School Board Prez Recalls Harrowing Night of Hurricane

At the height of Hurricane Sandy last week, Roy Lester and his wife, daughter and son were forced to the second floor of their Canals home, as a surge of water flooded their home. But what was frightening was yet to come.   

Three blocks away, a cluster of seven houses were engulfed in flames, with heavy black smoke and sparks seemingly aimed at the Lesters’ on Boyd Street.

“The way the wind shifted, it sent all the sparks and smoke toward us,” said Lester, who is president of the Long Beach Board of Education. “… If the house had caught fire, there would have been nowhere else to go.”

Previously, as bay water invaded their basement and first floor living room and kitchen, Lester used a sump pump that removes 100 gallons of water per minute. It was futile, he said. “My neighbor was using a 500 gallon pump and it did nothing,” he said.

Eventually, Sandy subsided and the floodwaters left his home, but that moment during the evening of Oct. 29 was as scary as it could get for the East End family. “My daughter who is trained in emergency management was in a panic,” Lester said.   Before the storm, at about 4 p.m., Lester noticed the bay water had already reached the top of his bulkhead on the canal in his backyard, and he knew a full moon was coming later that night. In preparation, Lester drove his Hyundai 4x4 atop his elevated front lawn, which is about eight-feet high, but it was destroyed along with the new washer, dryer, refrigerator and furnace that he had to purchase after the damage Hurricane Irene wrought last year.

The storm’s winds twisted his catamaran around his deck that was turned on its side on the canal. Late last week, days after the storm and after he and his family took up temporary residence at a relative’s home in Point Lookout, Lester was cleaning up his storm-ravaged home and tossing their belongings curbside, along with virtually all of his neighbors. The sight of his block was something else.

“I’ve never seen anything like this, where everyone is throwing everything out,” he said.