Hurricane Sandy Aftermath - Bayonne, NJ

My hometown didn't avoid Sandy's wrath, either. Here are a few videos taken by various residents.

Down the waterfront where the Elco Marina used to be but is now occupied by condos with their own private marina:

View from 16th Street Park. At the 2:25 mark the person landed at the lower level of the park and it's already underwater with surges coming in from Newark Bay. By the time the storm was at its peak the water completely covered those low fences and went part-way up the hill:

A nut driving around in total darkness after the blackout. It's because of people like him that the mayor called a 6pm-6am curfew during the 8 days without power:

First Street. This street floods during every storm, including sun-showers! Old-timers on the block own their own sandbags and know when to start putting them out. But they didn't do a bit of good with this storm. The street borders the Kill Van Kull, and the people who live here can look out their front windows and see Staten Island, a place that really got hit bad by Sandy. The mayor called for everyone on First through Third Streets to evacuate BEFORE the storm even hit, so it's their own damn fault if they got stuck and had to evacuate with water around their knees DURING the hurricane!



And this last one looks like it was shot within walking distance of my home. I walked right past that tree at the 2 minute mark the same day this video was shot!

Too bad the camera is messed up and everything is echoed and off-color:

The power was out for 5 days for some of the city, 8 days for most of the city, and here we are, more than 2 weeks later, and some people are still without electric.

One of the long-term problems on the east side of the city is the oil. Bayonne was heavily industrialized, the city of oil refineries. Standard Oil, now known as Exxon, started in Bayonne, and they weren't the only refineries in town. When they all closed up and left, they left a lot of contaminated land behind. When Sandy flooded the eastern part of the city it pushed a lot of that oil in the contaminated land out, leaving an oily residue on everything it touched. Not only have a lot of homes been condemned but a church was devastated, too.

Hurricane Sandy Jersey Shore YouTube VIdeos

If you're reading this at work you may want to press MUTE.

The following are from The Highlands, the town our grandparents had lived in from the early 1960's through the mid-1970's and the scene of Kevin Smith's movie Jersey Girl. Even after they died, my husband and I used to bring our son here each summer just to roam the beach and stop in Bahr's for dinner. 

As a kid, my brothers and I played in Veteran's Park,  especially when the grands were having a family cook-out and the adults were getting drunk and rowdy. We bought comics in Katz' after church right up the hill. My dad and I used to take fishing trips in the ocean on boats out of Bahr's. How scared I was walking up those stairs at Twin Lights and so proud of myself when I finally did it. I learned how to drive on the dirt road between Bay Avenue and the hill, behind the stores right off of Waterwitch Avenue. Remember, that was pre-1970! The city is so built up now compared to then. In the video below where a guy rides a bike or ATV through the streets, that "dirt road" now has the fire department and a load of homes on it and is fully paved.

And I remember when ANY hurricane was forecast my grandmother would pack 2 overnight bags and my grandfather would get out the sandbags to put around the basement windows and on the top steps blocking the doors on their way out to the shelter at the elementary school at the top of the hill. They usually only had to stay overnight, because all the land at the bottom of the hill - where all the stores and most of the housing was at that time - would ALWAYS flood, and the waters would usually recede by the next day. Luckily the basement was only a crawlspace and not storage, and the only time they suffered any real damage was the year the garage door warped. More than once after a hurricane they had a boat land in their yard (they were only 2 houses away from the bulkhead), and once found an overturned car.

These people weren't so lucky. More housing of cheaper quality means more damage when something like this hits. Sure, a lot of the old converted bungalows, like my grandparents owned, suffered some water damage, and I see many houses got damaged by boats whose owners didn't bother to take them out of the water before the storm, but they're generally intact. I wonder how many of the condemned houses are pre-1950 and how many are post-1970.

Here's that bike ride I mentioned:




This one is the view from the bridge between The Highlands and Sandy Hook:

And just another view of the town in the aftermath of the storm:

 

And who can forget Sea Bright, right over the bridge? This is the town The Weather Channel always sends someone to when a storm is predicted off the coast of NJ. This city, especially Ocean Avenue in the strip between the Highlands Bridge and Shrewsbury River Bridge, is always under water for a while after even mild storms. Across the street from these houses is the Atlantic Ocean, right up those stairs you see in the beginning of this video, and the Shrewsbury River is in their backyards. I used to have an aunt and uncle who lived right on this stretch, my grandfather's brother Pete. When he died, my aunt said she had enough of the water and moved back up to drier urban areas.