Interview with Karen Kiely, December 6, 2013

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay. My name is Trudi-Ann Lawrence and today is December 6. So, can you tell me your name for the record?

KAREN KIELY: I'm Karen KIELY.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay, and if you don't mind sharing your age.

KAREN KIELY: Ooh.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay, that's fine [laughter]. That's okay. Could you just state your ethnicity for the recording?

KAREN KIELY: White.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay. And so, how long have you lived here?

KAREN KIELY: Fifteen years.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay. In this house particularly?

KAREN KIELY: Yes.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay. If you don't mind, just a brief overview of the price for the house when you first purchased it, how many bedrooms are in here, and any specific reason why you chose this house?

KAREN KIELY: Okay. I was a single parent and I was working for a corporation, and one of my son's friends sat me down. She worked for a mortgage company and we were having breakfast one morning, the first day of school, sending all the kids to school. And she said, "It's about time you started looking for a house." She's been with this company for a while now, like, "Buy a house." 00:01:00Okay. She said, "I'll walk you through the whole process." So she had a realtor call me two days later, and I said, "I just wanna look in Union Beach because we've been in Union Beach for twenty-four years." My two older sons are thirteen and eleven years older than my two younger children, all from the same family, the same father, and the two younger kids were in probably like fifth, sixth grade when I started the process for the house. She walked me through everything. This house was a foreclosure, and I bought it 1999. No one was looking at foreclosures in 1999. People were just buying and they were having bidding wars on houses at that time. So, I did something very unusual in the bidding process as well. I came up with the amount that my friend said, "If you 00:02:00want that house, you have to bid 10,000 over what they're asking because it is a foreclosure." She said, "Other people will come in." They were asking for 95,000. I think that was 95 or 105, one or the other. She said, "Somebody else is going to come in, 5,000 over that and somebody's going to come in, maybe 6 or 7,000 over that." She said, "If you really want that house," she said, "It's a great price, then bid 10,000 over," so I did. I wound up purchasing the house for 116,000. But I did 116,000 instead of 115, so I had that extra thousand dollar cushion over another bidder, and then I put 500 on top of that so I have that $500 cushion on top of someone else, and then I did another $75 on top of that and through change-in as well. And the realtor said, "I've never had anybody put that kind of a bid on a house." So I said -- but, again, I explained my thinking. It gives me that edge. If somebody else comes in at $116,500, I've got this $75 over them. And if somebody else comes in at that 00:03:00$75 over, I've got to change over them, and it has to go to the highest bidder.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Yeah.

KAREN KIELY: So I tried to cover the bases all the way around. So when he calls me and said that I won the bid and I said, "Oh, how did they tell you who won the bid, and do you know what the other bids were?" He said, "No. It's just published what the winning bid was." He said, "And yours was such an odd number." He said, "We know that it's you that won the house."

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: All right.

KAREN KIELY: That's how that came to pass. And then I was able to include another $20,000 on top of the 116,000 because it had to be renovated. It was a foreclosure. The back doors were -- there were glass doors in the bedroom, and they were broken. And there was smelly, ugly carpet throughout the whole house that had that smell from pets.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay.

KAREN KIELY: It was gross. All the walls were painted these really dark colors. Somebody had come in to take the light fixtures out, and they stripped the place. In the kitchen, there were no appliances. There was probably five cabinets, and the cabinets were covered in wood grain contact paper [laughter].

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Wow.

KAREN KIELY: So I added the 20,000 in to do everything. So it turns out there's 11 rooms. I'd never owned a house before. HDTV hadn't come out yet, so I didn't have all that experience and knowledge from HDTV to guide me through all this. So I have my two older sons, who I guess were in their early 20s at that time, and they rounded up their friends and they spent 2 months doing as much renovation as they could. And they ripped up all the carpeting; we found the 00:05:00hardwood floors underneath up here. We put in a sub-floor downstairs because that basement was -- that's a cement addition I guess that they had it on. It was a cement garage.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: It's a full basement?

KAREN KIELY: Yeah.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Originally [unintelligible - 00: 05: 16] like a…

KAREN KIELY: Yes, there's four steps down that I guess went to a garage.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay.

KAREN KIELY: But for some reason, the floor is sunken down there. There's I guess a 5-inch cement border around the floor. So when you step down the stairs, you step on that -- that last step was like that border, and then you step down into the ground downstairs.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay.

KAREN KIELY: Then the people that were in the house before me had continued the cement slab back and built three more bedrooms and a full bath back there. It was owned by a foreign company, foreign couple, and I think the husband had a limousine service business because we were getting magazines for them. Every 00:06:00time one of them came in, my heart just broke for those people that they lost their house, as happy as I was. And I probably looked for seven or eight months before I found this house because anything else that I was eligible to buy, got into those bidding wars. And I couldn't find the house. And I was fighting to a point where I was willing to take anything. They showed me a house that had sunken floors, like they were dipped in the middle because they were so old. It would have been a horror show if I'd bought one of these other houses. But at that point, it's like I'm still paying rent while living up on the highway, and we just lucked out getting this. And then like I said, my girlfriend, Laura [Cola], who has passed away since, worked for a mortgage company, and she guided me through the whole process. I did not lead one document.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Wow.

KAREN KIELY: I just sat at her house for like half an hour one night and just signed off on everything. Then, as it turns out, I wasn't making enough money 00:07:00to secure the mortgage on my own. My older son was working at Home Depot, and they had to include him as a co-purchaser on the house in order for me to be eligible for the mortgage. We did that, bought the house, and then immediately, I refinanced after they took his name off because this was my house. I was doing this.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Right.

KAREN KIELY: Then my oldest son would come back years later and say, "I felt like market was instrumental and you're getting the house and I wasn't able to contribute." But he's the one that organized all the labor that painted every single room in this house that did the kills on the stain stuff. He took a job with a cabinet company, and they installed all my cabinets. We bought the cabinets at a warehouse, and they came in boxes. So the guy that he worked for came over. My son brought some of his friends over. They put all the cabinets together then hung the cabinets, put the counter work in, and other estimates I 00:08:00had for the cabinets was between 5,000 and $8,000 because it's a lot of cabinets. It's a big kitchen. I think we wound up purchasing all the cabinets and the countertops for about $3,000.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Wow.

KAREN KIELY: So that worked out really well.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: It's a great deal.

KAREN KIELY: My son put the floor down in the kitchen, and that's the vinyl tile. But it looks like it has the grout on it. And that's when they had first come out with that tile, so really it looks like a slate floor. And when people come in, they're like, "Oh my, gosh. Look at this floor." They think it's really slate. And then, a couple of months after he puts the tile down, I decide I'm really going to clean the floor, and I use bleach on it and it turned it yellowish.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Oh no.

KAREN KIELY: You're not supposed to use that on those products. So, live and learn kind of thing.

TL: Right.

KAREN KIELY: But he was the one that organized all his friends and my other son's friends and got everybody in here and got them doing the painting and 00:09:00putting the light fixtures in. Like he could do outlets kind of electric, but that was the extent of the electric that he could do. We had to have a general contractor. And my best friend has a brother that is very well connected, and he had a guy doing business that runs a contracting company that owed him favors, and because of our relationship with her family, he called in a favor and had this guy be my general contractor. And he was not happy about it all because he used to just work on commercial properties. They didn't have to deal with homeowners.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Right.

KAREN KIELY: But he came in and got everything up and running, and so they put in -- I have a Jacuzzi, a nine-jet Jacuzzi bathtub in my bathroom, and my bathroom is very small. And this was when they came out with those drop-in tubs, they call it, so I didn't have to build a platform around it or anything. It looks like a regular bathtub, but it has nine jets in it, so.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: That's nice.

