Editor's Notebook: Long Beach, Post Hurricane Sandy

By Joseph Kellard

The Long Beach Beach Patrol station being lifted and knocked into the boardwalk was the signature image of Hurricane Irene in August 2011.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy on Tuesday, not a trace of the structure was left.  

As I drove around Long Beach on Tuesday morning, this was one of the many outstanding scenes I came across.

Others included four neighboring homes destroyed by fire in the Canals, sections of the boardwalk on Park Avenue six blocks away, and cars clustered together on many side streets throughout town.  

 I talked to the National Guard and a State Trooper on Oceanview and Michigan in the West End, where the dunes were wiped away and sat in mounds on these streets.   

“They are concerned with the second coming of high tide tonight,” the trooper told me when I asked what residents were telling him.  

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While on West Beech Street, Donald and Christina Federlin of Georgia Avenue hitched a ride from me. They heard that the 7-Eleven on Long Beach Boulevard was the only store open in town.  

“The storm surge looked like we had the Mississippi River running down Georgia Avenue,” Donald said. “We had about four feet of water rolling down the street.”  

The couple lives on the second floor of a home on the beach, where the dunes were washed away.

They said their neighbors’' basements were all flooded and cars damaged. They had parked their vehicles at the Rockville Centre train station the night before.  

“I don’t believe in taking chances,” Christine said.  

When I asked Donald how Sandy compared to Irene, he said there is no comparison.

“Irene was like a thunderstorm compared to this,” he said.   

When I drove to the Canals on the other side of town, I came across four adjacent homes, at Farrell Street and Barnes Street, each devastated by fire Monday night.

Bob O’Conner, a resident of Armour Street at East Pine Street, was one of the spectators taking photos at the scene. 

“We could see the flames up in the air,” he told about Monday night’s blaze.  

O’Conner lost power, and with it his phone service, so he was walking over to his brother’s house on Curley Street. He estimated there was eight feet of water in his basement, after Sandy forced about 10 feet of bay water onto his street. 

“It stayed for about an hour and went down inch by inch,” he said.  

O’Conner said he was going to his brother’s house to figure at what they were going to do in the wake of the storm.  

“We’re all still in a little bit of shock,” he said. “I’ve been down here since the mid-1970’s; I’ve never seen water like this.”