Five long years after Sandy

There were many individual stories of tragedy and rescue, both from our residents and our own members.”

Steve Torborg, East Rockaway Fire Department

Standing in her new, unfinished Bay Park home, Debra Orena said she was eagerly anticipating the holiday season, so that she can celebrate at her old address for the first time since Hurricane Sandy.

“Oh, I’m going to have a big party,” Orena said, her voice stark against bare wood paneling. “I really am. There’s going to be a big party.”

Orena has been working — and fighting — to build a new home ever since her bungalow on Lawrence Street was damaged by Sandy. Fierce winds knocked her house off its foundation, and it was flooded with four feet of water and sewage from the nearby Bay Park Sewage Treatment Plant.

After a three-year wait for approval from the Town of Hempstead’s Building Department, her house was razed in April 2016. Last December, Orena angrily flipped through a thick folder filled with drawings, construction plans, permits, her letters to the Town of Hempstead and a list of officials’ objections to her building plans, as she told the Herald that she continued to pay taxes on a vacant plot of land where her home once stood. Now, she is hoping to put that frustration behind her.

After her house was bulldozed, Orena said, she had to persuade the department to approve her plans for a new home. The project was eventually green-lighted on Jan. 31, and construction began in May. She has been living in a home that a friend rented to her for the past five years.

Her home, she said, is eight feet higher and 800 square feet larger than her original house. It will cost about $250,000, and $110,000 was covered by the Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery. To make up the difference, Orena said, she used the money she was saving for retirement.

“I want to go in my backyard,” she said. “I want to be in what belongs to me. I worked very hard for this, and this is mine. This is my retirement right now.”

Orena, who filed her first set of plans in November 2012, said she was looking forward to having her children over for Sunday dinner again. “My house was perfect before,” she said. “This is better. … I just can’t wait to unpack. There are things I haven’t seen in five years.”

Lessons from Sandy

Hitting the South Shore on Oct. 29, 2012, Sandy wreaked havoc on many areas, including the sewage treatment plant and the East Rockaway Junior-Senior High School. The devastation resulted in changes for both buildings.

There was infrastructure damage at the plant, and homes were flooded with sewage. During the storm, the plant could not treat effluent.

Among the many revisions to the plant was a $12.5 million project to replace settling tanks and mechanical equipment that were submerged during Sandy, according to Mary Studdert, the Nassau County Department of Public Works spokeswoman.

In addition, substations, that provide power to the plant, were replaced with new, elevated substations that are above the 500-year flood plain. A berm and floodwall system, completed in June, now protects the entire facility, and 27 repaired pump stations transport wastewater to the plant. “We still have several more projects in design,” Studdert said, “to be bid and begin construction later this year and next year.”

Improvements are also being made to the high school, which was flooded by water from Mill River during Sandy, causing $12 million in damage. The students were displaced for six months, and attended the Baldwin School District.

On June 30, 2016, the Federal Emergency Management Agency awarded nearly $4.5 million to the district for Sandy-related repairs and mitigation work. “There are a number of measures that we are going to be putting in place that will protect the building from further damage,” said Superintendent Lisa Ruiz, who was not with the district during Sandy.

Jacqueline Scrio, the assistant superintendent for finance and operations, said that bidding for mitigation projects opened on Oct. 19. The district received bids for the installation of sump pumps, backflow preventers, a generator, interior and exterior masonry protective coatings, the anchoring of fuel tanks and the replacement of unit ventilators, which are being reviewed by its architect. Scrio noted that there were no bids for flood doors or flood planks, but they will be rebid in the future.

Scrio said she plans to make recommendations to the Board of Education at its Nov. 21 meeting, and the projects will likely start next spring or summer. District funds will also cover work to stabilize the high school fields and prevent further erosion.

Reflecting on a resilient community

“There were many individual stories of tragedy and rescue,” said Steve Torborg, who was the chief of the East Rockaway Fire Department when Sandy struck, “both from our residents and our own members.”

Torborg recalled that flooding forced the firefighters to relocate from Main Street to their headquarters on Atlantic Avenue, and eventually to Village Hall, as they fielded a record number of emergency calls. “Through that first night, our department responded to almost 100 alarms — about one-tenth of the normal alarms in a full year,” Torborg said. “Members used their personal boats and waded chest-deep through rising waters in pitch darkness to get to those who, like myself, never imagined it might be that bad.”

Grass-roots efforts and “unprecedented acts of kindness” helped many people survive the storm, Torborg said. He recalled that East Rockaway resident Elizabeth Daitz spearheaded one of the efforts, which ended up attracting donations from places like Michigan and the Carolinas.

Torborg said that Daitz, other residents and members of the Auxiliary Police Department helped spread the word to make the firehouse a distribution center. They collected so many items — water, toiletries, non-perishable foods, and blankets — that they helped supply other places, including Island Park and Long Beach.

“Reflecting back on the storm, I think about a community that took care of one another, that prayed for one another, that gave so much,” Daitz said. “I think about the pain and disbelief and the cold, overcome by selflessness and sharing.”

The storm was just the beginning for some people, with many still struggling — waiting to move back home, dealing with contractors who ran off with their money or trying to get their homes raised five years later. Some South Shore residents have seen significant increases in their property taxes after having their homes raised.

Daitz said that there was no true aftermath to Sandy because the consequences of the storm are still ongoing. “The time invested in the paperwork, in trips back and forth to the Building Department, that’s time people will never get back,” she said. “I can only hope that the beauty of the Bay Park and East Rockaway community, the spirit and the soul, as well as the beautiful new homes, begin to make up for what was lost.”