This is an article I wrote after Hurricane Sandy hit New York. I interviewed families all over Long Island to create this powerful piece.
On the night of October 29th, Hurricane Sandy hit Long Island, New York, causing devastating damage to many people and their homes. NASA states that while most hurricanes are tropical cyclones, Hurricane Sandy became an extra tropical cyclone when it moved north and combined with contrasting weather temperatures, which made Sandy so destructive. According to Post Media News, within the first few hours, the hurricane caused a 9-ft. storm surge to rise up and sweep through New York. The storm destroyed thousands of homes on the coastal regions of the Atlantic Ocean, and caused major flooding, especially in Long Island. These are the stories of Donna Healy, Carrie Rosano, and Ron Daly whose homes were affected by this horrific storm.
Donna Healy is a wife and working mother of two daughters. The block in North Massapequa, Long Island that Healy lives on is considered a floodplain, which means that the land is lower and adjacent to the ocean. Her house is an expanded cape and is half a block away from a canal and several blocks away from the bay in Massapequa.
At first Healy and her husband were not going to prepare for the storm since 2011’s Hurricane Irene caused no damage to their home. Yet by early morning, Hurricane Sandy, had already caused them to lose their power. Nervous, they started to move upstairs whatever small furniture they could physically carry.
Just to be safe, Healy sent her two daughters to her sister in-law’s house because she lives the farthest from the water in Massapequa. She and her husband relocated to her parents’ house a few blocks away to utilize their power and to comfort her parents during the storm.
Like Healy, Carrie Rosano, a married, working mother of two daughters ages nine and eleven, also resides on the South Shore of Long Island. Her home in Oceanside is located five blocks away from the Middle Bay. Typical of split-level homes, there is no basement and the family room is the lowest level, existing partially below and above ground. This construction makes Rosano’s home particularly vulnerable to flooding.
Rosano and her husband did not think they needed to prepare for Sandy. “Last year when Hurricane Irene came they told us to evacuate and made a big deal about it. As it turned out, we didn’t lose power and we didn’t have any flooding in my house,” Rosano said.
Ron Daly, 42 years old, and 6’2 ft. tall is a New York City fire fighter and father of four. He lives in a cape home in South Wantagh, Long Island. Although the structure of a cape home isn’t vulnerable to flooding, his home’s close proximity to the East Bay makes water damage a constant threat.
He was also expecting the hurricane to be similar to Hurricane Irene, which only flooded the crawl space underneath his home. Still as a precaution, the morning of October 29th he sent his children and wife to his brother’s house in the safer, centrally located town of East Meadow. In an effort to try and protect his home, Daly and his father remained behind.
At about 7:00 PM the water was up to Daly’s waist. The water was coming into the house faster than he and his father could pump it out. Realizing he had to get his dad to safety, he walked him to his parked truck several blocks away, where the water levels were lower.
As he was walking back to the house, the water level in the street was rapidly rising. He remained in his house for about 15 minutes, moving some of his things to the second floor, until he realized “there was nothing here worth staying for to lose a life over.” He swam out of the house for a block until the water recessed and he could comfortably walk to meet his father. “The water was cold. It wasn’t like a pool – it was actually rushing water.” They managed to drive the truck to his brother’s house and reunite with his family. This experience did not frighten firefighter Daly because “it is what I do for a living – I’m used to coming to help people in bad situations.”
Around 8:00 PM, during the hurricane, Donna Healy looked over the railing towards the first floor at her parents’ house and saw the water coming up the stairs. “At one point I said ‘We have to make a decision when we are going to leave here.’” She started to think of ways to escape the water; she asked her father if he had life preservers in the house, but he did not. She then proposed an idea of going on the roof, but her father explained that once the tide goes down the water would as well. Luckily, he was right. Healy recalled, “To think that ‘oh my God what if we have to get out of here. I don’t know how we’re going to do this.’ It was a very frightening experience.”
Sandy was still going strong by 8:30 PM. Carrie Rosano and her family were staying on the third level of their home to stay safe and away from the water. They walked downstairs towards the family room and saw their couch floating. The water was getting closer to the steps that led to the first floor. Rosano started to feel helpless. “I was ready to go to sleep at that point. There was nothing I could do but go to bed. I knew I wasn’t going to die, but I was thinking ‘oh my God what the hell am I going to do tomorrow.’” They went back to the third floor and looked out the window. “We saw every car on our block completely submerged under water. It was the most surreal thing I have ever seen in my life. It was just unbelievable,” she said.
When Donna Healy woke up in the morning, the water was gone from her parents’ house. All of the furniture in the home was displaced around the first floor because it had been submerged the night before. “At that point, my husband and I knew we had to get to our house to see what happened. We were still hopeful that we were going to be okay,” she said.
