By Airwaves Staff Writer Elizabeth Dudley
Mantoloking, New Jersey is a predominately sailing community built on a barrier island. For the past century, residents have added bulkheads to their properties and built dunes on the ocean to keep the island from naturally shifting so that houses and streets would stay intact.
This small community received a devastating blow from Superstorm Sandy. In the words of Annapolis resident and sailor Ashley Love whose parents have a house on the island, “[Today] Mantoloking is a post-apocalyptic war-zone. 200 out of 500 houses are damaged, 60 are completley gone. As in gone, not a splinter of them left.”
As a result of the storm, seven new inlets from Point Pleasant to Cap May cut their way through Long Beach Island as they would have naturally if not for dunes and bulkheads. Two of those new inlets are in Mantoloking and are the cause of the loss of 30 some homes.
Dunes are gone and beaches houses are suspended 15 feet in the air by their pilings. Love noted that one house “looked like a doll house” with one of its walls completely ripped off revealing the contents of an otherwise intact house.
Very few Mantoloking residents stayed during the storm. Once the winds and the rain subsided though, in an effort to get correct and timely information out to home owners, one boy who had stayed to brave the storm, ventured out in his wetsuit with a GoPro. Maneuvering around downed power lines and gas leaks, he took pictures to prove which houses still stood, which were damaged and which were no longer.
The day Sandy made landfall in Mantoloking, Love was out of the country for work. When she began receiving news of the devastation, she immediately reached out to her friends and neighbors, mainly sailors, for help in collecting supplies.
Love was overwhelmed by the response. She said her friends even went to Davis’, the local Eastport bar frequented by the sailing community, to collect money and canned food from the kitchen. Tarps, army bags, sheets of plastic, gas cans, batteries, screws, tape, extension cords and rope were all collected in her apartment building while Love’s neighbors kept watch over it and helped her load it into her car.
At Home Depot, Love and her sister were touched by yet another sailor who had recognized her laser dolly. He helped them use a piece of wood to make a cart out of the dolly so that they could quickly fill their car with plywood and begin the trek north.
Back in Mantoloking, a week after Sandy had hit land, the gas system was being flushed and houses were being assessed by the authorities. Those assessed received either a red or green tag. The Love family house received a red tag which meant, “Enter at your own risk”, which for the Love’s, added a sense of excitement.
Love writes, “We’re sailors! We are used to standing on uneven surfaces. We are used to putting ourselves at risk for the highest reward. Weather doesn’t hinder us; we go into it willingly for the thrill of adventure. You can’t be rewarded for sitting still.”
So, dressed in a ski helmet, drysuit, gloves, tool belt and GoPro head cam, Love prepared to enter her family’s home. She was accompanied by a fellow sailor and neighbor who had abandoned working on his own house to be the first to enter the Love’s house. The family was also soon joined by a former crew on the Love’s E-Scow, Matthew Sullivan, who drove all the way down from Boston to jump into the thick of it and help get the Love family back on their feet. The family says that because of his support, they were able to get through that first crucial week.
Excitement mounted as more and more family treasures were passed out of the house and another group of neighbors who had fared better in the storm, offered their house as storage. And so Love and her neighbor spent the day salvaging what they could and preparing the house for the snow storm that was still to come.
Compared to the damages others sustained in the storm, the Love family was lucky. But they also felt as though sailors and the sailing community are well equipped to deal with events of this nature. Love writes, “From keeping an eye on the weather, dressing for bad-weather and preparing boats for bad weather […] our tools are at an arm’s length away and if they’re not, the guy you sailed with last week or your neighbor has what you’ll need.”
“If a ship goes down, if a house goes down, we know we’ll all be there be build another one so we can keep getting back out there into the fray. A red label on the door is not going to prevent us from moving forward. Our sailing community just took a wrong shift and got into a major collision that cost us places in the race, but that just means we’re going to steer the boat down a new course, without wishing we’d done something differently. Shifts come, waves come, storms come, but the bottom line is the crew is alive and healthy. Everything else can be replaced because we know we have each other and we have the memories that will still live in everyone who we shared the good times with before.”
With the help of the Facebook group Mantoloking/Bay Head: Sandy Recovery started by Love and Sullivan, information is being shared quickly. People and their belongings are being brought back together like the woman who thought she had lost everything until a post in the group informed her otherwise. Names of plumbers, contractors and engineers have been circulating as well as information on rerouting mail and back on election day, how to vote. It is an open forum that is making a difficult situation just a little bit easier.
The community of Mantoloking has a long road ahead of itself but most are prepared and ready to move forward. The people of Mantoloking are “Manto Strong” because they’ve always lived by “whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger”. They have come together as neighbors, as sailors, as a community, and they will only be stronger becaus
e of it.
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