Those of us who have grown up around Long Beach Island know the 18-mile stretch of land has been ravaged again and again by tumultuous weather long before the Great March Storm of 1962, regarded as one of the 20th century’s 10 worst storms, and beyond the Great December Storm of 1992, which formed record high tides and snowfall across the northeastern United States. Some of us have lived through those storms while others have heard about them from family members and friends or read about them in books. The stories have been recounted in Six Miles at Sea: A Pictorial History of Long Beach Island, written by former Beach Haven historian John Bailey Lloyd, and Great Storms of the Jersey Shore, co-authored by Islanders Margaret Thomas Buchholz and Larry Savadove. For Scott Mazzella, 36, of Matawan, who spent much of his childhood at his family’s second home in Holgate, those accounts were more than just stories.
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| Photo by Ryan Morrill Scott Mazzella, author of Surviving Sandy, checks on the progress of his parents’ second home in Holgate, which was damaged by Superstorm Sandy. |
“I grew up reading John Bailey Lloyd’s books. I grew up reading Great Storms of the Jersey Shore. Those were my storm bibles,” Mazzella said. “Those were the tools I used to learn about my two favorite things, history and weather. That became my lesson on storms, and I became intrigued with hurricanes and nor’easters. It was all through those local books.”
Every summer during his youth, Mazzella went to hear Lloyd speak about the 1962 storm. Mazzella later became a journalist and landed a job writing under the leadership of Buchholz for The Beachcomber as well as The SandPaper.
Although he eventually gave up writing for the local papers to pursue a full-time career as a seventh grade history teacher at Jonas Salk Middle School in Old Bridge, Mazzella continued to stay in close contact with the area’s people and happenings.
“I love Long Beach Island. I consider Long Beach Island as much my home as my regular home,” said Mazzella. “If I could say where I grew up, I could just as easily say Holgate because it was just the summers, but it never felt that way. We always came in the winters, too, and on the weekends all the time. I didn’t live here, I didn’t go to school here, but I felt like this was home.”
After the area was devastated nearly a year ago by Superstorm Sandy, the greatest natural disaster in Jersey Shore history, Mazzella combined his passion for history and meteorology with his love for LBI to write a book about the effects of the storm on Southern Ocean County, just as his favorite local authors had done for the area’s prior storms – a feat he considers “a slice of history” and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that “you have to say yes” to.
His book, Surviving Sandy: Long Beach Island and the Greatest Storm of the Jersey Shore, published by Down the Shore Publishing, hit stores last weekend.
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| Photo via Surviving Sandy: Long Beach Island and the Greatest Storm of the Jersey Shore is now available in books stores on LBI. |
A historical narrative that takes readers from the storm’s inception through the destructive blow of its tidal surge on the LBI area, through the recovery and into the aftermath, Surviving Sandy is unlike any other book of its kind. Its cover photo gives readers a close up view of the morning after the storm – a blue Volvo half-buried in sand and debris amid bottomed-out homes along Long Beach Boulevard and rolling ocean waves in Holgate before any rescue personnel had arrived. The photo was captured by local resident Carl Clark who rode out the storm with his wife, Susan, and stepped out the next morning to witness the destruction.
“That’s not a photo from a photographer at a newspaper,” said Mazzella. “That was taken by a couple that stayed through the storm, were rocked by it and came out the next morning to see their neighborhood completely different than it was before, the neighborhood they retired to, the neighborhood they call home full time. We’re seeing what they’re seeing. This is genuine.”
The book’s heartrending photos and unforgettable firsthand accounts, shared by the community from first responders and municipal personnel to residents and local business owners, will evoke a flood of emotions for all who lived through the storm.
“Working with images for this book was a totally different, new experience from any other book we’ve done. It was more confusing and not easy technically,” said Fisk. “Because so many images were very low-resolution cell phone pictures, or images copied many times, it was not easy getting the quality and resolution necessary for publication. Leslee (Ganss, Fisk’s wife) not only designed a remarkable book, but she did a phenomenal, behind-the-scenes job, much to her frustration, of working some magic on the images so that they’d be suitable for print on paper.”
Fisk said that originally he had no plans for publishing a book about Sandy, especially since his office and home on Cedar Run Dock Road had been devastated by the storm.
“I didn’t want to do a book on Sandy. I thought Great Storms of the Jersey Shore would be the end of the storm books,” he said. “I had so much work to do with picking up the pieces for my own house and my business. I didn’t want to take on any new publishing projects this year. But everywhere I went, I would hear the same refrain, ‘When are you guys doing the Sandy book? When are you updating Great Storms of the Jersey Shore? Down the Shore has to do this. You have to have something out this summer.' I did feel sort of an obligation to do it and do it well.
“For all that we had going on as individuals in our lives and our business, it was no different than anyone else,” he said. “Everyone else was affected by the storm and had huge, huge problems to deal with and pieces to pick up and a mess to clean up. Somebody had to tell that story.”
