That link ↑ didn't appear as a link, try this one

http://tinyurl.com/longport-bridge-closed

826, I was hoping to see more comments to this thread by now.

I know Frank was there over the weekend and hopefully will post what he found.

My family arrived to inspect their house and environs in the north end on Friday. From what I can gather, the worst flooding was in the south end, as usual, but the north end and the Gardens didn't escape unscathed.

By the time they arrived, water was gone, but the entire beach blocks from 1st to North Sts were buried in up to three feet of sand. Mostly due to residents with small tractors, the streets and driveways were being cleared, but there was nowhere to go with that amount of sand. They made zig-zag piles in the streets, and made a 15' sand wall on the beach.

Beachfront homes sustained substantial damage. One had a spa on the second floor deck that the wind smashed through a huge window, allowing sand and water to collect in the house, which eventually buckled 1st floor doors. Another had a support collumn swept away, but someone had propped it up before it collapsed. An unidentified storage shed had been deposited on the street...although still in good shape, it was destroyed by city workers.

I've got pics I can send you of all this if you message me via my profile page with your email address. Please post what you know of other areas.

Our house is in the 800 block of Pennlyn 5 houses from Corinthian. Water was in our street sometime Monday morning (we had 2 neighbors stay during the storm so we had many updates) and our neighbor thought that the dunes on 2nd street were the first to breach as he said the water came rolling down Corinthian. The worst surge tide came Monday night, with Tuesday mornings being a little worse. Pennlyn lost power sometime Monday and got it back sometime Tuesday...down about 24 hours. Water started to drain on Tuesday and slowly but surely it worked it's way back to the beach. By Wednesday most of our street was dry but the Atlantic and left behind mud, gunk and junk! We got down to OC on Thursday afternoon and coming across the 9th street bride things didn’t look too bad...that was till we got to Asbury. The stores along Asbury took it bad! Looked like they had a couple of feet of water in them and as of Thursday still had no power. We have a neighbor who has a store between 7th and 8th and her place has to be gutted to the studs. When we got to Pennlyn we found that at the Monday night surge we had about 18 inches of the Atlantic in our garage. It left behind some real muck in our garage and about 2 inches of mud in the street. We lost some things that were in our storage room (a frig, some old golf clubs, some booze and soda...basically anything that was within 18 inches of the floor) and had a bunch of muck to clean out, but we had electricity, hear, cable, and internet which was more than we had on Long Island (we joked that we'd been evacuated to the Jersey Shore). It was three full days of clearing out garbage (we did get rid of a lot of junk that we didn't need) and then hosing, scrubbing, hosing again, squidgy work, and then spraying everything with bleach. Lots of junk around the house (the outside shower had about 3 inches of sand in it) and we did find drift wood and clumps of dune grass all over the property but the best was our neighbor who had a TV and Magic 8 Ball float into their back yard! We have a great street and neighbors were helping neighbors but there were some that came and went within a few hours on Saturday and I fear that those that took the quick and dirty approach will pay the price down the road. Drove around a little on Saturday and there were many houses that you could tell had not been attended too since Sandy. Also streets that had a particularly foul odder which was the result of un-cleaned muck. In our area folks who were up by Atlantic got no water and were in pretty good shape.

I wanted to give an update since we were at our beach house this past weekend as well. All we had was about 10 inches of water in the garage, but it was all gone when we got there. We had moved all the contents of the garage up to the first floor, so we didn't have a lot of cleaning to do of property.

We powerwashed the garage floor, and power washed the driveway and exterior of the house. That was it! The house is as good as new. We spent the rest of our time helping our neighbors get cleaned up.

I rode around the island to survey the damages, except I never made it up to the gardens.

The boardwalk is 100% intact. I rode the whole boardwalk on my bike. Any boards that were lifted, which were very few, were already repaired. ALL of the shops on the boardwalk were fine. No damage at all. No flooding. Amazing. Many were open and it seemed like a normal day on the boardwalk.

Many of the ramps down to the beach were damaged and there was a lot of sand piled up around the steps. Probably about a foot of sand.

The dunes in the north side were gone. But the beaches were huge and beautiful, very wide, like a natural beach replenishment project. It was amazing. Other dunes farther north and down by the Gold Coast were still there.

The boardwalk benches were all fine, and so were the little sitting areas and gazebos that are in a few areas of the boardwalk.

Most of the island looks just like you left it. I was expecting sand piled on every property but mostly everything was just fine and you would not know a storm went through, except that people were flooded and were throwing out wet furniture and debris. The city placed dumpsters all over the city and they were all full, but we could take debris to the recycling center on Shelter Rd by the airport.

There were some hard-hit areas, however. The downtown stores were all flooded on Asbury Ave. They are in cleanup mode and expect to have their stores back open by Thanksgiving.

There was a lot of sand in the south side of the island, and many homeowners living along the bay, expecially in the south side, were flooded.

I saw very little structural or roof damage. For the most part the problem was flooding.

Many churches were hard hit. The homes and churches that were closer to the bay side and where they were not built over a garage suffered flooding in their main living areas.

But I was very happy to see how well everything looked! I was expecting much worse. We dodged a bullet and I feel very blessed and very thankful.

I took a lot of pictures and will try to post them somewhere so I can share them.

I just wanted to add my comments now that Sandy is a few weeks behind us. We were down this weekend and live very close to the shops on Asbury. At this point, about 50% of the shops and restaurants are open for business. The other 50% are in various stages of repair. Work crews were there in force on Saturday. Pretty much all the stores have been gutted and they are working on installing new drywall, etc... I was very surprised how great everything looked based upon pictures of Asbury during the flood. Our local North End coffee shops were open for business as well. As 826 indicated, the boardwalk is 100% business as usual. There is still sand pushed under the ramps but all the boardwalk shops which are usually open this time of year were open. Mancos had a line out the door at lunch time! The beach itself looked fine. Looks like the dunes were lost but the beach itself looked the same. All in all I was very pleasantly surprised at the overall condition of the Island.