KAREN KIELY: Yeah. Really, really cool. The house had central air when I moved in, and it had the central heat, I guess. It's four-stair heat or something. But, they had two separate units. So there's one unit for up here that's under the crawl space in the house, and there's another unit for downstairs that's in the closet in the back bedroom. So the furnaces, I kept the same what was here, but I had to put in new central air units. So that ate up a lot of money doing that too, but it is so nice having central air and central heat. All fanatical about shut the lights off and you can't put the central air on until it's 85 degrees or higher because I was working all day and the kids were working and the [unintelligible - 00: 10: 48] ones were in school and stuff. So I was really stern about that, trying to keep the bills down and stuff.

The house has gone through a lot since then, so I updated my kitchen recently by 00:11:00putting in all new light fixtures up in the kitchen. I put in a new ceiling fan in here to kind of update this a little bit. When I got laid off from my last job, one of the last things I bought was the flat-screen TV because I wanted it to look updated. I didn't want my house to be old looking and I didn't know when I'd have enough money to purchase a new TV. The other TV was working fine, but I wanted my house to look current and updated.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Modern, yeah.

KAREN KIELY: Then the TV stand, I guess, whatever you call it, underneath it, I got in a yard sale. Some woman -- it was a moving sale. She was moving to Colorado in two weeks' time and she had only decided that -- she'd gotten laid off. And the minute she got laid off, she decided she was going to leave and move in with her boyfriend in Colorado. So I bought that and I bought a queen-sized bed from her, and I bought a dresser from her. And all her furniture was from Raymour & Flanigan.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay.

KAREN KIELY: I got great prices on this stuff, so yeah, that was my last 00:12:00paycheck that I bought all this. And I'm glad I did, because it does keep it updating. I don't feel like it's old. I haven't worked in the last three years. I've aged out of my position. I used to be an executive assistant in corporate America, and my competition are 30- and 40-year-old-women that have the same education that I have, the same degrees that I have, and the same experience that I have. And as illegal as it is, it is what it is. I haven't worked in three years.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: A little bit older?

KAREN KIELY: Yeah.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay. Can you tell me what you like about living in New Jersey?

KAREN KIELY: My gosh. I grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey. We always came down to the shore to either -- one year, we went to Keansburg, but most after that, I think every summer, we went out to Point Pleasant. And we would get cabins for 00:13:00two weeks. And my father, all my uncles were all cops, and they would come on their days off and on their weekends. And so, that was my life growing up. It was Hoboken in the Jersey Shore on the summer. I love living in New Jersey because when I was in Hoboken High School, I was working in New York City, like a work-study program. I worked for AT&T. It was fifteen minutes on the subway to get to the city. Here, I walk three blocks up to the highway, and I can catch a bus to the city.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Oh, you still can [unintelligible -- 00: 13: 35]?

KAREN KIELY: Yes. It takes about an hour, normally. Depending on traffic or delays, it can be an hour and a half. And if you figure an hour and a half commute each way, that's 3 hours a day commute. I don't want to do that commuting anymore. When I was working in corporate America, the three companies that I worked for all had New York City offices. I always spent one or two days 00:14:00a week in New York City. And then one company, their office manager left the New York City office and I took over for the whole summer, and then they wound up closing in New York City office, so I was responsible for closing the office for them. I love having that access to the city. I love, love, love the city. Then I have a friend that lives in Pennsylvania that I went to. I have five friends that I grew up with. We've lived in the same neighborhood for 18 years, school years, but we all went to different schools. So one friend lives in Pennsylvania and has a summer house in [Wynnewood]. So it's an hour to Pennsylvania -- well, 2 hours to Pennsylvania, and it's two and a half hours to [Wynnewood]. Another friend lives at the other end of Pennsylvania, and it's 2 hours to get -- actually, she's on the Jersey side. Her husband's a forest ranger at Stokes Forest up in Sussex County, I think it is, and it's a couple of 00:15:00hours to go see her. We go whitewater rafting with them. You just have everything here in New Jersey, and I know everybody complains about the taxes, the cost of living. I have an adult handicap son. He gets $750 a month from Social Security. It's impossible to find an apartment here for that rent. However, he did find an apartment in Highlands a block from the water, and he lost everything in the flood. And he was a renter, so he's just out of the loop. He came to stay with me during the [cost] of the storm.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Right.

KAREN KIELY: It's just impossible for him to find something for $750 a month, which is all of his money anyway, but -- so I love being in New Jersey. When I graduated high school, I went to Florida and I lived in Florida for five years, 00:16:00and then I came back to New Jersey probably for a month or two. And I was probably twenty-three, twenty-four around then, and I was like, "No, I can't live with mom and dad anymore." My brother was living on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, so I went up and stayed with him. I found a job. I was commuting an hour into Boston from Cape Cod for my job, and then I found a studio apartment in Brookline, Massachusetts, which is right outside Boston, and my friends from Jersey came to visit me and they went to a local bar while I was working, and then we all met for dinner after work and they had met a bunch of people at this bar during the day because it's a big college town. And I met my husband that night.

We lived in Boston for fifteen years, and then my husband became disabled. He had multiple back surgeries as well. I knew I needed to be closer to my family, so we all moved back to New Jersey in 1986 and we lived in my brother's house in 00:17:00Highlands. My brother has multiple properties that he owns and he had a house in Highlands, so we moved in there. And then I moved to apartments from there and I made connections in Union Beach. And my kids started going to Union Beach Schools, and so when it came time to buy this house, I wanted to stay in Union Beach. In retrospect, I wish I had moved to Hazlet. I wanted to keep the kids in the same school because I grew up like that, not having to switch schools or move out of my community or anything, and I really wish that I had moved to Hazlet only because it's a more affluent community. It's not that much more, but it makes a difference. To local people, Union Beach is not one of the more affluent communities, I guess.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay.

KAREN KIELY: There's a little stigma attached to that when you say you're from 00:18:00Union Beach. Now that my grandchildren are living here, my granddaughter's starting school. In retrospect, again, I wish we were at just the other side of the highway in Hazlet. It's a different perspective. But I have lifelong friends that I've made here, and I really do love Union Beach.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay.

KAREN KIELY: I really do. So, I'm happy I'm here.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: That's good.

KAREN KIELY: Yeah.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: All right. We're going to talk about the storm. When did you first hear that the storm was coming?

KAREN KIELY: Probably a week before. The year before, we had Hurricane Irene.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Right.

KAREN KIELY: I had some money still then and took the family, and we went to a hotel in Pennsylvania. And all of my daughter's friends were posting on Facebook that there's all this water and the water is up to their doors and the water is this high and this high, and my daughter took a picture of all of us at the pool at the hotel and said, "We're up to our necks in of water, warm pool 00:19:00water." So that was fun for Irene, but then I didn't have the money to move us, when Sandy was coming. And I am on one of the highest streets in Union Beach. I've heard that only ten percent of homes in Union Beach did not have water damage. I am one of those ten percent. My particular block is raised on a hill. It's a very slight hill, but it's a slight elevation that made the difference in being flooded and not being flooded.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Right.