As a meteorology hobbyist, Mazzella had tracked the storm from beginning to end, keeping friends updated on its potential threats via Facebook. When Fisk shared a post about his uncertainty in evacuating his home the Sunday before the storm, Mazzella, whom Fisk knew through The Beachcomber and The SandPaper, offered a simple yet prophetic warning, “This storm is not well understood.”
“That was a haunting sentence,” said Fisk. “It helped persuade me not to stick around for this one.”
Like most people, Fisk and Mazzella did not expect the storm to pan out as predicted.
“We were looking at the Euro model (of the storm), going, ‘Wow, imagine if that happened,’” Mazzella remembered. “That’s what it was, ‘Imagine if that happened,’ not ‘Oh my God, this is going to happen.’ What people didn’t get was this was not Irene.”
For many area residents, the media hype surrounding Hurricane Irene, which wound up causing little damage to the area in August 2011, had cast doubt on Sandy’s impending destruction.
“I didn’t think that kind of scenario would actually happen,” said Mazzella. “I don’t think we’ll see that again in our lifetime. That’s how rare this kind of storm was.”
Mazzella watched the storm transform from a tropical depression to a thousand-mile-wide extratropical storm, a “massive animal” that was “almost apocalyptic for the Jersey Shore.” It was then he knew Sandy was coming.
Residing at home with his family in Matawan, Mazzella was able to view the storm from an objective point of view, he said. Although his parents’ vacation home in Holgate needed to be renovated after it suffered from 2 feet of floodwater damage, he said there was nothing he was required to do in the wake of the storm. That bird’s-eye view, he said, gave him the freedom to research and write a book about the experience.
“I was living in an area that was not affected directly. I was free to do it,” said Mazzella. “I wasn’t picking up pieces. I could look at the pieces everyone else had to pick up.”
For months Mazzella interviewed local residents who experienced Sandy firsthand. With the help of Cedar Bonnet Island resident Steve Warren, former editor at the Press of Atlantic City, Mazzella fashioned those stories into a narrative that speaks for the community.
“All the people featured in the book stand in for everyone,” said Mazzella. “We have people that rode out the storm, we have people that were evacuated, we have people who have seasonal homes that were represented because they’re a big part of the fabric of Long Beach Island as well. Everyone’s threaded together, almost like a plot. It’s real people, and you experience everything they experience through the whole storm. It’s like watching a movie. You’re going to want to know what happened to these people after the storm. It strikes a chord.”
“This is going to be the Sandy book forever and ever,” agreed Jim Mahoney, a Holgate resident who is featured in the book. “I’m humbled and honored (to be a part of it). This is our storm. I read (the book) halfway through and was choked up.”
In between investigating the storm and writing Surviving Sandy, Mazzella continued teaching and, of course, spending time with his wife, Liz, and two children, Ryan and Emily. He even managed to finish a master’s degree and acquire an administrative certification as well.
“Thank God for my wife, for her patience and her strength in keeping the family unit together while I was writing upstairs,” said Mazzella.
Surviving Sandy took six months to complete. Mazzella and Fisk agreed to take on the project over a beer at Buckalew’s in January. Mazzella finished researching and writing the narrative in July.
The book even includes a foreword written by Buchholz and an introduction penned by Savadove.
“I think Scott did a fantastic job. Together with Steve Warren, they put together a fast-paced narrative,” Buchholz said. Surviving Sandy has so much more depth and human interest than the picture books the newspapers up north threw together right after Sandy.”
Furthermore, she said, “I was happy to pass the storm job on to the next generation. Scott worked for me at The Beachcomber about a dozen years ago, and often we’d get off the subject of whatever we were doing and talk storms, hurricanes, northeasters. He was always passionate about the weather. Way back then he said he wished he could write a book about storms. And so he did.”
Surviving Sandy retails for $44 and can be found in most gift shops on LBI. It is also available through Down the Shore’s website as well as at Barnes and Noble’s New Jersey locations.
Mazzella is set to hold a number of upcoming presentations and book signings in the area. The author will be available at Merchant’s Mart during Chowderfest weekend at the Taylor Avenue ball field, located at Ninth St. and Taylor Ave. in Beach Haven, across from Schooner’s Wharf and Bay Village, on Saturday, Oct. 5. He will also be in attendance at the New Jersey Maritime Museum, located at 528 Dock Rd. in Beach Haven, on Sunday, Oct. 6 beginning at 12 p.m. A presentation will be held at the Tuckerton Seaport on Route 9 in Tuckerton on Wednesday, Oct. 9 at 12:30 p.m. for an admittance fee of $2 per person. Advance registration is required for anyone who would like to participate in the lunch, which costs an additional $6. Call 609-296-886 to sign up. The Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences will host a book presentation on Sunday, Nov. 10 at 4 p.m.
–Kelley Anne Essinger
This article was published in The SandPaper.
–Kelley Anne Essinger
This article was published in The SandPaper.
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