From there, Sandy felt like “just a little windstorm, it seemed like nothing,” Romulo recalls. But television news showed the unfolding devastation, as the storm made landfall on Oct. 30. “We felt so helpless, not knowing what was happening” with the family’s home and business, a martial arts gym a few blocks from their house. When they got back to their property a few days after the storm, they found that the basement in their house had flooded; meanwhile, their gym had been filled with at least two meters of water.