KAREN KIELY: That's going from east to west. And then if you go north to south across the street, I'm also at an elevated peak there as well. So the block behind me, which is [Omak], was flooded. You couldn't drive up and down to your street. There was so much debris because the creek is two blocks away. The 00:20:00other block to the east of me, I guess, towards the water, you couldn't drive up and down to your block either. The next morning, after the storm, my son and I got in my Jeep--I have a Jeep Wrangler, so it's high--and we backed right out of the driveway, drove up to the corner. It was like we hit a warzone because of all the debris that was in the road. And none of that was in front of our house.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Right.

KAREN KIELY: But the rest of the town is just devastated.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Right. What thoughts did you have about Sandy when you first heard the storm was coming? Did you think it was going to be as bad as it was?

KAREN KIELY: No, absolutely not. The biggest thing that we worry about with the storm is that we have a tree on this side of the house that we need for shade, and branches fall off. And when we know there's going to be a heavy rainstorm, we don't park the cars in the driveway because big limbs do come off and one smashed a back window of one of our cars one time. But it's a really integral 00:21:00part of keeping the house cool in the summer because of the shade that it provides, so we don't want it take it down. And inevitably, branches will fall and stuff. My son at the time was twenty-two or twenty-three, and he had the bedroom that's directly under that tree, and he would always say, "The tree is going to come crashing through my roof and it's going to kill me. I don't want to sleep at my room for the storm." I said, "Well, fine. Come to my side of the house. You can sleep on the couch and whatever." They were fine. That was my big concern was that one tree. And as it turned out, that tree wasn't a concern. It was in the backyard. There are trees in the backyard, some of mine, some of my neighbors, and a huge limb fell and hit my back deck. And 00:22:00that's what broke the glass sliding windows. There's a crack in the outside pane. It didn't crash through anything, but just enough to break the pane, those double weatherproof panes and stuff. The circumference of the limb itself was probably two feet wide, and width of the limb was probably five or six feet big. It was huge piece of tree that fell in the backyard. I called my insurance company to tell them that I had this wind damage because it took the fascia board off the front of the house and it took some siding, like loosened up some siding around and caused some fence damage. When I called the insurance company, they told me that I have an $11,000 deductible. They said the reason that happened is because they had sent out a letter, adding on identity theft 00:23:00protection, adding on protection for the central air units and stuff, and they added three or four things and each thing cost approximately $2 to $3 a month more on your mortgage payment, on your insurance payment.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay.

KAREN KIELY: It said, "If you don't want them to add that stuff, then call them and they'll take it off. Otherwise, it's automatically being added on." I said, "I'll let it go for now. I'm not ready to really reevaluate my whole insurance policy at this time, so I'll just let it go." After Irene, I did have water damage downstairs. A limb hit the roof, put a hole in the roof and caused water damage down there, so they had replaced two walls and my floors downstairs, through the insurance company. When I called about this, they said that there was a letter that had gone out saying that you have to have this wind 00:24:00damage coverage. It was another 35 or $45 a month, and if you didn't get it, then it was five percent of your whole policy, whatever that was. That somehow -- that's how they came up with $11,000.

I never got a letter. I was never notified about this other thing. I called the insurance company and said to them, "So you're my agent. If you see in my policy that I let these little things ride, I didn't take them off, why wouldn't you contact me and say, 'This is a major hit to your policy. I just want to bring it to your attention. Do you want to get it?'" Well, her response was, "This was put into effect by our parent company." She said they don't know who got letters and who didn't get letters. They don't know who followed through and 00:25:00who didn't. I said, "In this day and age, in this computer day and age, you're going to tell me that your computer doesn't break down who took what and who has what and what changes were made and who had letters and stuff?" She said, "It was all run through the parent company. We don't know about it." She got very indignant because she felt that I was saying that she did not do her job and that she was neglectful in carrying out her duties. I tried to pull back from that a little bit because she's still my agent and I don't want to be on her bad side in trying to get all this pushed through, and then just life goes on and I never addressed it.

So my things didn't get fixed properly. Gateway Church has been very instrumental in our town in helping get things done, and they brought in a lot of volunteers. And there was one volunteer that fixed my fascia board, tacked 00:26:00down the siding that was gone. My awning out of my front door was completely off, and they put that back up. And what else did they do outside? They brought in a painting crew. There must have been 20 college kids here one day, and they painted my bedroom, the hallway, the living room, and they put everything in the kitchen into the middle of the kitchen for me because they didn't have enough time to do that. So I painted the ceiling and painted the kitchen myself because they left all their supplies for me and stuff. And they painted a big wall in my daughter's living room downstairs because that had been patched from Hurricane Irene, and there was some patchwork on there that still wasn't ever painted over, so we took advantage of their labor and had them fix that down there. So that's all done. The people that came with the painting crew, this woman took me to Home Depot and we bought some plants, and they paid 00:27:00for the plants and they did some landscaping outside for me. I have two planters out there that I usually fill every summer, spring, fall, so they always look. Aice and because they are just two containers, it's economical, it's easy. My kids aren't yelling at me that they're running over plants with the lawnmower and don't make it hard for them. They got all these supplies and stuff that I needed to fill that. I've racked up bills on my credit card because as much as I'm getting this free labor, a lot of the supplies are not free. The church rebuilt my bathroom downstairs, and it was kind of a big bathroom but it was a big 4-, 5-foot shower that they had in there. Then the second plumber that came said, "Instead of the shower, do you want a bathtub down here?" because he knows my daughter has the three babies down there. I 00:28:00said, "Absolutely." He said it's going to be a tight fit. I said, "That doesn't matter. We can live with that. To have a bathtub downstairs would be wonderful." So they gave me the bathtub, so they supplied that. They supplied the sheetrock and that kind of stuff to get the room built. I had to buy the vanity, the toilet, I had to buy the [kills], stuff it down there. I had to buy the lights for down there. I had to buy the tile, and I had to buy the accent tile for downstairs. I bought the grounding stuff and adhesive stuff. Well, I bought all the stuff, and it's all on my credit card. No job. But you know, you do what you have to do. I had to take advantage of this free labor to get this done. They demoed my bathroom in April of 2013, and the bathroom is still 00:29:00not done. But the toilet is working, so at least we can use the toilet. And that took place -- They got the toilet working probably in August or September of this year, of 2013 as well, so at least we have access to the toilet down there. But the shelves aren't built in, and like we said…

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: What happened to the bathroom?

KAREN KIELY: There was a leak through the venting system. You have the fan on to take the moisture out of the bathroom. Well, I guess water leaked in through there and caused all kinds of mold going on in there.

TL: Okay, all right.

KAREN KIELY: There's no windows in that bathroom.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Of course.

KAREN KIELY: They ripped down all the walls and they treated all the wood to get rid of all the molds and everything, and the existing floor was rotten in places, so they just took everything out. But they knew that I had a second bathroom up here, and I discussed this with them too, like, "I know other people 00:30:00have completely lost their homes. Other people need work done as well. But this is an integral part of my house." It keeps us separate. It keeps my half of the house separate from my daughter and the babies having their bathroom downstairs. So it's been hard having the three kids having full access to my house with downstairs fully baby-proof. Up here is to a degree, but the kids are always up here, they're supervised. But now, having them having to use my bathroom, my 4-year-old granddaughter needs to be -- I can't lock the door because she needed to come up here in the morning, took over the bathroom and stuff. So it was just crazy. But again, I count my blessings. They did it, they're doing the labor, everything's being done even though it's taking a really long time because they're working on other projects as well. And I'm 00:31:00just so grateful for whatever help that they'd given me.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Right. Did you make any preparations prior to the storm?

