After Hurricane Sandy struck, engineers visited thousands of damaged homes on the South Shore to evaluate the damage and determine whether the storm had caused structural damage — decisions that were critical to the process of finalizing how much money insurance agencies would pay out to their clients. more

Q. Our home was flooded in Hurricane Sandy, and even though most people didn’t get a “Sandy Repair permit,” we were told we needed one . . . more

Pope Francis issued an encyclical last month that focuses on our responsibility for and connections to the environment and the poor. I’ve only read the first half of “Laudato Si’" . . . more

Tuesday, June 16, 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.; Long Beach Hotel, 405 East Broadway, Long Beach more

Kennedy High School senior Beatrice Brown was recently named a 12th-grade winner in the American Museum of Natural History’s annual Young Naturalist Awards, a national contest. Brown won an all-expenses-paid overnight trip to New York City, where she will attend an awards ceremony at the museum and be given a special tour of its collections. Brown said she is excited to attend the ceremony because she has not been to the museum before. more

A Hurricane Sandy Storm Recovery Resource Fair will be held at Kennedy High School in Bellmore on Tuesday, May 26, from 5 to 9 p.m. more

Bob Kaible and his wife, Deborah Raimey, owned a yellow-clapboard rental bungalow on Michigan Street, behind their two-story Minnesota Avenue home, in Long Beach’s West End, when Hurricane Sandy struck on Oct. 29, 2012, submerging the narrow blocks surrounding the properties in six feet of saltwater. more

Architects, engineers and builders are frantically rebuilding and elevating Hurricane Sandy-ravaged homes across Nassau County’s South Shore these days, and they are expected to get even busier … more

Kendall and Ciro Frulio and daughters Olivia and Emma were living in a quaint home on Franklin Street in East Rockaway, within the village limits but blocks from the Bay Park border, when Hurricane … more

Hurricane Sandy was our worst nightmare realized. This monster storm packed as much energy as two World War II era atomic bombs, causing massive destruction, the likes of which had not been seen since the Long Island Express of 1938, a now legendary Category III hurricane. Trapped on an island jutting into the Atlantic Ocean, we were front and center when Sandy attacked with a vengeance. Thousands of homes were inundated with seawater and sewage. Hundreds were left uninhabitable. Two and a half years later, we continue to rebuild our tattered shoreline. In this series we will look in the coming months at the Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery’s ongoing effort to reconstruct worst-case homes, businesses and communities that Sandy ravaged on Oct. 29, 2012 — and the myriad issues that residents and officials face as they piece together our shredded infrastructure. At the same time, we will look at state and local officials’ efforts to reinforce Long Island in the hope that we might be able to withstand nature’s fury better when the next monster storm hits. —Scott Brinton, senior editor more