return of the relative stability of the Assad government or for the promises of Islamic rule.

Others see a grim hope, calling the tearing apart of their society a period that one day will be remembered as this ancient city’s ultimate test.

“We left high salaries, we left our jobs, we left our rank in society,” said Dr. Ammar Diar Bakerly, who directs medical care in the city’s rebel-held east. “We left everything to get our dignity. This is the price we have to pay, and it is a cheap price to get our freedom from the tyrant.”

Not everyone shares these revolutionary views. “We come every morning to the clinic asking for medicine, but they don’t offer any,” said Johair Iman Mustafa, a house painter and taxi driver with no work, who spotted a visitor and approached in a rage. “We go to the bakery for hours, but there is no bread and they kick us.”

“Before the revolution,” said Mr. Mustafa, a Sunni who had been no supporter of Mr. Assad’s Alawite-led government, “it was much better.”

Supplies Dwindle, Prices Rise

For most of Syria’s 21-month uprising, Aleppo, a commercial and government center built around its historic Old City, was spared the battles engulfing the country.

That changed in July when the Free Syrian Army, or F.S.A., as many rebels call themselves, entered Aleppo and opened urban fronts.

The government rushed in much-needed army units from elsewhere, turning to heavier weapons in a bid to retain control of a city that, if lost, would change Mr. Assad’s self-assured narrative. The war’s largest battle yet was joined.

Five months on, the government’s gambit has failed. Even with air support and artillery batteries firing relentlessly, Mr. Assad’s military has yielded ground. In roughly half the city, rebels move about openly.

From the outset, Aleppo’s population, its loyalties split, was stuck between forces. Disorganized rebel groups had started a battle they had little prospect to win swiftly. The army fought back in part with a collective-punishment model. Foreign fighters began to trickle in, stalking the front and talking of jihad.

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