KAREN KIELY: I filled the bathtub with water because I didn't know what was going to happen with the water. We cooked everything that was in the freezer as much as we could, so I had the pork loins in there and I put in the crockpot and I made pulled pork. We had some steaks and we grilled the steaks after the storm because we could still use the grill. So we did that. I made sure that we had plenty of blankets. We made sure we had all the laundry completely done because, again, I didn't know how long we would be without electric. I never expected it to go to the extent it did. I thought I was over-prepared. My oldest son also watches those shows about the preppers, the Doomsday Preppers, 00:32:00so cases of water and the canned goods and that kind of stuff. Obviously I didn't take it that far, but that was a good kind of helpful hint thing, like make sure you have bottled water because we had the baby that's on formula. I think the baby, who was born in January…

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay. He's ten months.

KAREN KIELY: He's ten months old now. So I'm trying -- was he born during Sandy? No, he wasn't. He came after Sandy. But my daughter I guess was eight months pregnant at that time, and then she has another baby that's less…

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Yeah, [Cadence].

KAREN KIELY: [Cadence], yes, is two and a half now.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: So she was…

KAREN KIELY: Yeah, and her birthday is in June, so she was one and a half…

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Right.

KAREN KIELY: … I guess when the storm came. And I guess she was still on formula or something.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Cereal, probably?

KAREN KIELY: Yeah. Every day blends into the next day, and my timeline and my sense of time is so warped.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Yeah, I understand.

KAREN KIELY: It's hard to figure all that out. So yeah, we tried to prepare as -- you know. We never expected it to go the way it did. I think my son-in-law's brother was able to get us a generator. So again, this was after the fact, so we were really only without electric for two or three days. Then we had the generator to kick in. The biggest thing that we didn't expect was none of us had cellphone service. We all have T-Mobile, and I love T-Mobile. I've been with T-Mobile for almost ten years, and they were going to be part of AT&T. And then that fell through. They didn't do that. But because of the storm, they were able to join or use AT&T services, but it took five full days 00:34:00before we had any cellphone service in the house. That was really scary. That was the biggest surprise, I think. You expect to lose the electric and you expect to not be able to have water. And they're things you can plan for. You expect not to have gas to be able to use your stove and stuff. As it turned out, we were able to use the stove because we have a gas stove. We had boiled water on the stove to heat upstairs a little bit.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Yes.

KAREN KIELY: Then you have to be careful of that because that causes carbon monoxide from the gas running. So I would get the water heated up, and then once it boiled, then I would turn the gas off and just try to keep that to a minimum. So that was something that we really had to be careful about.

As far as preparation goes, like I said, it was cooking what was here so that we 00:35:00wouldn't lose stuff in the freezer. We didn't board up windows or anything. Actually, I think my son -- we did the masking tape or the duct tape on the windows, all because my son-in-law is the hyper one in the family. I'm very low-key, I'm very calm. Nothing fazes me. I'm not stupid. I take precautions as I see fit. It's just I've been through hurricanes before, in this house, and boarding of the windows or taping the windows just wasn't a big deal. It was a sense of comfort for my son-in-law, so "Yeah. Go ahead. Tape up the windows if that makes you comfortable."

That wasn't necessary. It was the water that was the big source of contention, 00:36:00I guess, or the source of destruction in town and that didn't -- luckily I didn't have water in my home.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Do you think that you had adequate warning from the officials letting you know what was going to happen?

KAREN KIELY: Yes. They didn't know what was going to happen. I think one or two days before, they were talking about it being the perfect storm and they were expecting the water to rise. And the beachfront always floods whenever there's a hurricane. The places down there, they always flood. But never up here, never up here. Like these creeks -- there have been a couple of times when you couldn't just drive in and out of town like you normally would because of the position of the creeks. Those streets would flood. So you couldn't get from one end of town to the other unless you went up on the highway, ran around the highway. There were ways to do it, but you had to finagle your ways in and 00:37:00out of the street to avoid the flooding to be able to drive home. But this time, it was a lot worse. And there's no way to prepare for that either. You can evacuate, but like I said, I didn't have the money to evacuate. We considered going to one of the evacuation centers. But we had the babies, my daughter was so pregnant. My son, we brought him from Highlands to here, and he can't sleep on couch or sleeping bags or floors or anything with his back. He would just be devastated. We thought about it and thought about it, and I just decided that we would just wait it out. And again, because of my position -- we were always considered, like -- I'm not in a flood zone, as far as insurance 00:38:00goes and homeowner's insurance and that stuff. I'm not in a flood zone. I don't know what's going to happen after this whole Sandy thing. I still didn't flood, so -- but… it's crazy.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Take me through the day of the storm. Were you here? Were you [unintelligible - 00: 38: 24] -- like what was the first sign of storm, like, "Oh, it's here"?

KAREN KIELY: It was later -- it was like five, six o'clock in the evening. It was kind of darkish…

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: This was Monday or Sunday?

KAREN KIELY: I don't remember.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay.

KAREN KIELY: I don't remember the days. But the rains came and it was raining really, really hard and we were watching television. And I remember -- I forget exactly when the electric went off, but we had our flashlights and our candles and our battery-powered radios and stuff. And it was around midnight the night of the storm, and the guys went outside, and my son said he put his foot down 00:39:00into the street, into the gutter, and he said the water was up to the top of the curb. So it came up to the top of his ankle. He said it was rushing really fast, going down the street. I've never seen it do that before. And it was skimming the top of the street. And remember, we're on that curve kind of thing.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Right.

KAREN KIELY: So it was skimming there. But it was rushing water. It was going really fast. But that's as high as it came was to the top of the curbs. So that's why we went to sleep that night. Nobody was up stressed out or worried, just the really bad rainstorm with a lot of winds. You can hear the winds and stuff. But again, it just wasn't that big of a deal. What did we do with our cars? Did we keep our cars here? My Jeep was here, again, because that's stuff 00:40:00is so high. And I think we moved my son's car and my other son's car, my son-in-law's car over to Bradley's Shopping Center, over there, but then we heard later that people had put all of their belongings in their cars and put them up there for safekeeping and a lot of the cars got looted because the cops were focused down here because of the water rising and trying to evacuate people and stuff. Where with Irene, they filled up that parking lot with cars but they were able to control it because it wasn't as much damage and they just did not have a focus or dedicated patrol car for that area, so I know a lot of people lost stuff in their cars.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Wow.

KAREN KIELY: But again, we didn't. So yeah, we went to sleep that night, and 00:41:00when we woke up the next morning, we looked out and we really didn't see much. There's leaves and stuff. You could tell it was a windy storm thing. But then when my son and I went in the Jeep and drove out, we backed out the driveway and drove down the street, and when we got on the half -- I'm in the middle of the block. So when we get out to Union Ave, the main street that is two blocks in from the creek, it was like hitting a warzone. There was so much debris in the street. It was crazy. It was really, really shocking to see that, but we drove over all the debris. We went down to the beachfront, and we were able to drive on the main street at the beachfront before the cops closed it off. And there was one iconic picture that hit the Internet. It was a yellow house where half the house was gone and there was a pipe sticking out and the water was trickling 00:42:00out of the pipe. And that picture was all over the Internet. We saw that house. We drove by that house. And we can only go so far because the creek flooded across the street there so we had to make a U-turn and come back up the way that we had come again. Yeah, it was pretty devastating.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: What was going through your mind when you saw all this?

