The Life of O’Reilly

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Despite all of her efforts, however, the house was not habitable for months. Jean and Thea stayed with a 90-year-old neighbor for 10 days until that situation became unsustainable, then they moved into a vacated workshop “still full of tools” for three months. During their displacement, they paid rent on their meager living quarters while shelling out enormous amounts of money trying to rehabilitate their home.

They also began the process — familiar to so many in the area — of filing with the various funding entities that sprang up in the aftermath of the storm. O’Reilly signed up with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Small Business Administration, and she dutifully registered with every new agency that hung out a shingle on Long Island. She joined a class action suit filed by the residents around Barnes Avenue, but then withdrew, fearing that any money realized would be too long in coming. “I know class actions,” she said. “I’ll be dead before that pays out.”

She went to the SBA and secured a loan for $145,000, and dipped into her retirement accounts for another $55,000, all of which has been spent on reconstruction. She has been told, at various times, that she qualifies for a $300,000 grant because her house was “demolished.” But she finds this puzzling, since her house still stands. She was told that Nassau County would reimburse her for the $14,000 she spent on the initial rip-out, only to hear later that she would have to sue the county to recoup that money.

O’Reilly, who credited the process of chasing down relief money with teaching her to use a smartphone, said she now spends as many hours as she can bear every day trying to get help. The process of tracking her many claims and applications, she said, now amounts to a full-time job.

“The only day I don’t fight the battle is Saturdays and Sundays,” O’Reilly said, adding that the reason she takes those days off is because the people she needs to talk to don’t work on weekends. “Where is the money? Where is the $50 million they raised at that concert? No one is getting any money.”

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