Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Hurricane Sandy

The following says it all. 

We spent Oct 28th emptying as much as we could from the bottom level of our condo.  Then we evacuated to a hotel in PA not too far from A's house.  The storm hit Monday the 29th and Wednesday the 31st we drove back home to assess the damage.   Here is the high water mark in the garage - 19 inches.
We removed the soaked carpet from the entertainment room and hired someone to remove the soaked piano.  The rest of the furniture in that room we had put up on blocks so it is ok.

We have now removed all of the sheetrock from the bottom half of all the walls on the lower floor.  Have to wait for the cinder block and studs to dry before we can replace it.  And that requires power (who knows when it will be restored) and a furnace, which is due to be fixed on the 14th.  This is what my quilting room looks like at the moment.  At least the tile floor there survived.

The cleanup effort was amazing.  Large front-end loaders were picking up debris by Sunday
We feel very lucky. We lost the 40-year-old piano because we couldn't lift it out of the flood.  We lost the 19-year-old car, knowing that was a possibility when we left it behind.  We lost the carpet in the entertainment room, but had been wanting to replace it with ceramic tile anyway.  And we lost my cabinets in the quilting room - too many and too big to move.  We'll worry about replacing them after all the work is done.  It will be many months before we get everything back in order.

We are now back in PA having fled the nor'easter that descended on us today.  We don't think our property will flood again, but we could not afford to lose another car so we left just in case.  There are no hotel rooms anywhere with so many folks without power and still evacuated.  So we and S (who received a mandatory evacuation notice) are at A's for the night.  We have to be back home tomorrow to meet with the FEMA inspector.

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