May 22, 2013 — The small fishing town of Highlands New jersey, where the Jersey Shore begins is still rebuilding 6 months after the storm. Homeowner Tracey Johnson describes what it's like to live in her home as she continues to renovate.
The house that Tracy Johnson and Paul Merker share in Sandy-ravaged Highlands, N.J., isn’t so much a home as a campsite: insides gutted to the studs, kitchen sink propped up by two-by-fours, a bathroom with no walls.
They endured winter with a propane heater. They cook meals with a portable stove and hot plate. They take baths warmed by boiled water.
“There are days when I say, ‘I can’t take it anymore, I gotta get out,’” Johnson said.
But when she goes for a walk, she is overwhelmed by the sight: home after home that has been abandoned or ripped apart,
“You see people working on them, but they’re not nearly as far as they’d like to be. It’s depressing,” Johnson said. “It’s everywhere, and that’s the point. You try to get away from your own home, but even when you do that, you’re still not seeing anything different.”
It’s hard to relax in Highlands, a small but proud middle-class town at the northern tip of the Jersey Shore. The borough of 5,000, where the Shrewsbury River meets Sandy Hook Bay, is undergoing a profound transformation that won’t end with the physical rebuilding. The carnage wrought by Sandy—up to eight feet of water inundated downtown—has prompted what might best be described as an existential crisis, with residents, business owners and public officials confronting daunting questions about the kind of place Highlands will be for those who remain, and how it will survive.
Highlands, a modest fishing and commuter community known mostly for its seafood restaurants, doesn’t get as much attention as other communities along coastal New York and New Jersey that were battered by Sandy. It doesn’t boast a boardwalk or amusement park or golden sand. It is, however, emblematic of the region’s post-Sandy struggle. The borough is in a fight for its life, and the solution just might be a colossal engineering project that has been tried just once before, more than a century ago.
Read the full story at NBC's Channel 4 News