A year ago today, Hurricane Sandy took its toll on the Northeast. INSIDE EDITION looks back at the damage and recovery one year later.
It started like any other hurricane as a tropical depression in the Caribbean. But even at that early stage, meteorologists could tell that Sandy was going to be one for the history books.
Meteorologist Audrey Puente told INSIDE EDITION, " We were all here at our station really looking at this asking if it was really going to happen because the worst case scenario had already been predicted well in advance."
The Northeast braced for an unprecedented blow. President Obama urged citizens to listen to what states and local officials were saying as officials forced people to evacuate.
After a full week of anxiety, the monster finally came ashore the night of October 29th and all the predictions proved deadly accurate.
At the Jersey Shore, a massive wall of water surged inland.
Drexel University professor Scott Knowles in Philadelphia is an expert on natural disasters and has studied superstorm Sandy.
Knowles told INSIDE EDITION, "This was a storm of tremendous and unparallaled size. It was acutally the larget storm to ever hit the East Coast and push an enormous wall of water into the U.S.'s most populated region."
The ocean poured into the New York subway stations and cascaded into the pit at the World Trade Center building site. The streets became rivers as they swallowed cars. An iconic shot of a parking lot full of submerged taxies was taken in Hoboken, New Jersey.
An explosion at a power plant plunged lower Manhattan into darkness—the moment was captured on a surveillance camera mounted on a bridge. In the neighborhood of Breezy Point, Queens, the superstorm sparked a firestorm when high winds downed powerlines.
The morning light of October 30th revealed the full extent of Sandy's wrath as coastal communities were devastated.
Lisa Guerrero explained the devestation as she walked alongside a beach in Queens, "The devestation in Queens is unbelievable. If you look up at this one house in particular, you can see up into the kitchen where the dishes were still in the cupboards but the entire facade was blown away."
The wreckage of Seaside Heights, New Jersey came to symbolize the destruction on the Jersey Shore showing the the landmark roller coaster dumped into the sea.
Breezy Point was a wasteland where 135 houses burned to the ground.
Exactly one year later, the charred remains have been cleared away and the rebuilding has begun. Sandy wreaked havoc on a scale never before seen, but, slowly, we're coming back from the superstorm of the century.
