Sandy on Green (part 2)

Somewhere in the middle of the night between Monday and Tuesday I was woken up by the phone in our borrowed room buzzing. We must have lost power and now the hardwired phone was buzzing on battery; it's amazing the things you hear when you're in a dead sleep! That was the last of my sleep for the night. I jump right on facebook on my phone and realize that there has not be any updates from my neighbors in hours... I think "How could they not be posting at 2am?!?!". Frustrated, I get out of bed, shower, get dressed and proceed to pace around the house until the transportation woke up (my dad with his truck). I literally was pacing the house while they all slowly woke up, got dressed, ate breakfast. I was almost ready to walk to my house. It was only 3 miles away, hell, I could run that in under 30 minutes. Anyway, my dad was finally ready to go around 9am so he drove J and I over to our cars (that we had evacuated to higher ground) and we then proceeded to take the high roads down to our house. We were stopped about 5 blocks away as the flooding hadn't subsided and the police were not allowing people to attempt to drive down. We began walking the rest of the way down in waist high water. I'm not sure if I was shaking due to the cold or due to the shock. It was a mess. Fences were floating down the block and you could see the water line on houses that have never even seen water on their grass before. As we waded down the road, a man ran out of his devastated home to ask for help. "Can you help me pull out my generator?" J ran to his aid while I rudely commented to myself "what the f are you going to do with a generator? You don't even have dry ground to put it on!" But I was happy that J went to help the man. At least he was trying to do something to save what was left of his home. I walked on... the water was getting deep and I was nervous about stepping on something. A dead fish floated by. Then a fence. Then there was a car.. yep, it was crazy... and this was at low tide the day AFTER the storm!

My head was going two ways... on one hand, my rational self was telling me that our house got hit hard. "Expect water in the house" she said. "It's going to be bad" she yelled while my irrational, luck driven, praying self was trying to out do her with "It can't be that bad." "You're a good person and good things happen to good people." I think this is why it wasn't until I approached the back gate of my house and saw the water line around chest high that my rational self won. I took a picture... what else could I do. I turned into the action driven person that I always am. I tried to tell myself to just be there to take pictures, to show what we've lost and later, I could be sad.

But as I pushed in the back gate, and wasn't able to get it to go more than a foot because it was blocked by debris, I broke down. Yep, crazy me came out (much more fun than rational and irrational me). I was screaming at the top of my lungs, crying and pushing the gate.  Then I pulled it the opposite way and was able to get in and see that the thing that was blocking the gate was my daughters swing set. It had floated about 20 feet to end up where it was. To think, it took 3 people to put the thing together and move it in place and now it was just upside down, broken and mangled. I walked onto my back deck and saw the first of the real mess.  The water line was scary.  About knee high in the main house and waist to chest high in the utility room.

I started looking at the debris and trying to figure out what it all was.  Where did it come from?  This stuff wasn't mine.  No, all of the stuff in the driveway and even on my back deck had floated there from other yards down the canal.  I guess we were the storms dumping ground.  Maybe when the water recedes it would clean up after itself. hahahaha, yeah right.

There was something else that I couldn't figure out.  The smell.  It didn't smell like seawater or sewage.  It was worse than that.  It smelt like gasoline or OIL!  Yes, it was oil.  I ran to the side of my house to see if my oil tank was okay.  The one that I could see had shifted about 5 feet over but it didn't look like it was leaking.

I couldn't see the front oil tank so I decided to enter the house first and try to get a view around the front of the house.  This is where I cried.  No more screaming in anger.  No, this was real, full blown hysterics.  I tried to take pictures.  Focus on the pictures. 

Our house was destroyed.  The new room, the new appliances in the kitchen, all of my donations (kids clothes, toys, etc. ) ready to be donated were soaked.  The wainscoting that took J 2 full days of work to get done for Liv's bedroom, destroyed.  But then, I didn't know the half of it.  The smell of oil was intense.  I was feeling sick inside so I opened the front door and saw the front yard.  Oil, everywhere.  Propane tanks and tons of random junk floating in the thigh-high water.  Oh, and a nice huge piece of fencing on my front stoop.  I didn't walk out into it.  I didn't have waders, just my work out clothes and a pair of five-fingers so I wasn't going to try to injure myself but the red tinge in the water told me that our oil tank was leaking, a lot.

J finally arrived then and he waded out in his waders to see the damage.  Surreal.  He took pictures from the front of the house... and the oil tank...

To be continued...