As waters breached the blue-walled shop at the Surf City Marina in New Jersey on Saturday, Kenny Formica’s mind went straight to Hurricane Sandy. It was the only other time the boat dealership – run by his family since the 1980s – had ever flooded.
“We rarely get water in here, but this has just been something else,” Formica said of the intense nor’easter storm battering the Northeast this weekend. “Hurricane Sandy taught us that if the flooding is gonna happen, it’s gonna happen. You can’t stop it.”
The Surf City Marina sits on the western edge of Long Beach Island, overlooking Manahawkin Bay. Formica told CNN he was watching surveillance footage from his home on the mainland Saturday morning when he noticed water glistening where the shop’s rug should have been.
He called his dad, his business partner at the marina, and told him the damage to the shop and its docks was bound to be worse than they were anticipating.
“I don’t have the energy for the cleanup, let alone my dad. Here’s a guy who built the docks once originally from scratch, and rebuilt them again after Sandy,” Formica said. “He just can’t go through rebuilding them a third time.”
Formica had woken up Saturday to texts from worried customers and neighbors saying flooding in their area was worse than expected, and that he should check in on his marina.
“Given the time of year, our cash flow drops drastically as a seasonal marina, and now I’m gonna have to lay out tens of thousands of dollars to rip up carpet, replace inventory, rip up sheet rock,” he said.
But all he can do now is hope that Sunday’s forecast doesn’t bring compounding devastation, he said.
“I mean it’ll never be easy, but we keep going,” he said.
Formica added: “It’s the Shore. It’s resilient, it’s strong, it’ll always bounce back.”
CNN’s Nic Anderson contributed to this reporting.