Displaced Pair Helps Others Two Years after Sandy

WILDWOOD – It’s been two years since Superstorm Sandy hit the tri-state area Oct. 29, 2012, damaging homes, flooding subways, sparking fires, and worst of all – taking lives. While some have managed to move on, others are still trying to put the puzzle pieces of their lives back together.
“We are the forgotten ones,” said Lisa Brocco-Collia, 43, of Wildwood. “We are all the way down here in Cape May County at the bottom of New Jersey and people think because there was not a roller coaster in the ocean that we weren’t affected.”
Brocco-Collia, who owns a home on Pacific Avenue that she moved into in 1998, decided she would tough out the storm in spite of warnings by Gov. Chris Christie to evacuate. She prepared with a raft and enough food and water to last her two months. Once Sandy hit, she realized it was the worst she’d seen.
“During the storm I was thinking, is my roof going to fly off or is my house going to fall?” said Brocco-Collia.
Brocco-Collia was safe on the second floor of her two-story house where she stayed for days to avoid the four feet of water that pooled on her first floor, but she lost plenty of her possessions.
“My house was built in the 1950s and it was built on the sand without concrete padding. I thought my property was cement but we found out after the storm that it was just stuck up on top of wood,” she said. “When the water came in with force, it washed out underneath my foundation so my house filled up like a swimming pool.”
The storm was another check on the list of burdens in Brocco-Collia’s life.
Hurricane Irene badly damaged her roof and she was trying to fix it while also caring for her dying father before Sandy hit. He died in May after Sandy. Her mother then became ill and died of cancer not long after.
Almost a hundred miles away in Seaside Park, Jayson Rempo, 34, found shelter in his attic. The lower level of his house was flooded higher than his 6′ 1″ stature and many of his windows shattered.
He stayed in his house on Farragut Avenue and ate military meals ready to eat. He was a federal correctional officer at Fort Dix at the time of the storm.
Eventually, the National Guard transported him to a nearby shelter, but on Nov. 7, 2012, he was shipped via bus with 455 other refugees from Monmouth and Ocean counties to Wildwood with nothing but the clothes on his back and a list of hotels.
“I lost everything. The $28,000 truck I bought the year before that no one has been able to find, all of my belongings, and my job making $80,000 because I didn’t have transportation to get there,” Rempo explained.
Meanwhile, in the weeks after the storm, Brocco-Collia began searching for other people here who were affected. She heard about the refugees from other counties and felt compelled to help.
The owners of Gioia Ristorante, a local restaurant that opens in the summer, agreed to let Brocco-Collia pay them to host dinners there for the refugees. That is where she met Rempo. They started a romantic relationship and became a support system for one another.
After spending a few thousand dollars of her own money and even some of the money given to her by FEMA to repair her own house on funding dinners, she wasn’t able to keep footing the bill.
The city condemned Brocco-Collia’s house in February 2013, and Red Cross housed her in the Bolero Hotel where she shared a room with Rempo for three months.
Eventually, Red Cross stopped paying and she and Rempo moved six more times before ending up in a rented apartment in Wildwood paid for by Sandy Homeowner/Renter Assistance Program where they currently live. Brocco-Collia continued to help others in spite of her own plight.
Renee Sotelo was shipped to Wildwood with her husband and three children, 5 and 8 years old at the time, after a few months of living in the Toms River High School. She lost everything in her Seaside home during the storm and in January 2013 moved to Florida, but Brocco-Collia played a huge role in making their time in Wildwood bearable.
“We met Lisa at a dinner,” said Sotelo. “We were having nice hot meals at the Gioia restaurant. It made us feel like humans again.”
Sotelo also described that for Christmas after Sandy, Brocco-Collia gathered toys and coats at the restaurant and had families who had lost everything pick out things for their children. Her kindness didn’t stop there.
“My uncle was dying in Paterson and our car had died and Lisa got people from the Methodist Church to help me,” said Sotelo. “They drove me all the way up to see my uncle and the next day he died. She didn’t ask for anything in return.”
Although she didn’t ask for anything, she could have surely used the help as her house had developed what was a huge problem for residents after the storm – mold.
“Once I started networking with people in the weeks after, I started meeting people who didn’t think they were affected by the storm because they had evacuated and by the time they were back, the floods had dried up, but now they are realizing they were,” said Brocco-Collia. “We are having huge problems with mold and it’s tearing up people’s health and homes.”
Resident Mike Mattera, 61, had no help before Brocco-Collia came along. Mattera’s house on Wildwood Avenue flooded and developed mold in its insulation.
“I had called my flood insurance company and they told me I wasn’t a candidate for compensation,” Mattera said. “Later on, I bumped into Lisa and she told me she was helping people with damage from Sandy. Brocco-Collia got together volunteers and they all helped repair my house.”
Shortly after the storm, Brocco-Collia started New Jersey Southern Regional Sandy Coordinators, in order to help neighbors rebuild their lives and that included mold remediation workshops. The group has held three so far, in partnership with the health department and the New Jersey Medical Reserve.
“We provide them with the tools to clean their mold and then we show up and help them get rid of the visible mold that is there,” she explains. “Instead of the problem going down, more and more people are showing up with the same mold problem. People are having respiratory issues now. We are trying to get this funded.
Since February 2013 the group also partnered with Smile Corporation to help feed victims and volunteers have come from Maryland, Delaware, Michigan, and even New Mexico to help people gut out their houses.
While Brocco-Collia makes sure everyone gets help, she and Rempo’s own problems continue to mount. They are living off her $677 a month disability check from two separate car accidents, in 1988 and 1992, which left her with head injuries and a broken back.
She still needs to find a way to pay $7,000 in taxes for her vacant house and is trying to care for her 17-year-old son in boarding school in Pennsylvania. Rempo hasn’t found work since Sandy.
“We are not even really surviving,” said Brocco-Collia. The money that the Sandy Homeowner/Renter Assistance Program gave the two for their apartment runs out next month, but the place, they said, is run down anyhow. When they moved in she said it had ‘crack bags’ all over the floor with urine and smoke burns in the carpet. It costs $1,100 a month.
“We are living on one of the worst streets in Wildwood,” said Brocco-Collia. “Landlords are taking advantage of people like us because we have nowhere else to live.”
Rempo said having Brocco-Collia by his side has helped him in the aftermath of the storm.
“I served in Afghanistan and the stress since Hurricane Sandy has been worse,” he said, “Lisa has been a great help. I don’t know where I would be without her.”
While things may be hard for the two, Brocco-Collia said what she does keeps her going.
“Helping others is the only thing that keeps me sane,” she said. “It’s easy to forget about your own problems. Though it seems I’ve created more extreme problems for my family and myself. I would not be sane right now without having the diversion of helping others.”
Maya Chung is a graduate student at New York University.
Correction: Brocco-Collia’s father passed away before Hurricane Irene; her mother died months after Sandy. Also, Renee Sotelo lived in the high school for days (not months) after the storm.