How Occupy Sandy's Relief Machine Stepped Into the Post-Superstorm Void

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But the work of volunteering is nowhere as difficult as the work of cleaning up for those who have lost everything. In Staten Island, where there are boats in the street, docked in parking lots next to porches, people are removing all of their possessions from their houses because of mold and piling their things up on the curb. Gaetano Santo, an Occupy Sandy organizer who helped set up a recovery center there, said the relief effort is in the early stages.

"I think there's a lot of need just getting supplies to people and knowing what people actually need," he said. "So many people are holed up in their houses that canvassing is going to be really crucial now. And because people are holed up, it's hard to really get to them. We took cars out from a church that was helping out and we took all this food from there and drove around honking the horn and yelling out the window that we have food and clothes and water. But it's only so effective. If you actually know what's needed in an area, you can be really useful."

This task is made even more challenging for volunteers with the electricity on Staten Island still down and cell-phone communication nearly impossible in the hardest-hit places, where the recovery effort is still in the early phases. Occupy Sandy estimates that thousands of volunteers will hit the streets this weekend, canvassing, cooking warm meals, pumping basements, and beginning the slow and painful process of gutting houses before they can be rebuilt. As the group becomes more organized, fast-paced relief work will transition into long-term reconstruction, a prospect that many volunteers, for now, seem to welcome.