I was 24 at the time of the storm, living in Atlantic City with my husband and daughter. We lived at the corner of Atlantic and Maine avenues in a big white apartment building in a middle section. My husband was a commercial fisherman. He was the captain, and he was supposed to go out the night before. The weather was fine at the time. Maybe it was a gut feeling or maybe he was just tired, but he said he was going to wait and go out in the morning. Thank God that he didn’t go out, because he would have been a goner.

There was debris everywhere, and so much had been destroyed.

My aunt lived across street, and she called me in the morning. She said, “Look out your window. I think it’s the end of the world!”

I looked out and saw all this water in the street. There was water smashing into the pavilion. It was water, water everywhere. It was really scary and surreal. I remember seeing a boardwalk ramp floating down Atlantic Avenue.

This storm popped up overnight. The tide went in and out six times before the storm ended. We waited it out in our apartment for two or three days.

When the tide was out we would run to the local store to get beer and candles. They were little white candles, before the time of scented candles. We had no electricity, but we had a gas stove. All of the people in the apartment building congregated in our apartment because of the heat from the oven. We were on the third floor of the building, and my aunt came to stay with us. Her basement apartment flooded out, but her house is still there today.

It was a small apartment that we lived in, and we didn’t have room for everything. I had stored some dishes in a shed on the dock at Rhode Island Avenue. During the storm the shed was washed out. Five years later they were dredging, and one of the cups from my set was dredged out.

My son James says that he was conceived during that storm. He was born in December. We had to huddle to keep warm.

The boardwalk’s planks were ripped up from the wind in the storm. An apartment building on Dewey Place was destroyed from the strong winds and rain in the storm. Police had to put up barricades around fallen apartment buildings on Dewey Place after the storm to keep people out of the debris. During the storm, the water level rose so much that it looks like the boardwalk is a floating dock on Maine and Atlantic Avenues in Atlantic City. A ramp was completely detached from the boardwalk after the storm on Maine and Atlantic Avenues in Atlantic City.

Arlene Fadigan

Egg Harbor Township