First flood, now flames.
Hurricane Sandy victims found themselves homeless a second time when a fatal fire destroyed a Jersey Shore motel that was still housing the displaced survivors.
Four bodies were pulled from the charred wreckage of the Mariner’s Cove Motor Inn in Point Pleasant Beach in the hours after the early-morning fire Friday. Among those who fled the flames but have again lost their home and possessions were at least four motel guests displaced by the October 2010 superstorm.
“It was the sound of timbers burning upstairs,” Sandy victim Joe Frystock, 57, said of the nightmarish “popping” sounds that woke him in his second-floor room at around 5:30 a.m.
“I looked out and saw that orange glow, and there was no mistaking what it was,” he said. “People were yelling, ‘Help me! Help me!’ There was lots of screaming.”
Frystock’s home in nearby Brick Township had been inundated with 6 feet of water, and he described the motor inn as the latest in a series of temporary homes for himself and his son, Matthew, 24.
“A woman in the unit next to me — they pulled her from a bathtub, but I don’t know how anyone could have survived those flames,” Frystock said. “The entire second floor was engulfed, from one end to another.”
The woman had taken refuge from the inferno by standing in her shower and blasting the water. A firefighter handed her out of a window to another firefighter, who carried her down a ladder to safety.
She was being treated late Friday for severe burns, Ocean County officials said.
Mariner’s Cove manager Raj Patel had also lived with his family at the motel, and had rebuilt after Sandy flooded the first floor — including his family’s quarters.
Patel had a soft spot in his heart for fellow Sandy victims, and had allowed some to live at the motel free of charge when their FEMA benefits expired, according to The Star-Ledger.
Linda DeDreux, who owns the nearby Broadway Bar & Grill,
said firefighters told her one of the fatalities was a man in his 60s who was too afraid to jump out of his second-floor window.
Resident Peter Kuch did jump, suffering only a sprained ankle, after waking to the smell of smoke and opening his door to find a lounge area engulfed in fire.
“My window was only open an inch, and flames were already starting to come through it,” he said of his life-saving leap. “There was just no other way out.”