Front-End Loader Rescues In The Night: Point Boro Man's Sandy Memories

POINT PLEASANT, NJ — Jude Walker remembers driving down a side street off Beaver Dam Road in the early hours of Oct. 30, 2012, and seeing water several inches deep covering the road.

“ ‘This never floods,’ I thought,” Walker said, talking about the events of Superstorm Sandy 10 years ago. Walker, supervisor of the Point Pleasant Borough roads department, was driving a front-end loader to help rescue people whose homes had flooded because of the storm.

He lowered the rescue divers down to the front door of the home on Christine Court, where they had been told there was a resident in distress, there was no sign of the man, Walker said. So they forced their way inside, where they could hear the man yelling.

“The man and his dog were lying on the bed and the water was up to the boxspring,” Walker said. “My first thought was ‘this is going to be the longest day of my life.’ “

Superstorm Sandy pushed first responders all over Ocean County to the limit, going out to try to rescue people in the midst of the worst disaster to hit the Jersey Shore in decades. Thousands of homes were lost and thousands more suffered significant damage as a result of a historic storm surge.

Walker, a former fire chief, said he had been out of state on a hunting trip when he initally heard about the forecast for Sandy. He saw news reports from Point Pleasant Beach of people hunkering down before Sandy’s arrival.

“We’re not going to get this storm,” he said he thought at the time. A year earlier, Hurricane Irene had been forecast to hit New Jersey. Thousands of people evacuated, and the state got nothing more than a glancing blow. Walker said he expected the same was going to happen with Superstorm Sandy.

Then he got a call from his supervisor that he was needed at a meeting. Sandy was coming, and Ocean County was going to take a direct hit.

“I raced the storm to get back,” he said.

In the hours before Sandy made landfall, Point Pleasant’s public works employees were clearing trees brought down by the winds that were at a sustained 50 to 60 mph. When the power went out and trees began crashing down around them, Walker said, they got out of the storm.

He went to sleep but was awakened a few hours later because people needed help.

“The ocean had breached,” he said, “but it still just didn’t register with me.”

The borough’s front-end loaders were put into service because the machines’ engines sat the highest above the ground.

“I took the largest loader and two divers and headed out,” Walker said. And for the next 17 hours, they rescued people and pets and brought them to safety.

“One of the first calls was on Boat Point Drive. I knew it was going to be a difficult time,” he said, because the street sits where Beaver Dam Creek meets the Metedeconk River. He was able to get part of the way down the street, but not fully because the water was too deep even for the loader.

In the distance, “I could see the fires burning at Camp Osborn,” the Brick Township neighborhood on the barrier island that flooded and burned down when a transformer caught leaking natural gas lines on fire. “It was eerie.”

In all, Walker and the two divers with him rescued 152 people and 50 to 60 pets, he said.

"I said to people, ‘If you can get in the loader bucket I’m not going to stop you from bringing anything,’ " Walker said.

The school district provided buses to transport people who had been rescued to the shelters, offering warmth and protection.

When the water receded, the enormity of the disaster became apparent, Walker said.

“The most important thing was we had no loss of life,” he said. But neighborhoods were unrecognizable.

“The damage in Sunshine Harbor and Bay Harbor Shores was devastating,” Walker said. “We had some people without power for 22 days.”

When the cleanup began, Walker said the public works department convinced the town administration not to hire Ashbritt, the cleanup company that many other towns in Ocean County were hiring to help with the work.

“We felt we could do it ourselves,” Walker said. They worked with Waste Management to get 30-yard roll-off containers because taking the town’s garbage trucks to the Ocean County landfill would have slowed the process considerably.

“We told people, put out all your debris,” and for two months straight Point Pleasant’s public works picked up debris all over town, working seven days a week. “We only took two days off,he said, “Thanksgiving and Christmas.”

“It was one of the worst things I’ve seen. People I know sitting on their porches, hysterical crying seeing all their stuff in the trash,” Walker said. The town filled the 30-yard roll-off containers more than 900 times with trash and debris from ruined homes, along with dropping off 65 garbage truck loads.

“I’ve seen lots of disasters,” Walker said, adding, “a lot of people thought “it’s never going to happen.”

“If it wasn’t for the breach and that tidal surge, it would have been minimal,” he said.

Point Pleasant has changed a lot since then, with what he and others joking refer to as skyscrapers that at three stories high.

“It’s strange when you drive through these neighborhoods now, you don’t recognize them now,” Walker said. “You think about the poor people who are in those tiny houses but now they’re surrounded, they have no view of anything.”

And there are still some people recovering from the storm, he said.

Looking back, Walker said the most important thing was that there was no loss of life in Point Pleasant. Being self-sufficient with the cleanup afterward, too, mattered.

“We saved millions of dollars and still accomplished the work,” Walker said, due to the teamwork of everyone involved. “It was something that will never leave me but I”m proud as hell of how everything went.”