(Note: The author, Joe Donohue, a close friend, is a former statehouse reporter for the Newark Star Ledger. He lives in the Trenton area. RA)

You missed a doozy. The shore probably is more damaged than any time since the 1962 storm. It’s awful. At one point, nearly 2.5 million in NJ alone were without power- about 40 percent of all homes! There still are more than 1 million without power. 85 percent of Long Island was without power at one point. Long Beach Island in central NJ was devastated. Nearly every beachfront house was demolished. Also, an amusement pier in Seaside Heights.

Two of my cousins have homes on the southern islands (Ventnor and N. Wildwood), which weren’t as badly damaged. But even their homes probably were flooded. We still don’t know since they won’t let people on the islands yet due to safety concerns. We fared relatively well, but were not totally unscathed. Hope remains without power. I got mine back yesterday afternoon. The wind toppled one of her trees into a fence. I was out Monday night for about a half hour cutting off branches to relieve the weight.

I swear we were getting 80 MPH gusts. It was brutal.

I was up most of the night because I was afraid of other damage to her place. Fortunately, it wasn’t too bad. But a block away, a tree crash smashed right into a living room roof. And another destroyed a garage. There are trees down all over the place in Hope’s neighborhood.

We happened to know a guy with a powerful chainsaw. He and I cut up the tree and disposed of it after three hours of effort Wednesday morning. To top it off, this is our vacation week. What a blast! But I can’t complain. None of us were hurt and I got a LOT of exercise cleaning up.

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Pictures Show How Bad the Damage Was

From UK’s Daily Mail, here’s a link to a large collection of pictures that show the astounding damage caused by the hurricane.