Sandy’s aftermath:

Symbol of summer gone from shores. Amid loss of lives, homes, residents vow to rebuild.

Some of the most vulnerable people — the elderly, the disabled and the chronically ill — have been pushed to the brink while struggling to recover from Superstorm Sandy.

BELMAR, N.J. — The boardwalk had changed over the past 100 years: Carousels switched to electric from gas power, sunblock replaced baby oil, stuffed animals supplanted cigarettes as prizes at the booths where the barkers found new ways to wrangle dollar bills from the tourists who flocked to the Jersey Shore.

But mostly, it played the role of a constant, linking a century of summers. Just the word “boardwalk” evoked timeless images of warm breezes, dates walking arm-in-arm, the sticky sweet of Italian Ice.

And in a stroke, it became a symbol of Hurricane Sandy’s destruction, with boardwalks shredded, buckled, gone, from shore towns in New Jersey and on Long Island.

The bigger casualties were almost incalculable: the homes, businesses and lives lost to fire and flooding. But for many wading through the wreckage, the boardwalks summed up a ruined way of life.

These wood-plank promenades sustained businesses and tied together communities, serving as something akin to town squares on stilts. But blasted three blocks into town or dumped implausibly onto roofs of seaside retreats, their destruction served notice that for all the romance of the ocean, it can also wreak havoc — and in a warming world, increasingly does.

In Seaside Heights, south of here, the 17block boardwalk settled in splintered heaps, the Star Jet roller coaster that once stood on it now ducking in and out of the waves like a skeletal serpent.

In the Rockaways, in New York City’s Queens borough, some residents returned as soon as the storm had subsided to check on the planks clustered like a game of pickup sticks, while others said they could not bear the sight.

In Long Beach, on Long Island, the police tried unsuccessfully to keep residents away from mourning over the ruins of the 2.2-mile boardwalk, parts of which were whipped half a mile away.

“The first thing I had to do was check out the boardwalk,” said Chris Cori, 19, a Long Beach native, looking down and biting his lip. “I just couldn’t believe it. I didn’t expect it.”

It has happened before: The Great Hurricane of 1938 and the Ash Wednesday storm of 1962 struck the East Coast like freight trains, ripping up these beach-town boulevards from Virginia to New England. The boardwalks were built back, at great expense.

But the destruction now seems faster and more severe; last year, the boardwalks along the Jersey Shore suffered damage from the one-two punch of an earthquake and Hurricane Irene in the same week.

In Belmar, the town merely continued, as it had over the years, replacing wooden planks with composite lumber supposed to last decades. The repairs were finished in May.

The Belmar Boardwalk served as the staging ground of summer for Matt Doherty, the mayor of this town, and his daughters, 5 and 8.

“I would come home from work, we would ride our bikes, go up to the boardwalk, get our ice cream if they were good that day, go play on the Boardwalk, they would get all sandy,” Doherty said.

“They would always want to go down to the water, that would always be an argument, and they would go into the water because I would lose that argument. They would get wet. They would get back on the bikes. They would complain that they were wet. And we’d go home. And we’d repeat.”

Now, James Robinson, 46, who grew up here, sat on his bicycle, sniffing rot in the air and watching planks floating in deep pools of water.

“I’ve seen the Boardwalk get beat up back in ‘70s but never to this point,” he said. “It’s just sad. It’s just completely sad. It will take years to get back to where we were.”

In Far Rockaway, Terrence Nottingham, 32, spoke of the boardwalk as a kind of talisman.

“If I’m ever going through something or feeling a certain way, I can come to the board- walk and it’s very serene,” he said. “I just look out at the water and I can just clear my head and think about how to help myself.”

“I just hope that they hurry up and build another one, like this one, but make it stronger,” he added.

That was the sentiment up and down the shore about rebuilding. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey called it resilience.

Christie, who is 50, had rented a house in Seaside Heights with high school friends after his graduation, and he returned to the rides and boardwalks here with his wife and four children in the summers.

“We’ll rebuild it,” he said last week. “There is no question in my mind we’ll rebuild it, but for those of us who are my age, it won’t be the same. It will be different because many of the iconic things that made it what it was are now gone and washed into the ocean.”

AP / AIR FORCE, MASTER SGT. MARK C. OLSEN An aerial view taken after the Superstorm Sandy shows the roller coaster from the Seaside Heights amusement park on the New Jersey shore submerged in surf. Dozens of lives and hundreds of homes were lost to the storm.

ASSOCIATED PRESS A man walks by a piece of the Rockaways boardwalk that was washed into the street, alongside a small car that was destroyed by Sandy as storm cleanup continued in the Rockaways neighborhood of New York.