Read an Excerpt
From the Preface:
To be at the Jersey shore during the hurricane of 1944 or the northeaster of 1962 was to be witness to forces that boggle the mind, bend the imagination and beggar description, the kind that had our ancestors huddled in the backs of caves and continue to instill in us an awe approaching reverence. Only a few people get to experience the great storms and they tend to remember every detail of every moment. And while most hope they never have to go through one again, only a few wish they'd missed it in the first place.
From Chapter 8 - "Sandy":
The helicopter flew over Staten Island's north shore and Stephen Wilkes focused his camera on the oil tanker John B. Caddell, which sat stranded on the beach below. Wilkes, a photographer who covered Superstorm Sandy for Time magazine, had just set out from Republic Airport on Long Island with two assistants and pilot Al Cerullo to get an aerial perspective of the damage left days earlier. Already they had witnessed destruction in Coney Island, a fire-ravaged Breezy Point in Queens and the twisted remnants of piers below the Statue of Liberty on Liberty Island. Nearby, Wilkes spotted a house in the middle of a 10-acre sea of cattails. A long trail of broken reeds marked its path to exile. He took some photos and leaned back into the cabin, easing his gunner's belt and tension line. He motioned to Cerullo and they turned and headed to New Jersey.
They crossed Raritan Bay and paralleled the bayshore from South Amboy to Sandy Hook, flying just north of Morgan, where boats from demolished marinas had been mashed into a steel New Jersey Transit railroad trestle.
Past Sandy Hook, they turned south toward Sea Bright, where large beach club cabanas lay tossed onto their side and Donovan's Reef restaurant, a popular social spot, sat in a pile of rubble. Parking lots and streets resembled beaches, and boats from marinas were littered throughout town. In Monmouth Beach, sailboats completely surrounded a stately Victorian home. Boats, parts of homes and washed out cars piled up where walls or structures had stood up to the surge.
Wilkes thought of Bruce Springsteen as they flew over Asbury Park's storm-torn boardwalk. Over Ocean Grove, Bradley Beach, Avon-By-The-Sea, Belmar, Spring Lake, Sea Girt, Manasquan and Point Pleasant Beach they looked down on bare piling protruding where pavilions, boardwalks and buildings had been swept away, and on dunes that had washed westward and covered entire towns in sand.
In Bay Head, the dunes had done little to protect oceanfront property. Grand cedar-shake homes had skirted off their foundations. One massive, mostly intact home leaned toward the sea, its western facade tilted toward the sky.
Neighboring Mantoloking was hit even harder. The bridge led straight into the sea as the ocean and bay met. A lone home remained stranded on its own little island in the middle of the new inlet. Dozens of other homes had vanished. An entire section of town had been sliced out, replaced by saltwater. Massive oceanfront homes both north and south of the breach had been ripped open, their contents swept into neighboring yards or pushed by the surge into massive piles along the tangled ribbon of broken asphalt that was Route 35.
Over Camp Osborne in Brick Township they looked down on a charred pile of broken cottages between Elder and East Marion Streets. The storm surge had shoved the houses together and fires from broken gas mains took care of the rest.
The same scene played out from Normandy Beach through Lavallette to Ortley Beach, although some areas had been hit harder than others. Sandy had targeted one stretch of shoreline while sparing the next, like a tornado that destroys one house and leaves the neighboring house unscathed. It reminded Wilkes of the peaks and valleys of a cardiograph.
At their final stop, Seaside Heights, Wilkes spotted the submerged Jet Star roller coaster. It sat in an ocean turned turquoise by upwelling from the storm…
***
Lieutenant Barcus and his officers could no longer respond to calls. Conditions outside the TowBoatUS building had gotten that bad. When a call came in from a Mantoloking resident, an officer wrote down the details and logged the call. They would follow up when conditions changed, but for now they had to wait it out. It was dark and the wind rattled the building, and Barcus thought about Mantoloking and what must be going on over there.
His thoughts were interrupted by flashing lights in the window. A Brick police car raced up Mantoloking Road, followed by another, then another. Then a barrage of Brick fire trucks with lights flashing and sirens blaring. Mantoloking was only a short distance up the road and there was a large fire there. They raced to their vehicles and chased the Brick motorcade to the bridge.
A police car blocked the road. The fire trucks were stopped as well. Barcus pulled up to a Brick police officer standing in the road and opened the window.
"John, you can't go over that bridge," the officer said.
"What do you mean? That's Mantoloking. That's where I work. I have to get over there," Barcus replied.
The officer let him through but knew he wouldn't get far. Barcus drove until he got to the crest and stopped. Ahead of him stood a wall of wood, insulation, appliances and other household debris. He was stunned. There was no way to get by and no place to go if he could. Beyond the wall of debris there was just water. It was if the ocean had consumed a section of town.
