Residents Along Shorefront Recovering

Residents along Patchogue's shorefront began cleaning up Monday but the process may take several weeks.

Major concerns from residents were the corrosive property of the salt water as well as the oil and sewage that was floating through the floodwaters. Several residents were preparing to power wash their property to try and reduce the damage if possible. Damage was already visible to much of the landscape.

Plants and shrubs, if not torn loose, were shriveling up and dying. The area also lost electricity from approximately 4:30 a.m. Sunday morning until 10:00 a.m. Monday morning.

SJ Sullivan has lived on Smith Street for 23 years without any major problems. He chose to not evacuate during the storm.

“I’ve seen it all. I’m used to this. This one was pretty bad though; I would say that its on the top ten list. It felt like you were in the middle of the Great South Bay. The waves were pretty intense,” Sullivan said.

Visible damage to his property included missing sections of fence and dying landscaping.

His neighbor, John DeBenedetto, has lived on nearby Gale Drive for over a year and also chose to not evacuate.

“We made it. There is some property damage; the water came up to the front yard but did not enter my garage. We were lucky but it will still probably take a few weeks to get back to pre-storm conditions,” DeBenedetto said.

South Breeze Drive resident Nancy Minski described the storm as extremely windy but not as much rain as expected fortunately. Her family did not evacuate and even saw kids swimming after the brunt of the storm had passed.

“We sat down and played a game for about a half hour [early Sunday morning] because everything looked like it had calmed down. Then we looked out...and the roads were flooded. After high tide, we thought that it was going back down again so we put on our waders and wandered out. The water was up to our waists,” said Minski.

Paul Ray has lived on Bay Avenue for 15 years and said he never saw anything this bad. His family evacuated to a friend’s house in Medford. They came back briefly on Sunday to assess the situation but were unable to really get to their property; they returned on Monday to find that their house is inhabitable.

“We’re not staying here. We got about six inches in the house. Now, we just wait for the insurance adjuster before we can do anything,” said Ray.

Check the photos for highlights of homes after the storm.