Photo courtesy of DavidGiordano.com
Mr. Contrubis had lived alone since his mother’s death a few years ago. He had outlasted storms before. This one would be no different.
As night fell on Monday, Oct. 29, Mr. Contrubis, 67, talked by phone with his brother-in-law. The wind had felled some branches, he reported, nothing more.
But around 6:45 p.m., water from Lower New York Bay breached the beachfront road and poured into Mr. Contrubis’s neighborhood, knocking out power and eventually swallowing entire blocks.
At some point, Mr. Contrubis left a message on the voice mail of his sister, Christina Contrubis.
“The water’s coming in,” he said softly.
His body was found in his house the next day.
Mr. Contrubis was one of eight people who drowned during Hurricane Sandy in Midland Beach, a small, low-slung neighborhood of one-story bungalows and newer two- and three-story houses. The eight lived within about eight short blocks of one another — apparently the highest concentration of deaths in the United States attributable to the storm, which killed more than 100 people in this country. READ MORE …
