Homeowners, Shopkeepers Clean Up After Sandy

STONE HARBOR- Alex Helander, of Westfield, arrived at his home Oct. 31 along Stone Harbor Boulevard, bordering the wetlands, to find the interior stayed dry.
The exterior was surrounded by a tremendous amount of loose saw grass and his dock was damaged. The neighborhood was originally fishing shacks that have been rebuilt over the years into larger houses.
Pieces of his neighbor’s damaged dock were lodged against Helander’s dock.
Before the storm struck, Helander moved his trailered boat to the shoulder on the opposite side of Stone Harbor Boulevard. Upon his return, he found the boat had not moved an inch.
“I don’t know how that made it, truthfully,” said Helander. “I really thought I would be fishing it out of the middle of the wetlands.”
His dock was pitched to the left by the storm.
“Something must have bashed into it,” said Helander. “Our neighbors lost the back end of their dock.”
A shed next to his dock had a watermark 25 inches above the dock.
At low tide, Helander’s dock would normally be sitting in mud but a day after Hurricane Sandy, the water was high along the dock. He was creating mounds of saw grass in front of his house as he raked up debris.
Down the road, Denny Gaul, of Moorestown, opened his home at 363 96th St. to find 30 inches of water inside his garage. The force of the water bent his garage door outward as if someone had given it a number of sound kicks from the inside.
A piling broke away from a dock behind his home.
“I’m trying to get it secured until I can get someone here to fix it,” said Gaul.
The living space in his home remained dry since it was all located on the second and third floors. He had a floating dock behind his home that wasn’t there before the storm.
Nancy Hanker, owner of Pappagallo and Neptune’s Jewels at 236 96th St., had an inch or two of water in her two shops.
“For what happened, I think that’s pretty good,” she said.
Her carpeting was wet along with the bottom of fixtures that displayed merchandise. Hanker said this was the worst storm damage she had seen in 30 years.
Carpet cleaners were due to arrive at her shops an hour later. Many shop owners on 96 Street were dealing with wet carpeting and floors and debris on their sidewalks. Most streets were free of water by noon.
Parts of the borough’s beaches had steep drop offs where dunes had been eaten away by huge storm tides.
Further south in Grassy Sound, a village that barely exists on dry land in back bays behind North Wildwood, residents were rebuilding the boardwalk that led to a number of homes.
Power saws were humming and hammers pounding as stacks of boards were being unloaded from pickup trucks. A number of homes in Grassy Sound had water inside and damage to their docks.
Josh Dworchak had no water inside his home which sits on pilings.
“It got so high when you walked on our floor you could hear the water underneath your feet,” said Dworchak. “Around 2:30 in the morning, a piling got caught underneath the house and started pounding on the floor, it was like someone lighting sticks of dynamite off underneath your house.”
He said he thought the piling would break through the floor, so in the dark of night he went under the house to free the piling.
“The winds were incredibly harsh,” said Dworchak.
Water topped railings on the main boardwalk, he said.
A few homes had broken windows. Many homes had damaged docks and were surrounded by debris.