Storm Chronicles: Long Slog to Recovery in Ocean County

Show me the way to go home.

Five months? Has it really been five months since the monster Superstorm Sandy roared into Ocean County and changed the landscape for all time?

Has it really been five months since we fled our Bayville home and moved into my son and daughter-in-law's basement? I remember hoping in those first dark weeks that we might be back in time for Christmas. We are still out.

It took a while for reality to sink in. It took some time to realize that recovery, for many, won't happen quickly. And for some, it won't happen at all.

I met a woman who lives on Cove Road West in Bayville at the township's informational session on home elevation recently. She moved into her house about 15 years ago and happily began making it a home.

After Sandy, she had plans to remediate her beloved house and return. What she had managed to save from Sandy was stored in a small trailer on her driveway. Her mint-green toilet and glass shower doors were propped up against the toilet.

Now she is not coming back. She learned how difficult and expensive it would be to raise her home, which is part on a slab, part on a crawl space.

She is in her early 80s and walks with a cane. She's not in the best of health. And she's tired, very tired.

"I don't have too many years left," she said, her voice choking. "I just can't do this."

The seminar featured a Powerpoint demonstration by Roderick Scott, a home elevation expert. When it was finished, hundreds of people shuffled into the cafeteria of the Berkeley Township Elementary School to speak township professionals, FEMA representatives and home raising professionals.

Many of them looked stunned and numb when they left. Home elevation is not easy and it can be extremely expensive, depending on the size and layout of your home.

You have to figure out how high to go. You have to hire an engineer to design the elevation plans. You have to have a flood certificate done, which usually runs around $450. Then you have to find a qualified, home elevation company and get yourself on a waiting list. Oh, and you have to have the money to do it.

But there's another catch. If your home was more than 50 percent damaged, as ours was, you are eligible for up to $30,000 in FEMA's Increased Cost of Compensation (ICC)  funds.

If you decide not to wait for the money and elevate your home now, you don't get the ICC funds. So it's the old hurry up and wait and pray another Sandy doesn't hit before your house can go up.

It's April. Easter has come and gone.  The calendar says it's spring. But drive through ravaged Glen Cove and Good Luck Point and you can still see Halloween decorations in some windows. Late October was the last time some people lived in their homes.

The streets of Glen Cove are full of contractors' trucks, storage pods and bulldozers. "For Sale" signs are sprouting everywhere.

Good Luck Point was Bayville's Ground Zero. Five months later, some of the homes on this spit of land that juts out into Barnegat Bay are starting to cave in. Hardly anyone lives in Good Luck Point now.

The "storm warriors" of Sandy are tired, bone-tired. It's a fatigue born of trauma, loss, mind-numbing regulations, inspections, insurance paperwork and FEMA acronyms, replacing Sheetrock, floors, furniture, appliances, clothing and just about anything else that went with the flood.

It's a heavy sadness that comes from watching your neighborhoods transformed forever. It's saying goodbye to good friends you knew for years, who either don't have enough money to rebuild or can't bear the stress anymore.

We are luckier than most. The insurance money came relatively quickly. The new furnace works. The painters are in the house now. Then the new floors can go in. Once the house passes all the township's final inspections, we can go home.

I want to go home. And I'm afraid to go home.

Patricia A. Miller is editor of Berkeley Patch and owns a home in Bayville, near Toms River.