Now that's the power of libraries!

Despite Ruin, Library Offers Books and Community

It was the little things, the sudden absence of everyday fixtures, that disoriented residents in the Rockaways in the days after the storm, as much as the loss of house and home. The traffic lights had gone dark. Where was one to get a prescription filled? And oh, what about books due at the library?

The Rockaways still look like ghost towns. But the community libraries are there — if only in the form of a bus, parked in front of the gutted, muddy Peninsula branch. Days after the storm laid waste to four Queens Borough Public Library branches in the Rockaways, a colorful mobile library bus has hummed just outside its former location on Rockaway Beach Boulevard, offering warmth, power outlets, emergency information and books.