Hurricane Aftermath: Residents' Cleanup Begins

When Fire Island Avenue residents left home for higher ground before Hurricane Irene hit early Sunday morning all was good. There was no flooding in the village as they headed to stay with family members in West Babylon.

It was quite a different scene when they returned home on Sunday afternoon.

“We came back around 2:30 p.m. and were just able to get through the street to the house,” said Gerald Martino. “We found our finished den under eight to nine inches of water.”

By Monday afternoon, the Martinos, like many of their neighbors, were outside cleaning up, surveying the growing piles of storm-damaged possessions. They also managed to grab time with a local contractor, Mike Janssen of Janssen Home Improvement, to talk about repair work.

“We’ve been here 44 years, and we’ve had four floods. So we have him on speed dial,” jested Martino, referring to Janssen. It was a light moment in a day full of damage assessment and clean-up.

Martino said they’d been able to elevate the den furniture before the storm, but that everything else in the downstairs area was destroyed. 

“All the carpeting, the sheetrock, the appliances, the washer and dryer. We even sustained patio damage. A lot of the bricks appear shifted and moved,” said Martino.

Martino said a neighbor told him the water level rose to the top of the fire hydrant in the street at one point during the storm event.

Further south in the village, a waterfront resident who’d ridden out the storm gave her account of the high water levels.

“It was much worse than I thought,” said the resident, who asked to remain anonymous. “The waves went above the highest pilings, about eight to 10 feet with the surge. We live in a high ranch, and at one point, waves lashed up and hit the kitchen window. They uprooted heavy boulders on the property and actually moved a section of concrete wall," she recalled. "The winds were coming out of the east, the south, the west, everywhere.”

Another resident south of Montauk reported two feet of water in his garage, and had seen water rise to cover the street between one canal and another. 

As Gary Sinanyan, of Bayview Road, recalls, “It was just the water. The water is what did it all.”