KAREN KIELY: There's a business on the corner down by the beachfront that was Ron's Appliance Store, and he sold used refurbished appliances, like washers, dryers, refrigerators. And I remember driving down there. There was washers and dryers strewn all over the roads. His shop obviously was destroyed and that stuff was floating around. Then there was another. There was -- what did we 00:43:00see? We saw something in the road that my son and I were just amazed that this was sitting in the middle of the road. Maybe it was a big piece of tree or -- I don't know if it was a big piece of house or something. It was like something that really, you were like, "Oh my God, look at that in the middle of the road. It shouldn't be there." The people down at the beachfront, there was a lot of crying, and you could just see the shock on people's faces. We were driving by -- and again, because we weren't personally damaged like that, we were coming at it from a different perspective than the other people. So as devastating as it was, my house was a haven for my daughter and son-in-law and their three babies and then my older handicapped son being here, so I'm glad that I was able to provide shelter for all of us and not being faced with all the stuff that these 00:44:00other people have to go through and are still going through.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: I know you talked about your cellphone service being down. Did you have anybody that you needed to get in contact with? And if so, how did you contact them?

KAREN KIELY: My friend -- again, a childhood friend, had moved to Hoboken to live with her 97-year-old mother because her older brother had lived in this two-family house with his mother and he had passed away. So Pat left her daughter and grandson in Florida and she moved to Hoboken to be with her mother. I was going into Hoboken at least once a week to see Pat, to hang out with her, with her mother. And then when Pat went home for a couple of weeks, I stayed in Hoboken with her mom, and I was worried about that because we're seeing all this 00:45:00stuff on the news about Hoboken, how Hoboken had flooded. But again, she was in one of the higher areas in Hoboken. They didn't even lose electric. They were very fortunate because she was worried about having to take her mother to a shelter. And Pat doesn't drive, so I was concerned about them trying to see -- I'm too far away to help them, and they were the only people that I was really concerned about. My brother and my sister have separate houses. They live in Highlands, but my sister's in the condos up on the hill. I wasn't really worried about her. And my brother is in a high area. My brother wasn't here. My brother was on a business trip, so he wasn't home and his daughter was a college, so his house was kind of empty.

When I drove down to Highlands the second day of the storm because my son wanted 00:46:00to see what his apartment looked like and see if could retrieve anything -- and when Irene struck, my son had taken all his important papers and put it on top of the refrigerator or on top of tall dressers and stuff, and he just put everything up high. Because of the storm -- and he lived right behind the Marina or in front of a Marina. A boat had crashed through the back of this apartment building and he was on the first floor and the water just came through. So when we got to his apartment, his refrigerator was floating in the water. All of his furniture had been toppled over, and everything was floating. He had almost six feet of water in his apartment. He lost everything, everything. And we just never expected that. You just don't expect to lose all 00:47:00that stuff. He never thought, "Oh, let me bring my important papers with me."

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Right.

KAREN KIELY: Just crazy.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Yeah.

KAREN KIELY: That was really hard for him, and my other son went with him and helped him get out what he could that first day. But these guys are walking in water that's up to their waists in his apartment.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Right.

KAREN KIELY: And my brother's house, there was a whole tree resting against the front of his house, so he had roof damage from the tree. But another two or three feet and it would have crushed the front of his house, so this way it landed right in front of his house and did some damage to the roof and was just leaning against his house, this huge tree. It was crazy.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: I know you said you contacted your insurance company.

KAREN KIELY: Yeah.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Did you contact anybody else, like FEMA and anything?

KAREN KIELY: I did. I applied to FEMA and I applied for the small business loan because in order to be eligible for some -- if you wanted to be eligible for something, you had to apply for the small business loan as well. I don't know what it was. They were giving appliances. From -- the Robin Hood Foundation had donated appliances to Ocean County, but Ocean County only needed so much, so they brought Monmouth County into their thing with them. And all I really needed was a washing machine, but all my appliances are ten, fifteen years old. So when I was dealing with the people from the church, I would say to them, "All I really need is a washing machine." They said, "Don't say that. You have to take everything." I was like, "Okay." So I did. So I got the washer and dryer, I got a new refrigerator and a new stove. And I gave the stove to my 00:49:00brother. He lost everything in Highlands in his second house, and he didn't have any insurance to that house. He needed to rebuild his stuff, so I gave him the stove that they had given me because it was very small. I kept the refrigerator for a while because I thought that all I was going to do is replace the weather stripping on my refrigerator, because the refrigerator they gave me was an apartment-sized refrigerator. We have six, seven people here in this house, and the refrigerator is really small. Well, over the next month, I still had that refrigerator in my kitchen, and the compressor went on my refrigerator and I got rid of my refrigerator and kept the small one. And that's what we're using, the small refrigerator. It's just one more thing I didn't have to put money out. So I was very grateful to have it.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay. How long did the response take from your insurance company then FEMA when you contacted them?

KAREN KIELY: My insurance company was awhile. And again, when I contacted my insurance company, I said to them, "I am not in dire straits. I know that you're dealing with all these other families that lost their houses and stuff, so you don't have to get an adjuster out here right away." So I just gave them time and I never heard back from anybody. I think it was two weeks later when I called and I spoke to a gentleman, He said, "You do realize that you have an $11,000 deductible, right?" I said, "What?" That's what it came about that I could do that. Then he said that they were giving up to a thousand dollars to replace food that you had lost because the electric being out, that kind of thing, and something just happens that you're focusing on the little, tiny 00:51:00day-to-day things and I've never submitted a claim for the lost food. In the scheme of things, I think it was partly just that I was so angry that they did that and you just feel helpless too with stuff. And I still haven't addressed the [unintelligible - 00: 51: 28] situation with the insurance company. She said that the rate had gone up and that it would be $54 a month, but yes, I could add it on to my policy. For some reason, I told her, "Look. I have to think about it and I want to reevaluate the whole policy," and I still have not addressed it. I still have not added that with the policy. And every time I hear that there's a hurricane coming and would do for storms, I just cringe, I shudder. But I just haven't done it, not working. I just refinanced under the 00:52:00H.A.R.P. Program.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay.

KAREN KIELY: I'm hanging on by a fingernail to keep my mortgage payments on time and be able to cover my bills, and it's just scary. I live month to month. I don't know what's going to happen.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay. So the days when you didn't have the generator, what was it like to do day-to-day necessities?

KAREN KIELY: Well, the heat was the big thing, and not being able to take showers. Especially the babies, their dirty diapers and stuff, my daughter, sponge-bathes them every single day, and there's three of them. I guess there was two at that time. She was still pregnant. And then there was no place to keep food refrigerated. We had gotten ice and we were using coolers to try to 00:53:00keep stuff refrigerated. We had to have milk for the babies. Yeah, it was just trying to keep that level of keeping the ice going and being able to purchase ice and that kind of stuff.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Yeah, okay.

KAREN KIELY: It's difficult. You couldn't really wash dishes. Luckily, we had stocked up on paper plates and plastic ware so that we could just dispose of that stuff. But again, you're talking -- it's the middle of the month, so your financial ability to do this stuff is really limited. You need to buy toilet paper, not paper plates. So it's hard doing that. The help is not there to prepare the stuff. That help stuff doesn't come until after the fact. There's nothing to say, "Look, we're expecting this big storm. Go to the firehouse and 00:54:00get a couple of cases of water per family," or you know.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: All right. I understand.

KAREN KIELY: Get paper plates and get silverware because we may be out of electric or something. There's nothing that anywhere. I don't think that -- there's never a preventative prepare kind of thing. It's always after the fact.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Right. How did you notice your community coping?

