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Community Corner

Riding Out Irene at Rye's Water's Edge

A firsthand account of coping with the storm.

Rye’s aptly named Water’s Edge, like the rest of the city, was in Irene’s path as the storm approached this weekend.

Residents of the complex’s 74 condos had varying experiences with the storm, but here is my birds eye view highlighting what transpired:

Shortly after 9 a.m. I walked out my condo door with my wife, Stephanie, and the first thing we see is a Van Gogh scene gone mad –the tall sunflowers in the garden virtually outside our window are bent and broken, like a maniacal Jack in the Beanstalk had been wielding an ax.

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Further on, there is a tree down right near where I usually park my car outdoors. The tree is split right down the middle so I say a silent prayer of gratitude that I had moved my car into the indoor garage overnight or else my car would have been crushed.

As Steph and I walk the short distance down to the water, the waves are cresting over the seawall, drenching us with spray and flooding the walkway. The community swimming pool is overflowing, salt water mingling with chlorine. And in the distance, the waves seem to be reaching towards the top of the Rye Playland Ferris Wheel.

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Stephanie is clicking away with the camera and I am taking mental pictures as the seawater leaps the wall as though determined to reach the sand bags stacked in front of the windows of the six waterfront town houses. The sand bags serve as a last ditch line of defense. The waterfront houses flank both the Bird Lane and Oakland Beach property boundaries–three on each side—and they are taking a pounding.

Entrepreneur Michael Buccieri and his wife, Ilona, came up with the idea to barricade their downstairs living room windows with sandbags, and their waterfront neighbors followed suit. But the wind seems to be blowing the surf at the Buccieri living room anyway, while the water capriciously ignores the windows of Toni Maloney’s house right next door.

“To tell you the truth it was pretty scary last night between the wind, the rain and the water coming virtually right up to my window even before it was high tide,” said Ms. Maloney who had her hands full this weekend, between storm preparations and taking her father out of the hospital and moving him into The Atria, the assisted living senior residents complex on King Street in nearby Port Chester.

“I didn’t want my father (noted retired orthopedic surgeon Phillip Palazzo) celebrating his 90th birthday today in a hospital during a hurricane,” she said.

“I’ve seen a lot worse than Irene,” said Michael Foster, a long-time Water's Edge resident who remembers December of 1993 as the year when waves not only jumped the sea wall, but soared higher than the two-story houses facing the waterfront. “I remember police telling those homeowners to stay up on the second floor, that’s how high the water was.”

I then bump into new resident Ken Hirsch, a television producer, shooting video of Long Island’s fling with Irene while attorney Al Weiner is noting the number of damaged trees on the property.

“There’s going to be a lot of tree damage in Rye,” Weiner said.

Al’s wife, Anahid, is looking into her camera at photos that show the dead end street just outside the Water’s Edge gates. That street serves as a baseball field for kids like David and Natalie Weiner and Lucas Tsuchida, among others. It is flooded so there will be no baseball.

Water’s Edge had been prepared for the worst. They even had the stone cottage-like board room set up as a kind of emergency bunker of sorts, with lanterns and other emergency equipment in case any of the residents closest to the water wanted to camp out there.

That emergency measure reflected the concerns elsewhere in Rye and beyond. Like the call from the Rye Police Department that came in to me at 7:18 Saturday night saying there was emergency housing available in Port Chester High School and in Rye’s Whitby Castle just in case.

At Rye’s Church of the Resurrection, the 7:30 p.m. Saturday night Mass took place in a cathedral that was virtually empty, perhaps 50 people or so in a church that could hold 1,000. The priests cautioned Mass-goers to drive home carefully in the steadily increasing downpour. We did. But before exiting the church, I noticed water stains seeping through the newly restored cathedral roof.

When I got home, I decided to watch a movie to pass the time. The next morning I encountered Vito La Russo, president of the Water’s Edge Board of Directors, roaming the grounds, surveying the storm damage to the condo complex at a time when Rye was experiencing flood damage elsewhere in town.

“It could have been a lot worse considering we are right on the water,” La Russo said after his walk through. “We came out of the storm all right, all things considered.”

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