He got out of the car and looked east as waves rolled in from the ocean to the bay completely unobstructed. One home still stood intact on an island in the middle of the new waterway. Another large home was stuck against the south side of the bridge, just beyond the debris pile. The officers watched as incoming waves pushed the tons of debris farther up the bridge. To the south, the horizon had an orange glow. Camp Osborne was ablaze. As they watched, another house slammed into the bridge and ripped apart. Barcus got everyone off the bridge before they all became victims…
From Chapter 6 - "March 1962":
There is no story to this storm. It didn't have what's needed for a story—a beginning, middle and end. It was all middle. It came all at once, without warning. It stayed for three days. Then it went away. It was nothing like a hurricane, with notices and watches and advisories to herald its approach, flags flying, satellite pictures of its beady little eye and flailing arms—Is it heading here? Is it heading out to sea?—and then it comes and blows and bellows and spits and rages, and then the calm eye passes over—God's eye, some have called it—and then you get hit with the backside, furious, mighty, unassailable, unanswerable, and then it goes off to unload on somebody else.
A hurricane is a progression: the sound of distant cannon, the attack, a lull, redoubled violence, and then peace. This storm was nothing like that. This storm was five high tides, the highest 8.6 feet, just 4.8 inches below 1944's 9.0-foot record, water that just kept coming. It was a northeaster more ruinous than any hurricane that ever happened here, a demonstration that nature is a hard mother, a reminder that those who dwell beside the sea are always only a wave's length away from sleeping with the fishes. "A savage gale, with pounding tides, towering seas and heavy snows," said The New York Times.
It was unexpected and unannounced, sudden and surly, inundating, devastating, mutilating, obliterating. It battered and bludgeoned the shore until there was no more shore, until it was all running water and milling debris, until almost every trace of a human presence had been washed away. Then it was gone. But not, to this day, forgotten. One newspaper called it "a scene of human misery unparalleled within the memory of longtime resort residents, exceeding that wreaked by the hurricane of 1944."
While there was no one story to the storm, there are a thousand stories of the storm.
Captain Paul McGill, a professional pilot, flew over the shore midway through it: "It was the worst sight I ever saw. I flew over Louisiana after Hurricane Audrey, but this was worse than that. I thought Hurricane Donna was bad but this looked like an atomic explosion compared to it…"
From Chapter 4 - "Great Atlantic Hurricane, 1944":
Kate and John Lovett did not evacuate soon enough to avoid the wall of water that hit their home. In fact, they'd already taken in two women and children who lived even farther from the Coast Guard station. Before they could get out, four feet of water came into the first floor; they grabbed life jackets and moved up to the attic. Whole cottages floated by; one crashed into their house, collapsed a wall and filled the attic with water.
Lovett kicked out a window and helped his wife and the others onto the roof. Two of the women and a child floated through 15 feet of water to the station. Lovett, who didn't have a life jacket, swam into the attic of another house. His wife and one child disappeared in the raging surf. Her body was found the next day; the child was never found.
For Mariana Johnson, the loss of her grandparents' Holgate home was "like a death in the family." She and her cousins, Carol Mastran and Isabel Wickham, returned there the next day on an Army flatbed truck. "All the landmarks were gone, telephone poles were gone; we were all crying. The Whitmers' house next door had been washed onto our property and only the attic and a part of the second floor were left. There was nothing there from our house except an anchor that had been under the house, a few pieces of slate and a marble tabletop. I had nightmares for a year."
Chief Griffen and Sam Kleva had taken refuge in the Whitmer house and were trapped in the attic. "They watched the destruction of our house. They saw shingles spin off and around in a circle, then saw the slate come off," recalls Carol Mastran. "The house was well boarded with bolted shutters; it was airtight and the wind lifted it off the foundations. When it sank back down, this gigantic wave took it into the bay and then it washed back, breaking up into pieces. Because they witnessed the wind pick up our house, we collected insurance."
Warren Griffen, stranded in a lifeboat at the yacht club, watched the seas coming over everything. Small boats, parts of houses, planks of the boardwalk, pieces of beach pavilions and sections of Nat Ewer's boardwalk gift shop were all pushed into the bay.
Just east of the yacht club, Mabel Reeve waited out the storm at Betsy Ross Rooms and Bath House on the southeast corner of Holyoke and Bay avenues. In a letter to her husband the next day, she wrote:
"While the streets were flooded, I saw flashlights going past, so I called to them. It was two Coast Guards. They came in and I asked them if they thought it was safe here for the night. They said the wind had gone down and changed S.W. and the tide was going out, so everything was all right. I couldn't have gotten out anyway for the water was nearly up to their hips. I told them I thought the Coast Guard might have boats to take people to safety; they said no boat could stand that wind. The water came up the porch, then the little house in back banged against the porch and it's about to collapse. The front steps are gone, and the bath houses are lying out in the lot. Menns' house is out in the middle of the sidewalk on Holyoke Avenue, and a lot of the furniture out of it is over in the lot in front of us. As far down as I can see toward the point [Holgate], houses are sitting out in the street…"