As they walked the quarter of a mile to her house through streets that were still flooded, they saw almost all of the houses damaged. When they arrived, Healy was shocked. “You didn’t even have to open the door. You knew that it wasn’t going to be good because you could see the water lines on the outside of the house,” Healy said. When she walked inside, her house no longer felt like her home she saw her destroyed belongings and smelled the putrid scent of the water from the bay. “There was a muddy residue on the floor. You could see the molding was starting to come off the walls. Any area that was carpeted was completely saturated. It was heartbreaking,” she said. Her husband’s mother, who was not affected by the storm, came to pick them up and bring them to her house since they could not bear to look anymore at their shattered home.
Two days later, she and her husband went back and started the long process of cleaning up. Healy was distraught when she was going through the damages. She said, “I’m done crying. When I was cleaning everything up, it was very tough for me. At least 80 percent of my Christmas decorations were ruined. In order to keep my kids from worrying, I had to act normal.”
Her entire first floor was flooded with about three feet of water. The walls and flooring had to be completely taken out because they started to grow mold. Luckily, Healy’s neighbor is a contractor so after cleaning up the house she hired him to redo the downstairs.
Her parents also have to redo the entire downstairs. Fortunately, they have a Hi-Ranch so the downstairs of their home is only a den and a laundry room. They can comfortably live in the upstairs part of their home, which has a kitchen, bathroom and bedroom.
Healy is living at her mother in-law’s home with her husband and daughters, until her construction is finished in April. Although grateful to have family she can stay with who were not affected by flooding, Healy does not feel as comfortable as she did before the storm. Describing how stressful her daily life has become she said, “It’s the little things that will trigger you off for it to become overwhelming. I couldn’t find my kids soap for the bath and I had a breakdown because it’s the simplest thing that you can’t get together.”
In the morning, Carrie Rosano woke up to see the first floor full of mud and slush and the family room still full of water. She and her husband borrowed pumps from their neighbors to remove the water. Rosano walked outside to see almost all of the houses on her block damaged. “It was just like ‘oh my God.’ The houses were just demolished,” she said.
The next two days Rosano and her family spent cleaning her home. She could not get in contact with anyone because there was no phone service and she was unable to leave Oceanside because both family cars were flooded. Rosano and her husband started to take out the carpeting on the first floor and family room. They also took out up to four feet of the sheet rock on the walls in order to prevent mold in the house. Everything that was in her family room was destroyed such as her furniture, washing machine, TV, fish tank, pictures, and decorations. “The more I was thinking about it I was like ‘wow the only picture I had of my father’s bar mitzvah is ruined.’ If I dwelled on it I would probably cry but because I had to go to work and I had to keep moving forward I can’t let myself fall apart,” said Rosano.
After two days, a friend of Rosano’s drove to her house because she was concerned when she did not hear from her. Her friend’s car was not damaged from the hurricane and she was able to drive Rosano and her family to an area with phone service and to a car rental company.
Later that day, after getting in contact with her parents she brought them to live in the upstairs part of her house. Since her parents were also affected by the storm, they decided to stay together in one house than to be separated in two damaged homes. “It was just better for us all to be together. I could take better care of my parents if they’re with us,” she said.
Rosano decided to stay in her home instead of moving into a hotel or staying with family, like many other people on Long Island are doing. The bedrooms on the second level were not affected and she had friends that lived close to her that offered her meals and hot water for showers. Her extended family lives in New Jersey, and if she left to stay with them she would not be able to clean and meet with insurance agents. “To leave the house just didn’t make sense. There’s just too much to do,” Rosano said.
About two weeks after Sandy the company Servpro, came to her home to professionally clean the mold that formed and used blowers to dry out the house. Four feet of the sheet rock on the wall and the flooring on the first floor had to be taken out because of mold that started to form. Her family room has to be completely redone because of all the damage.
Rosano is waiting to see how much her insurance is going to give her. She said, “No matter what I am going to have to fix my house whether they give me a dollar or a hundred thousand dollars. Waiting for that is upsetting.”
The morning after Sandy, Ron Daly went back to his house. “My first impression was like ‘wow look at the damage that this storm did.’ It was shocking.” Daly’s immediate thought was to move with his family back to Queens where he grew up. But after presenting the idea to his children they decided against moving because they were raised in Wantagh.
For the next two weeks, Daly took his vacation hours from work and spent them cleaning up the house. Since the flooding moved the structure of Daly’s home, he believes he will have to knock it down because it is unsafe. If he has to rebuild, he will make house higher off the ground to prevent future floods. He’ll handle most of the construction himself, but the larger jobs will need to be handled by a professional company. Since the construction will have to wait until the Winter passes, he and his family are going to live in his brother’s basement for now.
The damages of Hurricane Sandy surprised many people that live near the water and did not expect the storm to be so powerful. “It’s like being defeated. There’s definitely something out there stronger than all of us, that’s for sure,” Daly said. Many ideas have been proposed in order to protect people from future powerful natural disasters. Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University, told NBC News that as we rebuild New York, developers should be cautious of the rising sea levels in the location while they are reconstructing. According to Rosenzweig, what needs to be done in the near future is "…fixing the subways where they're vulnerable, fixing our sea walls, remaking our wetlands so that we can, across our whole region and for all our 21-and-a-half million people, protect against the next Hurricane Sandy.”
