“In a matter of hours, we transformed from a small youth development center into a major hub for the disaster relief effort here,” said Eisenhard of The Red Hook Initiative. “The number of people volunteering their time and donating food and supplies has been unbelievable to see.”

Including one contingent that has been making itself known throughout the many poor neighborhoods affected by the storm: Occupy Wall Street. Volunteers organized by the movement under the moniker Occupy Sandy arrived on bicycles, asking if they could set up a kitchen on R.H.I.'s premises.

“They threw it together and started putting up hot meals right away,” said Eisenhard. “We know how to reach a lot of people and businesses in the area. But we don’t have the skills to put a kitchen up that fast.”

As Chloe Cockburn, a civil rights lawyer with ties to Occupy, put it: “What we build last fall in Zuccotti Park has been put to use and come alive here.”

Photo by RDeLetto via Flickr

Beginning Tuesday afternoon, a team of over a dozen Occupy organizers, working in collaboration with RHI staff, has helped provide two hot meals each day to around 1,000 people. For support, they’ve drawn on an extensive network of volunteers through the website interoccupy.net, and established a distribution hub at St. Jacobi Church in Sunset Park, where thousands of pounds of donated clothes and supplies have poured in.

As of Saturday morning, only three of the development’s 30 buildings had power, according to a spokesperson for the New York City Housing Authority. Another update is expected later today.

While around 80 percent of those who lost electricity citywide during the storm have seen their power restored, according to a statement released by Con Edison on Sunday, residents of the Red Hook Houses worry that they may not see power restored for another week or more. At issue is the repair of the buildings' own electrical systems, which could take a while even though the underlying Con Edison grid is restored beneath it.

The condition in the Red Hook Houses, as with project developments in flooded areas across the system managed by the New York City Housing Authority, has been an intense focus of the local media. It's used sometimes as a parable of the disparate effects of the storm on rich and poor. And the whole system has been roped together in several articles describing fear and crime in the projects in the wake of the storm.

What’s resulted is a kind of sanctuary of altruism and mutual aid, even as rumors spread of robberies and vandalism inside the darkened buildings.

“I think many in the Red Hook community feel geographically and psychologically disconnected from the city,” said Carlos Menchaca, an aide to speaker Christine Quinn who has been conducting community outreach in Red Hook since Wednesday. “But over the last few days, with the coordinated support from the immediate surroundings like Park Slope and Carroll Gardens, that hasn’t been the case at all.”