Dark Water: A Year After Hurricane Sandy

Our own extensive renovations were finished months ago, but I have yet to hang pictures on the walls or put rescued books and photo albums onto their new shelves.

Mine is a wary ambivalence. And I’m not alone.

“There’s a reason the women in this town have all gained 20 pounds,” said Jill Blumenfeld, 54, sitting in the small rental apartment where she has cleverly repurposed twin captain’s beds into living-room sofas.

The Blumenfelds’ three-bedroom house on Fairway Drive rumbled last October as it filled with more than two feet of ocean water and sludge. “I really thought it was going to collapse on us,” she said.

Since then, she and her husband, Gary, 58, have distanced themselves from the home where they raised two sons and held dinners for 30 at Thanksgiving. Now they refer to it as the Swamp.

After the storm, when they weren’t badgering their 18-year-old son to finish his college applications, they were trying to figure out what to do next. Should they retreat from the beach, as some have chosen to do? Or patch up the Swamp and hope that the storm was an aberration? Or resolve to stay put and take whatever steps necessary to armor themselves against the next hurricane?

“We decided, hands down, we both love living in this community,” Ms. Blumenfeld said, unfurling blueprints for a new beach house with multiple decks and a cupola. The house will sit 13 feet above sea level on deep-set pilings, and has been designed to withstand floodwaters and 120-mile-an-hour winds. “A freaking fortress,” she called it.

That kind of security comes at a price. And flood insurance adjusters have credited the Blumenfelds with less than half of the $250,000 maximum payout for their two-story house, built in the 1940s. They are now fighting for the balance, and have hired a public adjuster to assist them.

They have also applied to every state and federal program that might help with the increased costs of flood mitigation and compliance with Federal Emergency Management Agency regulations. The couple work in the financial sector and are lucky that they can afford to move ahead without knowing how much they will be reimbursed. Even so, their decision to start over could more than double their mortgage debt just as they are starting four years of tuition payments and trying to plump their 401(k)’s.

But as Ms. Blumenfeld said: “The reason we’re going to rebuild is not because we can afford to. It’s because we can’t afford not to. Our house lost more than $300,000 in value in one night.”

There is nothing leafy about this wisp of a barrier island along the southern shore of Long Island. Its allure derives from the combination of the same delicate white sand and sparkling surf found in the Hamptons, with far more modest housing stock and a 50-minute rail commute to Manhattan.

The land mass is so small that children of a certain age can bicycle almost anywhere; they don’t have to be driven. When the surf is up, you see them heading to the beach, surfboards tucked under their arms. Of course, this cherished geography was a problem the night of the storm, when ocean and bay surged, meeting in some places. Ever since, the island has been filled with cranes, Dumpsters and storage pods the size of large rooms, along with the constant thrum of construction and truck traffic. And worry.

Over on East Hudson Street on a recent afternoon, Robin Antila, 59, was unloading a few things from the storage container in front of her house. She invited a stranger in to see the renovation of the first floor, but seemed prouder of the makeshift kitchen tower she had put together in the master bathroom upstairs: a mini-fridge with a microwave and a toaster oven stacked on top. Even with her gleaming new Craftsman kitchen up and running, she can’t bring herself to dismantle the temporary one that sustained her family for months.