Everything is back up and running here in the middle of nowhere Virginia after this storm caused a bunch of snow and wind here. Thankfully I didn't have much in the freezer, so it wasn't much of a loss to toss after the power was out 2 and a half days.

Things could have been much worse like up north or near the coast.

Just yesterday I told my girlfriend that I was regaining my confidence in the intelligence of the human species because nobody had tried to link Sandy to these silly doomsday theories.

Oh well ... ;)

From what I heard of others, the people who do have power (either through access to the power net, or through a working generator) are often very generous, and let others charge their mobiles.

That is very comforting to hear since these people don't have phones to call for help and charging their cellphones definitely will go a long way to keeping them safe. The trauma of facing those floods and being cut off from civilization can definitely be made worse if they can't at least communicate with family, so this is good to hear.

With anything in this scale, especially the people who had to stay in their homes uncertain of making it through the night, the children would definitely be profoundly affected. Are there any emergency response systems for preventing/treating PTSD in victims of traumatic events? I assume it would be much cheaper for society to help these kids now rather than 10 or 20 years down the line. :/

I fucked up.

Look at it this way people from the East Coast, you get hurricanes and storms that may wreck power homes, but they are rebuildable while here in Southern Califronia the major disaster we have to worry about is a massive earthquake that would theoreticaly split off California from the rest of the US. If that happened we would be screwed indefitently.

In NJ I am near a place hit bad. I am at dad's work typing this because we lost power since Sunday night

Not really but as you get older, life gets stranger and more ironic so I never know what to expect. XD
Ha! But it does fit in with the movie "2012" XD

Smart phone. Charge the phone in the car, and the middle school is set up as a shelter.

Our house is fine, but we've had no power since the Hurricane hit last week.
Spent time at a friends place for a few days, now I'm back home but still
without power. Wife's uncle has power (I'm there now), luckily he's only 5
minutes away. They're doing odd/even days for gas, spent a couple hours waiting
today at two different gas stations (first one ran out of gas, got lucky at the
second).

This really sucks, but I see people going through much MUCH worse in the
surrounding towns. Alot of houses with nothing but wet furniture & boxes of
stuff pushed out to the curb. A few houses destroyed, some towns still without
power. I dropped off a bunch of toddler clothes that my kids have outgrown to a
local donation center.

This is all so surreal.

Those that lost power or saw the devastation (or had stuff devastated) WILL never forget. The Jersey Short WILL BE REBUILT because that is where the tourism in NJ is