How one hard-hit Rocky Point block fared after floodwaters rose

Hagerman Landing Road is the type of block easily missed without a map, a dead-end street in Rocky Point across from town and county parkland by the entrance to Tides Beach on Long Island Sound.

With homes averaging about $500,000 in value, residents of the block include a retired drug and alcohol counselor, a grocery store manager and a golf course worker.

Some have lived there for generations, others less than a year. But after a rainstorm on the night of Aug. 18 into the early morning of Aug. 19 that dropped up to 9.4 inches of rain in the area, the block has a distinction none of its residents wanted — some of the worst damage in Suffolk County.

Gov. Kathy Hochul on Friday declared a disaster emergency for the county and said she would request federal aid.

The five families devastated by the flood on a block with seven houses said they had invested much of their life savings into dwellings that no longer feel like homes. None of them had flood insurance.

"I don’t own anything anymore. Everything is gone," Christian Loy, an electrician who rents a home on the block, said Wednesday, his voice cracking slightly. "Forty-eight years of living is in this dumpster now."

An unwelcome plug

Brookhaven Town Highway Superintendent Dan Losquadro said Hagerman Landing Road is a natural drainage point to the Sound that acts like a funnel for surrounding roads.

During the weather event, storm drains and pipes that normally would carry rainwater to the Sound were overwhelmed by a deluge of dirt and debris. If Hagerman was a bowl, Losquadro explained, the sediment blockage was an unwelcome plug that turned the quiet street into a bathtub filling rapidly with water.

"The volume of rain over the short-term period overwhelmed and destroyed systems that easily survived catastrophic events," he said.

The scope of the damage was wide ranging across the county, what Hochul's office called "a 1-in-1,000-year rain event," saying more than 2,000 residents and business owners experienced flood damage in some capacity.

Besides damage in Rocky Point, the torrential rain, which came down in intense bands, left parts of Smithtown, Stony Brook and Commack in tatters, washing out roads, battering homes and displacing wildlife.

By Wednesday, four of the five damaged homes on Hagerman Landing Road already had dumpsters outside — repositories for irreplaceable items transformed into debris.

While residents escaped without injury, the storm exposed a vulnerability none imagined possible and left them with more questions than answers.

Could they afford to fix their homes? Would insurance or government reimbursement make them whole? And why were their homes damaged when others nearby were spared?

'Let's get out of here'

Loy woke up at 2 a.m. Monday to a feeling he’d never felt before: his bed, frame and all, floating across his bedroom. Anxious, he leapt out of bed, finding himself in waist-high water.

"I was confused," he said. "I didn’t know where the water was coming from. I didn’t know if it was coming from outside or if a pipe burst."

Reality dawned as he ran outside, wearing only underwear, sneakers and a leather motorcycle jacket, and climbed to the top of his Ford F-150, which was fully engulfed with water.

He scanned the block, which resembled an Olympic-sized swimming pool, trying to decide what to do next.

In the distance, he heard his next-door neighbor, Yvonne Montesantos, 73, screaming for help.

Loy jumped down from the truck and swam to his backyard before hopping a fence and onto the neighbors' patio.

"I opened the [patio] door and yelled, ‘Come on, let’s get out of here!'" Loy recalled telling Yvonne and her husband, Jerry Montesantos, 76.

Moments later, the Rocky Point Fire Department arrived, evacuating all three, using a rope pulley system to bring them to dry ground. Jerry Montesantos clutched the family's Shih Tzu, Sofia, as they evacuated.

"I’m a normal person that did what a normal person is supposed to do," Loy said of helping his neighbors. "If somebody falls, you’re not supposed to step over them. You’re supposed to help them out."

On Wednesday, he took a Newsday reporter through his rental home.

A refrigerator was horizontal. His dresser drawers, ripped from their hinges, looked like they’d been in a woodchipper. Outside, a half-filled oil tank, dislodged from an exterior wall, rested on its side.

A framed Bruce Springsteen poster, hanging high on a living room wall, could be cleaned up. The electrical panel, which had been submerged, continued operating, a mystery the electrician could not explain.

But most of the contents of Loy's residence, inside and out, were a total loss. That included a $30,000 record collection, a $15,000 truck and motorcycles valued at a combined $25,000.

"Some of it is sentimental, but it’s still just stuff. I’m sad. I’ve got all of the emotions," he said. "But at the end of the day, you just got to stay positive and keep moving forward. A year from now, this will just be a terrible memory."

'This was going to be our vacation'

The Montesantos couple thought they finally had the perfect retirement home after a lifetime of labor. They said they invested more than $200,000 this year into renovating their home with all of the finest furnishings: Mahogany wood floors. A new kitchen with marble countertops. A washer and dryer.

Everything was top of the line, said Jerry Montesantos, a retired Bank of America employee.

"We never went on vacation. This was going to be our vacation," he added of the summer home they'd owned for 45 years but only lived in part-time until recently.

On Wednesday, the Montesantos couple cleared out items from their flooded dream home, dejected but grateful to be alive after a daring rescue by area first responders.

In the early morning hours Monday, they woke to the sound of their restless dog. Jerry knew something was wrong when got out of bed and stepped into a pool of water.

