One Year Later: Bayport Home Nearly Done With Sandy Repairs

It’s been a long year of work, repair and costs but the finishing touches are being done this week on a Bayport family’s beach cottage that was demolished by super storm Sandy on October 30, 2012.

The Linker family’s three-acre home typically boasts a large green sloping back yard most of the year that ends at the Great South Bay shoreline. 

That all changed in one day after Sandy dumped several inches of sand on most of the the lawn, creating a beach rivaling town beach sites. It took four days of constant payloader efforts to get the sand back where it belonged.

The storm, as Ingke Linker, told Patch was worse than any other storm she and her husband Philip had lived through during their 40 years in the house.

The damage ranged from devastation of the cottage to ripped up foliage and a neighbor’s gazebo being relocated to the east side of their home.

The extreme bay surge flooded two areas of the Linkers' main house and crawl space and decimated the heating system. They lost power for 12 full days.

This week Linker looked out at her grass covered backyard, and smiled as she watched a contractor finished up the last of the beach cottage work.

“It was horrible to see how that storm had damaged everything so badly, the wetlands took such a beating. But the other day I realized how fast they’ve actually come back. Nature is amazing that way,” she said.