6 years after Sandy, stories of the storm have new chapters ‘WE’LL TAKE CARE OF IT’
NEW YORK >> A community where residents rallied with surfboards and kayaks to rescue neighbors from flood and fire. A survival story in a suburban garage. A religious statue that stood firm while its surroundings were leveled.
Superstorm Sandy roared into the nation’s most populous metropolitan area six years ago Monday. When it was all over, the meteorological monster created by a former hurricane merging with other weather systems had left at least 182 people dead from the Caribbean to the Northeast and a trail of tens of billions of dollars in damage.
It also left stories and images of resilience, resolve and humanity.
The Associated Press revisited some of those stories and explored the new chapters added since the storm. basements — and homes, too.
But the community’s cohesion survived, says Tommy Woods, who used his surfboard and a kayak to rescue his family and over 25 neighbors as his own home burned. Woods, a fire lieutenant, was awarded a medal for his offduty actions that night.
Despite Belle Harbor’s ordeal, he didn’t hesitate to rebuild and return.
“The people are wonderful,” he explains.
Six years later, most residents have stayed. Homes have been restored, and Sandy led to a new ferry service and a rebuilt boardwalk.
“If you took a stroll down there one day,” says resident Thomas Buell, one of the kayak rescuers, “you’d see people who have faith in each other and believe in each other. Believe in their community.”
“The wrong place at the wrong time,” Linda Ripke says, “is absolutely where I was.”
The place was her Long Island garage. And the time was the instant a big oak tree toppled onto it during Sandy.
Ripke dashed into the garage after trying to help her husband secure items that scattered in her yard when a shed blew over.
Then she heard a crash, and the sound of the ceiling giving way. She knew she had to get out. But the fallen tree blocked the doorway.
The roof caved in around her.
Yet some unassuming objects — a ladder, a patio table with chairs stacked on top — held up the corner of the garage where Ripke was standing. She escaped injury.
“I was very spooked at first,” she recalls, “but by the next day, I felt very fortunate.”
These days, the Ripkes — she’s a hospital lab technician, he’s a postal worker — relax in the expanded living room they built in place of the garage at their home in Selden.
She keeps close track of approaching storms, empathizes with any news reports of trees falling on homes and emphasizes that other Long Islanders endured worse ordeals during Sandy.
And she says her frightening experience left her “more confident, in the sense that no matter what happens, we’ll take of what needs to be taken care of and move on.” second anniversary when he criticized Keady, who was among protesters with signs decrying the pace of storm aid. Then Keady began talking over Christie’s speech. And the famously combative Republican governor told Keady to “sit down and shut up.”
“Because I had the truth on my side, and I wasn’t going to let him bully me, he blew a gasket,” said Keady, a Democrat who owns a tavern in Waretown.
Christie remains proud of his Sandy recovery work, and spokeswoman Megan Fielder said this week that “Mr. Keady is still today what he was that day in Belmar: a knownothing.” She added that “voters have confirmed that” in Keady’s unsuccessful bids for the Asbury Park City Council, the state Assembly and Democratic nominations for Congress during the last five years.
Keady chalks up his election losses to the difficulty of running as a Democrat in a highly Republican area. He plans to remain involved in politics, although he says it now might involve partybuilding and helping other candidates get elected.