Storm Cleanup Begins in Ocean City

Ocean City Beach Patrol veterans Bill Dorney, Rick Schindewolf and Paul Boardman were among those who got the call first thing Monday morning to report to the boathouse at 46th Street and West Avenue -- where the damaged lifeguard stands and boats were starting to pile up.

By 9 a.m., they were hard at work on emergency repairs and construction of new stands.

The guards usually work on the beach, but Boardman said Tuesday that he expected the call. He said he had watched powerful winds from a Sunday night thunderstorm move his lifeguard boat 200 yards from its usual spot on Eighth Street.

He said the lifeguard stand at the beach crashed through a dune fence and that the lifeguard boat landed in the dunes nearby -- but the dune fence in the boat's path was undamaged. The boat had apparently flown over the fence.

For anybody who's ever tried to move a 350-pound Van Duyne surfboat across the beach, the idea of the behemoth taking flight seems absurd. But a taken from a porch at 36th Street where a pair of lifeguards were taking refuge shows just that. The clip was submitted to Patch by Tom Buck, who worked the patrol in the late 1970s.

A submitted to Patch by Ken Weaver shows a lifeguard boat that had been pushed nearly a mile away from where it started. 

On Sunday night, National Weather Service meteorologist Jim Hayes said the winds were straight-line and reached 55 mph. On Monday, NWS meteorologist Greg Heavener said spotters had called in 65 mph gusts that peaked around 5 p.m.

"It was an enormous storm," Heavener said.

But people in Ocean City, who are used to seeing 50 mph winds in a typical nor'easter, were wondering exactly what hit the city. Unofficial reports from home anemometers had gusts as high as 80 mph.

Heavener said he can't dispute reports of higher gusts -- it's just that the Weather Service has no records of them.

Ocean City Police Department Capt. Steven Ang said Monday that meteorologists had told the department that the east-to-west winds were the result of a storm that formed right over top of Ocean City.

Ang said the majority of the damage in Ocean City appeared to be limited to the area of the Sun-Aqua Motel on Ocean Avenue between 14th and 15th streets (), to a house on Central Avenue between 43rd and 44th streets that lost part of its roof and to Ocean City Beach Patrol equipment.

Debris from the Central Avenue home knocked down power lines, and the road was still closed on Monday morning.

Ocean City Beach Patrol Director of Operations Tom Mullineaux said Monday that 13 lifeguard stands were "totaled." He said a rough estimate indicates 12 to 13 lifeguard boats damaged -- with perhaps as many as half totaled.

Meanwhile, repair work at the Sun-Aqua Suites was underway on Monday.

The storm had a happy ending for one family of 16 displaced when the Sun-Aqua was closed down after the storm. The children and grandchildren of an 81-year-old woman recovering from lung cancer were on the second day of their week-long vacation when the storm hit.

The family was considering trying to find six or seven hotel rooms or ending the vacation altogether, said Catherine McCormick of Harrisburg, PA.

Hearing of the family's plight, Chamber of Commerce Director Michele Gillian put in motion a plan that helped them land in a beach-block rental home at 23rd Street and Wesley Avenue.

"We are doing fabulous," McCormick said on Tuesday.