Halloween 2012 was not normal in any sense.
If you were lucky you were dealing with a power outage, if you weren’t you were assessing wind and flood damage from Sandy or even wondering how to rebuild your home.
After seeing huge waves crash onto Fire Island from across the bay, I knew I had to get over there to see what happened.
This was not going to be easy as the bridges were still closed and most people (including me) had taken their boat out of the water before the storm.
Luckily I ran into some die- hards at my marina that let me jump on board their boat and head over to Old Inlet to see what was left.
To summarize what we saw, the Pattersquash gun club somehow survived but a huge chunk of dunes, the entire boardwalk, and marina were now part of the Atlantic Ocean.
To get a broad perspective, the images taken by the USGS below show Old Inlet before and after Sandy to give an idea of how significant this breach was.
For those of us that spent countless hours with friends and family at Old Inlet it has still not entirely sunk in that our beach is now gone forever.
The photos below are some of the first taken of the new inlet, 10-31-2012.
On the fourth and last page there is a short video of the new inlet flushing out the bay.
