When Hurricane Sandy rammed the Jersey Shore on the night of Oct. 29, 2012, saltwater fisherman Nick Honachefsky was living in Camp Osborn, a community of tiny bungalows a mile south of Mantoloking on Barnegat Bay Island. Earlier that day, Honachefsky had taken a bottle of Captain Morgan rum with him on a walk down the beach, figuring the arrival of a hurricane meant it was time to start drinking and take a few pictures. The news that cops were banging on doors, telling people who were insisting on riding out the storm that they should write their Social Security numbers on their wrists so their bodies could be identified later — plus a phone call from his worried mom — made Honachefsky decide to spend the night at an ex-girlfriend’s house on the mainland.

A few hours later, the storm’s surge roared on top of a high tide across the skinny barrier island, opening broad new inlets as the Atlantic poured up Barnegat Bay. Most of the bungalows that made up Camp Osborn, including Honachefsky’s 750-square-foot house, were washed away. A friend of Honachefsky filmed the storm’s arrival. “He’s like, ‘I think I did see your house. It was the blue one, right? Yeah, it’s floating down Route 35. It’s on fire,’” Honachefksy remembers. When he was finally able to return to the site of Camp Osborn 10 days later, Honachefsky saw 30-foot flames of gas still shooting out of the ground. “It looked like the oil fields in Kuwait,” he says. An exploding transformer had kicked off a fire that continued to burn; there was no gas shutoff valve for the island.

By Susan Crawford. Read the full article here.