Sandy's Destruction: Random and Indiscriminate

Donna and I are staying the week in Loveladies, the next-to-northernmost town on Long Beach Island in New Jersey.  Everywhere on the island you hear the sounds of rebuilding: generators growling, radial saws whining, hammering.  Today we took a drive down to Holgate, at the southern end of the 18-mile-long island, to look at the effects of Sandy seven months after the storm.  Then we drove back and up to Barnegat Light on the north tip.

What struck us was the randomness of the devastation.  The southern half of the island, which is roughly bisected by the Route 72 causeway that spills mainland traffic onto the island, generally was hit harder by Sandy’s force.  In Holgate, particularly, where the island is only a few hundred yards wide, the destruction was widespread and massive.  Houses were ripped from their pilings.  Older homes, not built on pilings, were either simply washed away or battered by storm surge into uninhabitable rubble.  

Yet some homes very near disaster zones seem to have suffered relatively little damage.  On Harding Road, which traverses the single north-south boulevard in Holgate, an entire mobile-home park was destroyed, and next to it were the skeletons of what used to be houses.  Remarkably, next to some of the worst-damaged properties, there were structures that appeared to have been largely spared.

The same is true further north.  In Beach Haven, boarded-up businesses on the boulevard included Laundromats, restaurants, arcades, ice cream shops, souvenir shops and bars.   Meanwhile, other, more fortunate enterprises, were open and bore fresh paint.

Certainly, many of those businesses, as well as homes, benefitted from hundreds of construction crews that have been on the island since Governor Christie re-opened the island after the storm.  Still, today, on most streets, there is at least one construction crew, and in many cases, multiple crews working on multiple properties.  In some cases, the work is to replace lost siding or sheetrock or shingles.  But other crews are rebuilding sections of houses that were taken away, or gutting ruined interiors, or razing what little is left of someone’s home. 

A lot of the damage you can’t see from the car.  We pulled into Passaic Avenue in Harvey Cedars, where Donna’s family used to own a house, to see what was going on.  An oceanfront house stood with little damage that we could see; but a telltale log, about eight feet long and a foot in diameter, rested on the roof.  It’s hard to imagine how it got there without there being significant damage.  On that same street, where previously there was a large, switchback wooden path built from the street across the dunes to the beach, was gone.  We’re not sure if the structure was washed away or is buried under the tons of sand that Sandy pushed up from the ocean floor. 

There seems to be no pattern or logic to the destruction’s touch—it appears to be random and indiscriminate.  Why this house and not that?  Why that street, or block, or town, and not another?

Whatever the reason, the people of Long Beach Island are unbowed.  In Harvey Cedars, the proprietors of Neptune Market changed their policy of closing for the winter and remained open to serve the construction workers who were rebuilding the island.  And in Holgate, where we stopped to survey what was left of the dunes and beach there (very little), a crew was working on an oceanfront house that had sustained heavy structural damage.  A shirtless man was in front of the house fishing.  As he reeled in a six-inch grouper, the workers stopped to razz him for catching such a small fish.  “Hey, it’s something,” he said.