Surviving Long Island's Superstorm

The sound started as a slow creaking, which quickly became a wrenching noise, as if sheet metal were being folded back and forth violently.

Then, snap!

I ran downstairs, flung open the sliding glass door leading to the backyard, and there they were: long sections of white siding and squares of foam insulation scattered across the deck and lawn, blown off our house by 50-mph winds.

It was Saturday, March 13, around 5:30 p.m. One minute I was tapping at my computer keyboard, filing a story for LIHerald.com on what later became known as the Superstorm, a hurricane-grade nor'easter that whipped across Long Island with wind gusts of up to 75 mph. Ironically, the creaking sound began as I was finishing writing about storm damage that I had found on a short ride around my little Merrick neighborhood. I wrote about lost shingles and siding on other people's homes, posted a photo of an old oak tree that had tumbled across Byron Road, and then -- bam! -- I was hit.

I ran outside to collect the lost siding, while, from inside the house, my wife held on tight to an aluminum cover over a second-story window frame that the siding had previously surrounded. It was flapping in the wind, and we thought we might lose the window.

As I scurried around the backyard like a frightened rabbit, I could only think we were going to lose all the siding and the window.

Once inside, I grabbed my drill and the biggest screws I could find and tried to secure the cover with my wife still holding on. I drilled and drilled, but I didn't have the right screws to punch through the thick aluminum. (Sticking my arm out a window with gale-force winds pounding against me didn't make for steady hands, either.)

Realizing we couldn't fix the cover or hold it all night, we conceded defeat. If the wind was going to take out the window, so be it. We could board it up with plywood from inside and hope that insurance would cover the damage.

Then, like tens of thousands of Long Islanders, we lost power and heat, regaining it the following evening.