He saw the rear of their red Hyundai Sonata, parked outside, wedged 6 inches off the ground against a tree.

Jerry moved Yvonne and Sofia to the attic of their one-story home — fearful the waters could rise even farther — and called the Rocky Point Fire Department for help.

Fire Chief Sean McCarrick said the 2:24 a.m. call was "for two people in a house up to their neck in water. And then we lost contact with them after that. So obviously it was a more heightened ... situation."

Loy heard Yvonne’s cry for help and quickly rushed to their back door to let them out. Moments later, fire officials arrived on an inflatable motorboat.

Rescue swimmer brothers Second Lt. Chris McCabe and volunteer Sean McCabe arrived in the backyard in hazmat-style water suits.

Tethered to other firefighters, they handed life vests to the Montesantoses and helped them navigate by rope to higher ground. The first responders came back for Loy, who by then was on top of his fully submerged truck, unable to find an escape route.

"I’ve been a firefighter for 28 years and I’ve never seen anything like that," First Assistant Fire Chief Sean Martin said.

On Wednesday, Jerry Montesantos dug through what remained of his personal heirlooms. 

"We live on Social Security," he said. "That just wiped out our whole savings…We’re starting from scratch again."

'We didn't sleep'

Karen Sinda woke up at 2:30 a.m. when messages in a neighborhood group text, set up to organize a Labor Day barbecue, began buzzing her phone. She thought it was odd anyone would want to discuss hamburger buns in the wee hours of the morning.

They didn’t.

"I’m thinking, ‘Why are you sending texts at 2:30 in the morning?'" said Sinda, 61, a project manager who has lived on the block nine years.

The flurry of messages was about the flooding. Her neighbor, Constantine "Gus" Giannakos, sent a photo of the door to his basement steps with the water just inches below his feet.

His family's finished basement — the main living quarters for his elderly mother, who has dementia — was inundated from the floor to the ceiling during the storm. The Giannakos family watched in disbelief, at one point spotting firefighters outside in an inflatable motorboat.

"From 2:30 in the morning, we didn't sleep until Monday night," Giannakos, 54, said Wednesday.

Sinda’s home had been spared during previous area floods, and she thought it might escape unscathed again.

But when she opened the door to her recently finished basement and saw a cabinet door, laundry detergent bottle and Stop & Shop bag floating by, that hope was extinguished.

Sinda woke up her fiance, Jeff Litzko, 60, and the pair, she said, spent the next few hours "shell shocked." When the sun came up, Sinda could see firefighters pumping water out of the street.

"I have to say that was pretty awesome," she said. "By the time it was around 6:30 a.m., the water was gone. It was murky, muddy stuff."

The couple's first floor stayed dry, but said their list of destroyed belongings includes power tools, golf clubs, electric bikes, Lionel train sets, U.S. military memorabilia and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle that previously never had been in the rain.

"Ironically, it came to its death in 5 feet of flood water," Sinda said.

The couple said insurance company representatives already have told them their claim will be denied. While a monetary loss that may be tens of thousands of dollars or more, for them it’s the damage to priceless sentimental items that hurts the most.

After the storm, Litzko unscrewed the wood casing of a 1968 oil painting of his late father, Walter Litzko, that was created from a 1946 photo taken during his days in the U.S. Army Air Corps. The heirloom was covered in mud, but the paint had not run.

"This is an irreplaceable thing," Litzko said of a painting he hopes can be salvaged with a professional cleaning.

‘Is this a dream?'

Perry Gallup’s eyes darted around the remains of his ruined garage Wednesday, heartbroken for the loss and wistful about belongings that couldn't be replaced.

The structure was musty and covered with a layer of grime in the aftermath of an estimated 10 feet of water that surged through the garage door, crushing its frame, at around 3 a.m. Monday.

Gallup, 82, pointed to a classic 1984 Corvette, once in pristine condition and with just 35,000 miles, that he inherited from his brother-in-law. Then the homeowner moved to his three motorcycles, including the Harley he rode with his wife, Kathleen, 74, early in their courtship and the more recent model they ride these days.

He spoke about losing countless baby photos along with wedding albums and Christmas decorations his mother made that had lit up the road for decades.

"I am still trying to reckon with what happened here, but it’s very disheartening," Gallup said. "You can get overwhelmed. Tears in my eyes, I look around and ask, ‘What happened? Is this a dream?’"

The floodwaters never made it into the couple's two-story home, which Kathleen's family built on an elevated slope in 1937. Her mother is an original Hagerman and one of the street’s namesakes.

The couple evacuated the house before 4 a.m., fleeing to the nearby home of Perry's brother. When they returned after dawn, the water had receded.

On Wednesday, the Gallups still were waiting for a dumpster, but doing their best to work through the mess in the garage by moving items to the curb and to the foot of the driveway.

Many neighbors had lost much more. The Gallups had a working refrigerator and bathroom they shared with those in need, along with bottles of water. A hot meal. Some dry clothes.

Kathleen said the block's neighbors, who admittedly were never close, have rallied to each other's sides.

"You realize that you’re crying over things," she said of lost possessions. "I’m very grateful to be standing here."