As hurricanes Harvey and Irma left Texas and Florida, they too left devastation behind. Dozens are dead, and untold billions of dollars lost. The roads to recovery will be steep — and they will be very long.

Hurricane recovery lingers beyond the first few months of hard work. Power is restored, homes are rebuilt and kids head back to school. But “normal” — life as it was before the storm — may never fully be reached. From New York City’s Open Data website, we downloaded the logs of over 36 million calls placed to 311 from the days ahead of Sandy’s arrival, in the fall of 2012, through today. Nearly 80,000 were directly related to the storm, and they tell the story of tragedy and recovery in one city. It’s a story that continues to unfold in New York, and one that is only beginning in Texas and Florida.2

Sandy hit New York on the evening of Oct. 29, and on that date, the city received 8,054 calls explicitly related to the storm. Over the next eight weeks, it received tens of thousands more.

Read the full article about hurricane recovery by Julia Wolfe and Oliver Roeder at FiveThirtyEight.