Almost Four Years After Sandy, Home Repairs Begin

Joe Corr’s home was lifted by hydraulic jacks this week.

With any luck, that will prevent a second round of flooding like when Superstorm Sandy made landfall in October 2012, leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage at his home and marina in Shinnecock Hills.

It wasn’t until more than three years later, in December 2015, that the flood insurance reimbursement for Mr. Corr’s home was resolved. Reimbursement for damage at the marina is still pending but is expected to be settled in a week or so.

“It’s a start, it’s definitely a start,” Mr. Corr said last week after a long-awaited visit from Nicholas Bros. of Hopewell Junction, New York, to get the house up on the jacks.

“We ain’t done the repairs, because the house needs to be raised,” he said. “There hasn’t been any heat in that house in almost four years … all the water pipes broke. I can’t live in it—I had to buy a camper to live in.”

As with at many homes after Sandy, the insurance payout needed to be settled—or challenged—before the house could be raised and the repair work started. But this was “the most egregious” instance that William Doyle, director of constituent services for U.S. Representative Lee Zeldin, said his office had seen.

According to contractors’ estimates, the damage to Mr. Corr’s residence totaled about $380,000. Appliances, heating system, roof, walls and floors had been ruined by about 5 feet of flood water, and the house had to be raised to prevent future flooding.

Travelers, the insurance company through which Mr. Corr and his wife, Sherry, had flood insurance, set the figure at only about a third of that—$123,000. It was only after he insisted on seeing an insurance adjuster’s photos of his home, Mr. Corr said, that he discovered the problem: The adjuster had been looking at damage to the wrong house.

“The insurance company under-credited him for what he had [that was] damaged,” said Mr. Doyle.

That problem was so pervasive that FEMA reopened Sandy insurance claims in May 2015—the original deadline was one year to challenge after the first response from the insurer.

As a “last-ditch effort,” Mr. Corr said, he had gone to Mr. Zeldin’s office shortly before the FEMA deadline was reopened last year.

“Joe came here one day and he dropped off his papers. I drove out to his house ... actually got to see the house,” Mr. Doyle said.

“It was quite moving,” he said. “He’d been living in a house—that was the third winter, him and his wife and his daughter—with no heat, with kerosene being the heat in the house. You could still see the water line.”

Mr. Zeldin’s office pressed FEMA to reassess insurance claims for a total of eight households, but the other people were at least still living in their homes, according to Mr. Doyle.

Mr. Corr expressed gratitude to both Mr. Doyle and his insurance agent, John Maloney of Maloney and Maloney in Hampton Bays, who, he said, “throughout this whole ordeal has not let up on fighting.”

Indeed, Mr. Maloney said last week that he had a file of paperwork for Mr. Corr’s claim that was about 3 feet high. “I’m so angry that he was treated the way he was treated,” Mr. Maloney said.

A few details remain before the insurance claim can be resolved for Mr. Corr’s marina, where, the owner said, almost $300,000 worth of damage was sustained by docks, pilings and a workshop containing tools and equipment.