KAREN KIELY: I think everybody was shell-shocked, but as much as they were shell-shocked, the people that could do something or anything were. There was a house three blocks over that I guess had a generator, and they had set up a station for people to charge their cellphones and stuff. Then they were putting 00:55:00out cases of water for people that need it. You can just drive up and just take what you needed. And then I was talking to the people that own the house, and it turned into a big clothing drive. People were coming from everywhere and had gotten their address, I guess, and they were just dropping off tons of clothes and canned goods and water and that kind of stuff. When these people had everything in your driveway and out in front of their house, they were trying to cope with all this stuff that was coming in like. They just had signs, like, "Take what you need," you don't have to ask [unintelligible - 00: 55: 49] offering. Just take what you need. Then the National Guard had come in, and my son's -- one of his very close friends that he sees on a regular basis is a 00:56:00sergeant in the National Guard, and he was in charge of setting up the hot food over at Memorial School.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay.

KAREN KIELY: We found out through him that the National Guard sends their troops into their hometown communities because they feel that they are more personally invested, and I would think that they would keep their personal people out so that they weren't personally invested that I thought that militarily thinking that they would think they would do a better job if they weren't so emotionally involved. And yet the National Guard felt, "We want them in their hometowns because they'll go above and beyond to do what needs to be done to take care of their home" kind of thing, so that was a really interesting perspective to see.

Then my daughter has a friend that she went off to school with that's also in the National Guard, and she had joined a couple of weeks, maybe a month after my 00:57:00son's friend had joined, so that was John. And then my daughter's friend is Maddy, Madeline. And she came up three days after the storm in one of those big trucks with a camouflage on it, and she had two or three other soldiers with her that were women soldiers as well, and they pulled up outside and I just pulled in from somewhere, and the two of us just hugged and cried on the lawn. It was just a very emotional time. And both of these kids doing their jobs had personally stopped at our house to make sure that we were okay because they knew that Kylie, my son's sister, had the babies and that she was pregnant and they 00:58:00just wanted to check in, make sure that she was okay.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Right.

KAREN KIELY: That we had everything that we need and anything they could do to help to let us know that they could do that.

Then when my daughter's friend Maddy had come up with the girls, we had the big crockpot with the pulled pork in it, and we made sandwiches for her and the soldiers she brought with her. And they were laughing. They're like, "We're supposed to be helping you. This is like a feast for kings," because they're eating all those [unintelligible -- 00: 58: 39] meals I guess. And we had gotten some of them from the service people. They would give them out and they gave out a lot of blankets. And blankets and stuff that they gave out really came in handy. They were godsend, having those blankets. That was just a really remarkable experience.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: All right.

KAREN KIELY: Yeah.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Was there any more aid that you've noticed coming in to the community?

KAREN KIELY: Going to the Borough Hall is when I first made my connection with the people from Gateway Church, and they had taken over a room in there and you could go in and they had the [unintelligible -- 00: 59: 24] meals that you could take. They had all kinds of cleaning supplies. They had the bleach and they had gloves and they had those white outfits to put on. They had sponges, and they had just all kinds of cleaning products that you needed to eradicate the mold either around your house, in your house. I'm trying to think what else they had. They had hot coffee and donuts and bagels all the time. So I would 01:00:00take my granddaughter almost every day and we'd go over so I could get a hot cup of coffee and bring back a couple of bagels for the family.

I was there every single day and made a really great connection with the people that are there, the people that are working there. And mostly I was going to get the paper towels and the paper plates and the toilet paper and the paper product stuff. And then my son being from Highlands, I had first gone to Union Beach because he would help I could get for him. He lost everything. He had no clothes. He brought a backpack with him, not expecting all this. And their response to me was "We are devastated in Union Beach," and they said, "I'm really sorry about your son. He's not a Union Beach resident. He's a Highlands 01:01:00resident. You have to take him to Highlands."

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Yeah.

KAREN KIELY: Which means that they expected me to drive up and down the highway. And you couldn't get gas--there were these gas lines--to drive him to Highlands. And this is a guy that spends seventy-five to eighty percent of his time in bed because of his back. That's how serious his illness is. But we did that. I kept going to Highlands because I didn't want him to fall through the cracks in Highlands. I wanted to make sure that he could take advantage of whatever they had to offer there. So he was able to get clothes from there. He was able to get toiletries and toothpaste and toothbrush, shaving equipment and stuff, things he -- he didn't have any of this stuff. So we were able to do that for him there.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay.

KAREN KIELY: I understand where the people were coming from in Union Beach, that yes, they had their own to help, but I'm one of theirs and this is mine, and as 01:02:00much as I understood it, I wasn't really happy about it, especially because he's disabled. If he were just an adult son that lived in Highlands and lost all his stuff, I can understand him not being on the Union Beach list. But again, this was so fresh. This was in the first couple days that I was trying to get assistance for him. And I knew when his house was gone, like, "Where is he going to live?" And he takes a lot of narcotic medication--it's all prescribed--and he can't be in such close proximity to the babies because it's not good for him, it's not good for them, and we were all living up here because it's colder down there, it's warmer up here and that's where the stove was with the water on it. And it was a really difficult time in that respect. I forget what your question was.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: That's okay.

KAREN KIELY: Usually I've been trying to come back to your question 01:03:00[unintelligible - 01: 03: 02]…

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Yeah, I noticed.

KAREN KIELY: I realized I ramble, and I just totally lost [with] that.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: It's okay. Did you feel safe within your community?

KAREN KIELY: Yes, very safe. Yes.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay, good. How do you feel about the response and your interaction with the emergency personnel? I know you spoke of your daughter's friends from the Guard.

KAREN KIELY: Yes.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Anyone else, like locals or cops that came from other states?

KAREN KIELY: Yes. Well, again, my son has moved out, and he lives in a house with four other kids. These kids all went to pre-school together in Union Beach, and now they're living in this house in Manalapan. That's an uncle's house, an income property of one of the guys' uncles. And so they're all living in this house now, and one kid -- and it's just in past year or two that these kids have started their careers, and one's a parole office now and another one's 01:04:00a corrections officer. And they pull the corrections officer out of the state prison that he works at, and they had him patrolling in Union Beach and the patrol cars. And they teamed him up with a cop from Virginia.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay.

KAREN KIELY: They were in and out of state patrol car. They were in a car from Virginia, I guess, and they were going around, patrolling and they would stop and talk to residents stuff. Some guy, I guess somebody in the heat of frustration said to Chris, the Union Beach kid, he said, "You don't know what it's like. You don't know what we're going through," because they thought he was from out of state. And he goes, "I live three blocks away. My parents lost everything." He said, "I know what you're talking about." The kids goes, "You're from Virginia." He's like, "No. Him in the car from Virginia. I live in Union Beach."

So we got these perspectives and these stories from all these different outlets 01:05:00in the stuff. So as far as dealing with emergency management people, some of it was very personal, and some of it, when I had gone specifically -- before they really had anything set up, I went to the police station to find out how to help my son. That's when they said "We can't help anybody from Highlands. We have to help -- we're not going to do it. Strictly the people from Union Beach at this point," and I understood. And they were very compassionate and very concerned. When they were giving me that information, you could tell that's not really what they wanted to tell me, but they had to prioritize as well for themselves. And it was so fresh. So they were amazing. I think the emergency help that came in here came in fast. I think it came in fast, and I think they 01:06:00really went out of their way to help as many people as they could, as much as they could.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Did you make any contributions as to resources, money, open home?

KAREN KIELY: No, I didn't have any money to contribute. And as far as opening my home, I already had seminary people living here. So it really wasn't an option to bring more people in. All of my friends and the kids' friends who lost houses or whatever had families of their own that they went to, so it's not like anybody that we knew personally was stuck [unintelligible - 01: 06: 50] kind of thing.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Right, okay.

