Hurricane Sandy was far more than a storm. It changed lives, destroyed homes, and left financial and emotional scars that would last for years.
We had three rental homes knocked out of commission. The mortgages kept coming, the expenses were beyond imagination, and everywhere you looked, there was doom and gloom. The financial burden was staggering, and the uncertainty was even worse.
And then came the insurance companies.
You would think that after suffering a catastrophic loss, the insurance you had faithfully paid for over the years would be there to help you rebuild.
Think again.
It took us five years of battling insurance companies to get paid. Five years!
Flood insurance wanted to limit its responsibility to damage caused by water up to the eight-foot mark. Homeowners insurance fought over what it was responsible for and offered settlements of roughly 30 cents on the dollar.
Meanwhile, the mortgages never stopped. Neither did the property taxes, the bills, or the mounting costs of rebuilding.
And the houses couldn’t simply sit there waiting for the insurance companies to decide what they were willing to pay.
Everything needed to be rebuilt, rewired, repaired, and made livable again. Electrical systems, walls, flooring, appliances, and everything the saltwater had touched needed attention.
Contractors needed deposits. Electricians needed to be paid. Materials had to be purchased. And every passing month meant more money going out while rental income remained nonexistent.
The storm lasted days. The financial storm lasted years.
For much of Sandy itself, we were huddled in our home in North Jersey, watching Al Roker broadcast live on Channel 4 from our very own corner at the Jersey Shore.
What we witnessed was almost impossible to believe.
Waves were breaking west of Ocean Avenue. Think about that for a moment. The ocean had crossed the road and was moving through neighborhoods where people had built their lives.
Just a mile south, three storms had collided, creating a force powerful enough to wipe out the man-made barrier road and reconnect the ocean with the inlet. Homes were simply gone.
Appliances floated down the streets. Sand was piled everywhere. Familiar neighborhoods were unrecognizable.
And then there was what happened inside our own homes.
Our oceanfront properties were literally emptied of their contents by the force of the water, only to be filled with sand piled four feet high.
Imagine opening the door to your home and finding four feet of sand where your furniture, belongings, and memories once stood.
And these weren’t poorly constructed homes.
We had doors secured with triple-bolt locking systems, designed to withstand thousands of pounds of pressure. Sandy forced them open as though they were barely locked.
Windows positioned four feet above the sand, even those protected by plywood boarding, were no match for the ocean.
The water didn’t care how strong the doors were, how secure the locks were, or how carefully we had prepared.
Everything we thought would protect our properties was overwhelmed.
And while television cameras captured the destruction, they couldn’t capture what came afterward: the mortgages, the repairs, the lost rental income, the endless bills, the insurance battles, and the emotional toll of wondering when life would ever return to normal.
Three rental properties out of commission meant three mortgages to carry, with little or no income coming in. Yet the banks still expected their payments.
There was something particularly frustrating about having to fight insurance companies while trying to recover from a disaster you had absolutely no control over.
We didn’t ask for the storm. We didn’t cause the damage. We had paid for insurance. Yet somehow, getting the coverage we believed we had purchased became another disaster to survive.
Sandy didn’t just destroy buildings. It destroyed financial security, disrupted livelihoods, and changed the course of people’s lives.
Fourteen years later, I can still picture those waves crashing across Ocean Avenue, appliances floating down the streets, mountains of sand, and the sight of our homes emptied of everything we had put inside them.
You can rebuild a house. You can replace furniture. You can eventually repair a road.
But you never forget the feeling of watching an entire community being washed away.
And you certainly never forget spending five years fighting to recover financially from something that happened in a matter of hours.
Hurricane Sandy wasn’t simply a weather event. For those of us who lived through it, it was a dividing line in our lives: everything before Sandy, and everything after.
#HistoryIsRewrittenInRealTime #JoeKnows