Sandy, two years later

Two years later: Scenes from a storm

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Hurricane Sandy devastated much of the East Coast two years
ago this week. Out of the storm came heartbreak, homelessness, financial woes and instability. But it also showed us what we can do as individuals, as a community, and as a nation.

The wrath of Sandy
Very few people escaped the wrath of Hurricane Sandy as the unprecedented storm left a path of destruction in her wake, causing floods, fires, downed trees and massive power outages — damage on a scale that many people said they’ve never seen in their lifetime living on Long Island.

In the Village of East Rockaway, according to FEMA Individual Assistance data analyzed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1,073 housing units sustained damage. Of these, 1,056 were from flooding — 73 of which had more than four feet of flooding, 259 had one to four feet of flooding, 116 had less than one foot of flooding.
In Bay Park, 665 housing units — 83 percent of the community’s housing units — sustained damage. All in all, that’s 36 percent in the 11518. In the weeks following Sandy close to a third of the area’s homes were unoccupied.
Current estimates are that 10 percent of Bay Park’s residents are still not back home.


The aftermath
By Tuesday morning, firefighters were still answering calls for downed power lines and home water rescues. Dozens of trees had fallen across roads in East Rockaway, pulling power and telephone lines down with them.
Although the Village of Lynbrook wasn’t hit as hard as its neighbors in East Rockaway and Bay Park, there was plenty of damage throughout, including downed power lines, blown transformers, property damage and fallen traffic lights.
Matt Fay, a Lynbrook resident for the past 17 years, said Sandy was the worst storm he’s experienced. He added that multiple trees in his backyard came down due to heavy winds.
“We didn’t get much rain, but the wind was howling and it was pushing the trees back and forth incredibly,” he said. “Thank God the trees didn’t come down on the house.”

Heroes emerge from the storm
When East Rockaway resident Elizabeth Daitz, the daughter of a firefighter, heard the many calls for rescues on the night Hurricane Sandy came to town, she was moved to action.
“These guys are the real heroes,” she said of the members of the East Rockaway Fire Department. “They pulled people out of their houses, out of the water, all night long.” Before the Superstorm was over and in the days afterward, the department would respond to some 200 calls, and Daitz was accepting donations of food, clothing and supplies.