KAREN KIELY: Yeah, because there's always room for more people if that's the case.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay.

KAREN KIELY: So no, I didn't do that.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Do you feel like -- okay, let me go back. Let me backtrack. 01:07:00How do you feel about the response that you did get in terms of aid from local or government?

KAREN KIELY: I think the aid was overwhelming.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay.

KAREN KIELY: For some reason, the national news stations picked up on Union Beach specifically. They didn't focused on Highlands, they didn't focused on Sea Bright. Sea Bright probably came in second after Union Beach. But Union Beach seemed to be the national face for the rest of the country for Hurricane Sandy. And I don't know why that happened, but there were so much response to donations and just things that people coming into Union Beach and setting up -- I think -- I don't know if it was the Super Bowl that they set it up down at the municipal building and some pizza parlor came and donated all this pizza. And I 01:08:00think there was a barbecue truck out there. Just extraordinary kind of things because people were still leaving in the houses without electric not because the electric wasn't supplied, either because they couldn't put electric or gas back into those areas because it wasn't secured enough yet or because the house itself was damaged that they couldn't run the electric to it.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay.

KAREN KIELY: There were still a lot of people a month after this storm or two months after the storm that still didn't have fully functioning homes.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Right.

KAREN KIELY: So providing that kind of stuff, they were amazing with all of that. I just have wonderful things to say about the way people came into Union Beach to help Union Beach.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay. Do you believe that New Jersey prepared adequately in 01:09:00terms of having enough dunes and raising the house, mandating the houses being raised?

KAREN KIELY: I think that whatever had come up for new construction -- like they build new condos down on the beach front. They're standing. They didn't suffer damage because they made them build to those specifications. The older homes that are down there, I believe -- I don't think they were built to the same specifications as these newer ones because they were built earlier, but they held up really well as well. As far as raising houses, I never heard of that until after this hurricane. Like we said, it was one-time thing. It really wasn't something that we see every day. The one business, Jakeabob's, it was down the waterfront. Before Jakeabob's, it was called The Sandbar. Every time there was a big hurricane, their businesses were devastated every single time. 01:10:00But then when they came back, they came back big. They're the biggest draws in the city for business. We love going down to Jakeabob's, and they had that big deck out into the middle of the bay. That was just phenomenal. And it was just a fun place to go and it was all ages and it was people from town, out of town, and now they're gone. I don't know if they're going to be able to rebuild down there. They took over Stevie G's so they have a place on Union Ave. I've never gone in there.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Really?

KAREN KIELY: Yeah.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: It's nice.

KAREN KIELY: It's just different. It's a different atmosphere than being out at the tiki bar or whatever. And I used to go to Stevie G's. But again, that was ten, fifteen years ago. I'm older now. I'm out of that. I'm into the grandparent mode now. I'm not the parent of the kids anymore.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Right.

KAREN KIELY: But it was still a good place when they had the outdoor tiki bar kind of thing. It was a good place to go. And I just haven't ventured down there. It might have something to do with my finances too, that I don't have the money to spend like I used to either, so maybe that's why I haven't ventured in there.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay. Do you think that the state could have done anything differently?

KAREN KIELY: I don't know. I don't have the answer for that. I'm sure there is. I was really upset with the way the governor's wife handled the fund that 01:12:00they had and holding out, like, "This is for long-term stuff." I think that was wrong. They brought up the Robin Hood Foundation as an example. Well, they raised this much money and they got this much money out into the community quickly, and her defense, she said, "Well, they've done this before. They're a bigger organization and they have the staff to do that." She's like, "Well, we don't." Well, then turn it over to somebody that does. Your learning curve should not be at the expense of the people that need the money now. And yes, you want it for long-term? Okay, there's still people in Union Beach that aren't back in their homes that are trying to get back into their homes. That's not counting the people that lost everything, that can't move back into a home but that have to have their homes rebuilt and stuff. I think that was handled 01:13:00really poorly and I'm low -- I don't know.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay.

KAREN KIELY: Most of my dealings with anything that I've gotten that I've needed in terms of supplies, construction equipment -- like when those people came who did the painting, I supplied all my own paint. It was an expense. It's all on my credit card.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Right.

KAREN KIELY: But again, I didn't have the devastation that other people had, so you kind of weigh it a little bit, so I don't know. I don't have the answers for all that.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Do you think the state responded adequately?

KAREN KIELY: No. The state or the government, because the biggest thing that I 01:14:00saw was FEMA, which is a federal program, not a state program. I don't know what the state programs are. I don't know.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Do you think the government responded adequately with everything?

KAREN KIELY: Again, it's hard to say. How much can they do? They set up that FEMA thing down here and that was a really good thing to be able to go in there. I know a lot of people got hired from FEMA along the way, but that was hard. I could have used the job. I could have done that work easily. And I dealt with 01:15:00them mostly having to do with my son and trying to get housing for him and they were talking about opening the Fort Monmouth Housing and I was trying to get him a spot in there. I had read something in the paper and brought it to their attention and they're like, "No, we didn't know about this." I said, "Nobody showed to you this newspaper and you're right in our municipal building? None of the people working here thought that you guys should see this?" Eventually, it got to a really higher up person and they deemed that my son wasn't eligible to be on that list for whatever reason. I forgot what the reason was that they felt that he wasn't eligible to go in there.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Do you think anyone is to blame for the storm or it's just nature?

KAREN KIELY: No, absolutely not. Again, it's something that happened, and it's 01:16:00a reaction. And the severity of it required a more severe reaction. So no one's to blame, yeah.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: What do you think about the media coverage? Do you think it was accurately portrayed, or was it sensationalized?

KAREN KIELY: I think it was accurately portrayed. If anything, it was under sensationalized. And I think that they did a good job. Like I said, they focused on Union Beach, and rightly so. I think that was a good thing. I don't think anything was sensationalized at all. I think it gives you a different perspective too, like looking at things that are going on now and the flooding that hit Texas. They've never flooded before in their lives. And then after 01:17:00us, there was another disaster that kind of put us on the back burner and they've refocused their efforts to whatever that next storm was and I don't know what it was.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Shootings, the Sandy Hook, the kids.

KAREN KIELY: That was the next thing?

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: It happened in December.

KAREN KIELY: Wow. Yeah, I don't think it was overplayed. I don't think it was underplayed. I think they were pretty good in their coverage.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: All right. What do you think about the governor and the president making their appearance in the area?

KAREN KIELY: Well, they actually flew into -- the president flew into the school parking lot right up here. I think it was encouraging. I think it added a 01:18:00sense of -- it was a morale booster in the area. I think it was necessary because this was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. But the way that sciences are predicting the future storms and the way the climate change is affecting water levels at all, is it going to happen again? I don't know. You hear about hurricanes that happened a hundred years ago and how devastating they were. Is it going to be another hundred years, or is it going to be in 50 years, or -- you know, kind of thing. So, are we trying to prepare for it? Yeah, we are, but the population is growing. When I moved to this area, I would say the population has probably tripled since I've been here. Since 1986, it's probably tripled.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Right.

KAREN KIELY: It's much more congested than it had been. So a hurricane that happened even fifty years ago, it's going to be a lot more devastating now just because of the sheer numbers of people that have increased.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Yeah.

KAREN KIELY: The numbers of homes and property and where they're building, how they're building. We are building smarter, but all of that costs money. How do we keep our lower and middle class people going? Who's going to be able to buy on our beachfront now? A Union Beach resident's going to be able to stay here? No.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Right.

