NEW YORK—Margurie Batts heard a loud noise, and then the water came in.
The storm surge from nearby Coney Island Creek and the Atlantic Ocean rushed into Batts’s home, and reached up to the edge of the second floor.
Luckily, Batts was living on the second floor. Her first floor tenant, a family of four, had evacuated ahead of warnings that Superstorm Sandy could flood low-lying coastal areas.
For over a month, Batts stayed at her son’s home in Long Island. She moved back into her house after the city installed an emergency boiler and got hot water running. But it would be almost two years later when she would finally get her house fixed.
“Anytime you have a void in your life, it isn’t pleasant,” Batts said, an 80-year-old retired postal worker. “But you can’t have it wearing and tearing on you.”
Batts has owned her home on Neptune Ave. in Coney Island for the past 37 years. “I was waiting for my season to come, and it finally has.”
Batts’s home is now getting repairs from the nonprofit Habitat for Humanity, through a new city partnership with local community organizations that the mayor announced on Wednesday, the second-year anniversary since Sandy hit.
The 2012 storm killed 44 New Yorkers and cost the city $19 billion in losses.
