Digging out Staten Island after Sandy My hand hit a hard object as I reached to clear a pile of storm debris from the driveway of a white house on Staten Island's Fox Lane. It was a little boy's piggy bank. The glass jar - decorated with stars, spaceships and the name "Daniel" in carefully written script - was intact. But the pennies saved up were missing, replaced by murky water. I wondered where Daniel was, said a quick prayer that he had survived then placed the piggy bank into one of the 80-some industrial-sized trash bags that we cleared from the driveway, filled with somebody's slipper, a broken window, pieces of the nearby boardwalk and plenty of driftwood. We stacked the black bags on the side of the road, next to piles of refrigerators, sofas, televisions, fish tanks and ruined family photos. Each of those piles was somebody's everything, waiting to be cleared away by the sanitation department. A five-minute walk from the beach, this New York neighbourhood was among the hardest hit last week as Hurricane Sandy battered the US east coast. The storm tore through the enclave. People who didn't evacuate died, my friend Larry explained as he drove a group of friends to volunteer at the scene. People who did lost most everything. We call Larry the "King of Staten Island." He proudly was born and raised in the New York borough, leaving only to study at the University in North Carolina, where we all met. Larry works in Manhattan but returned to live on Staten Island, and we visit for the pig roasts he hosts every summer. It wasn't until last Thursday night that my friends and I living in Manhattan learnt how devastated that storm had left Staten Island. Most of us live downtown - dubbed "SoPo" for "south of power" -- where electricity and mobile phone service largely had been knocked out after the storm hit. We were in survival mode. The streets were pitch black after dusk. One of my friends said that he'd seen the stars for the first time since moving to New York. Another warned that a man tried to follow her friend into her dark apartment building. By Saturday, the power was back on across most of Manhattan and my Instagram and Twitter feeds lit up with posts from the thousands of people in the city seeking to help with grass roots-organised Sandy relief efforts. My friend Britany knocked door-to-door in senior citizen apartment buildings to check on residents. Kyle organised the NYC Volunteerathon, a one-day push to match volunteers and runners in town for the cancelled New York City Marathon with local relief efforts. My colleagues volunteered in the Red Hook neighbourhood in Brooklyn Larry emailed on Saturday afternoon, reporting that he was OK but that many Staten Island residents needed help. When he met us at the ferry terminal Sunday morning, he described a scene most of us had seen on the news but never expect will happen to us. He found a fish flopping around a flooded living room, waited in line for hours to fill up his car tank with gas and bought the 96 tacos left at a Taco Bell for people who had nothing. By the time we arrived in the storm-torn neighbourhood where we helped clear debris for the day, a community group had organised a food and supply station. The Red Cross, Federal Emergency Management Agency and National Guard distributed supplies. Runners who had planned to run the marathon wore their race bibs and ran up and down the road, delivering bottled water, hamburgers, cups of soup. As we cleared pile after pile of debris from the driveway of the home on Fox Lane, the man who had lived there walked in and out of his home trying to salvage what he could.