KAREN KIELY: No, so I don't know.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Did your opinion of the governor changed?

KAREN KIELY: I'm a Democrat. He's a Republican. He's a politician. He's very 01:20:00good at what he does. Did my opinion of him change? No. I would rather see a Democrat in office for the overall basics and the overall principles that I want my politician or my state's leader to have. And I just firmly believe that the Democrats are more about taking care of everyone and the Republicans are about the rich get richer and the trickle-down theory. They're cutting education programs, they're taking funding out of the school programs. If you don't educate our kids, you're damaging your future generations that are going to be your middleclass people. You've got to invest in the kids and in their future 01:21:00because they're our future leaders. The Republicans aren't about that. They're just not.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: How has the storm shaped your environmental views?

KAREN KIELY: I've always been very aware of my environment. We keep referring to the creek. The creek is really federally protected wetlands. I had gotten a book on birds, just so I could recognize some of the birds in the area. The state bird, I don't think I've ever seen the state bird in this area. We have a lot of cardinals and blue jays in this area. When I walk my grandchildren to school or when I walk my children to school, we always stop at the creek and look. And I tell them about the tides and the water levels and teach them about 01:22:00that and show them the current and the tides and the banks of the creek and how that changes based on the tides and the weeds that are growing around there and the vegetation that's around there and the animals that live in there and that whole ecosystem supports. I also know that we are on a migratory path for over 200 species of birds that fly back and forth, and that we have to protect our environment and that we are in a really exciting environmental area. Being here and by Sandy Hook and they brought the ospreys back and we have the osprey nests, when we were going to a kid's T-ball game and my friend's husband is the 01:23:00forest ranger -- well, he's at a park down here, stationed at a park down here before he went up furthest north. So all the [unintelligible - 01: 23: 14] we have our beach chairs out and watching the little kids play T-ball, and Dan says, "Look" and he points up to the sky, we look up, and there's an osprey flying over our field with a fish in its talons. I mean, where do you see that? Because of the environment we're in, we are in day-to-day contact with environmentalists. We're in day-to-day contact with people from nowhere because of all the activity that's out at Sandy Hook. We're in day-to-day contact again with the forest rangers, again, because of Sandy Hook, that whole federal thing and the birds down to our state parks. It's just a really rich area to live in. 01:24:00And I think the schools and the towns make the residents aware of how rich this community is and environmental resources.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Has the storm changed your view about Union Beach or any other views, making you probably want to move or do anything differently?

KAREN KIELY: I don't want to move, but again, I didn't have a lot of damage. I love this area and I can't afford to move anywhere else. Like when I think about moving to Highlands because of Sandy Hook, I go to the beach all year 01:25:00around. I bring the kids to the beach all year around. We have pictures of them in their snowsuits and snow on the sand. We walk the trails. We take advantage of all the programs that they offer. They do a Plum Island run because there's real plums that grow up, Plum Island down at Sandy Hook and you make them aware of the dunes and the wildlife that's down at Sandy Hook and fishing and just everything that's there. It's so accessible for us. No, I don't ever want to leave. And my oldest son is talking about moving to Colorado, and we took a trip to Denver to check it out for him to see if it was really a viable move for him. And I think it's a good thing for him. I don't want to leave New Jersey. I don't want to leave this area. I want to stay in 01:26:00Monmouth County. I had read or heard somewhere that Monmouth County is -- now, this was a few years ago, so I [unintelligible - 01: 26: 15] heard that we were one of the ten most affluent counties in the country.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Right.

KAREN KIELY: That's because we had the horse farms is one aspect of it. Our proximity to New York City, that there's lot of executives that live on those side. But I think we've dropped. I think we went probably in the top fifteen or top twenty. I don't know what the number is now and I've never really researched it, find out exactly where we are at this point, but I just remember hearing one time that we're in the really affluent community. And I like being in that affluent community. It affords you great libraries, great parks, just 01:27:00things that if you live in an area that's not as affluent surrounding you, you're not going to have all these cultural and just that influx that you get from people that have money and education.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay, all right. So, have things returned to normal for you and your family, for the most part?

KAREN KIELY: No, because my bathroom's still not done. We're still working on that bathroom thing. And not being able to find a job. Is some of it Sandy? Yeah. Is all of it because of Sandy? No, that hasn't returned to normal.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay. What problems are you still facing? Are you still making payments to your home or insurance companies or anything of that nature?

KAREN KIELY: Yeah, because I just refinanced under the H.A.R.P. Program. Just to try to have a little more breathing room. So that helped. But yeah, my insurance rates have gone up. My taxes have gone up. And I include that in my mortgage. So when I say how much do I pay for mortgage, it's including my insurance and my taxes. My insurance and taxes are higher than my actual mortgage payment.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay. Have there been any changes to the outlook of the community since this happened?

KAREN KIELY: Yeah, I feel like we're still in the struggling phase. Yeah, we 01:29:00haven't crossed that hump. Yeah, I feel like we're still in that struggling phase and everybody is trying to be optimistic but we haven't crossed the phase where you go… like there's an end in sight,. I see the struggles happening for the next few years, you know?

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay. Do you think that the storm and the governor and the presidential appearances had an impact on the presidential election and the gubernatorial election?

KAREN KIELY: Do I think the governor and the president's meeting had an impact on the election today?

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Right.

KAREN KIELY: I do. I think Christie got more votes than he would have otherwise. I think his whole spin is that he's here, he's in New Jersey for New Jersey, but he's out in California and in Texas and all these other places saying how he's here for New Jersey. He's running a presidential campaign from New Jersey, but that's politics. He's not doing anything wrong. It's the way 01:31:00it's supposed to be. He's very good at what he does.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Right.

KAREN KIELY: I think yeah. I think it impacted the elections, yes.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: If you wanted to give a central message or the overall legacy of the storm, what would you say that is?

KAREN KIELY: Wow. I think what happens is what I feared from the beginning is that lower and middle class people are not going to be able to live close to the water, that only the rich are going to be able enjoy that because it costs so 01:32:00much now to build -- if you're going to build a house and now, they have to be raised -- turn that off and take it downstairs. It limits the -- and Union Beach is very diverse. There are affluent families as well as lower families, and I think it's affected. A lot of people lost jobs. They couldn't go to work because of the situation going on here, and I think that's still part of the storm.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay. If there's a word of advice -- I remember now. If there is a word of advice to those who had the tornado and more, what would your advice to them be?

KAREN KIELY: Count your blessings no matter how bad things are and you have to 01:33:00deal with all the devastations that's going on. Count your blessings, say your prayers, always be grateful for anything you can find to be grateful for, and try to work from there, as hard as that is. Because the alternative is it will overwhelm you and eat you up.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay. Just to wrap up, is there anything else that you wanted to share that I possibly didn't cover?

KAREN KIELY: I think we covered everything. I think I'm really disappointed in my insurance company. I think that's my big takeaway and that I'm vulnerable 01:34:00and I don't have the stamina to fight them. I'm just rolling over. And I just wish that the insurance companies responded better with their customers. They're supposed to take care of us.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay.

KAREN KIELY: That's not what's happening. And it's not just me. Mine's really minute compared to what other people have been going through with the insurance companies and the way they word their policies so that they don't have to cover what they really should be covering. And I think that's wrong. I think that's the biggest thing I would like to see taken care of or fixed, that they will be 01:35:00more transparent and more accountable.

TRUDI-ANN LAWRENCE: Okay, so that's it. I'm going to end this recording now.

KAREN KIELY: Okay, great. Thank you. /AT/rj/es