Looking towards 79th Street, Harvey Cedars from Long Beach Blvd. The bay and ocean connected during the storm. John Larson photo, courtesy of the Barnegat Light Museum
A first-hand account by Lloyd Vosseller
The Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962 occurred on March 5 through 9, 1962. For three of those days and several high tides, Long Beach Island and its residents endured one of the worst and most destructive storms in the Island’s recorded history. It was a nor’easter that would be officially named The Great Atlantic Storm.
At the time, Lloyd Vosseller, Jr. was thirteen years old and lived with his parents, Lloyd, Sr. and Elsie, and maternal grandfather, Elam K. Woodoth, in Harvey Cedars on 84th Street. On the first day of the storm, like any other teenager, Vosseller’s only thoughts were about whether school was open or closed.
Day One: My mother called Harvey Cedar’s Chief of Police Bob VanMeter’s house and found out school was closed. It was early; I was still in bed feeling good about a day off and had no idea how bad the storm was until I overheard my mom’s phone conversation with Eve VanMeter, the chief’s wife. My mom sounded upset. “What? There’s a mattress floating down your street… It’s bad!” I jumped out of bed and ran up to our attic and looked out the window just in time to see one of the nearby beachfront houses fall into the ocean. I could hardly believe what I was seeing. Frightened, I went to find my dad and found him on our back steps removing debris that was being left behind by the rising ocean water that was swirling through our backyard. When I told him how scared I was he replied, “I’m worried too, son, but don’t let your mother know.’
77th Street and the boulevard. The house in the foreground belonged to Ralph Nash. Vosseller Archives
That night as my mother looked out her bedroom window, she asked about the strange moving lights she could see on the Boulevard. Later we found out the lights were from Salvatore and Dorothea Pinto’s car. Their house on East 85th Street was getting hit by ocean water and so they tried to drive to our house. It was high tide. Waves were hitting their car — spinning it around! The Pintos and their dog were trapped inside the car. The water was so high they had to sit on the backs of the car seats so they would not drown.
When the tide went out enough, they were able to get out of the car and make it to our house. They were wet, cold, and pretty shaken up, but they were safe. By the next day, telephone service and electric were out and we didn’t have water. My father and some other men from Harvey Cedars had gone to the High Point Volunteer Fire Company where they were volunteers. I wanted to know what he was doing and what was going on. So, I put on my boots and headed out into the storm to find him. When I got to the firehouse on 80th Street my dad was not there. The men there told me to try the Esso gas station on 78th Street and I headed out into the storm in that direction. At the time, I did not know that erosion from the storm had destroyed the dunes leaving the Island with no protection from wind-driven waves that were as high as 40 feet.
The 80th Street firehouse after the storm. Vosseller Archives
After several tides, the ocean cut through the Island all the way to the bay. I got as far as 79th Street to find that the water had cut an inlet through the Island from the ocean through to the bay; the Ships Wheel was washed off of its foundation and a house we always called The Wedding Cake House had almost completely fallen over. It was the worst thing I had ever seen, and I ran home crying. When my mother saw me, she thought something had happened to my dad and became very frightened. “What happened to your dad,” she asked. I replied that I did not know but we are never going to live here again.
At home in Harvey Cedars the wind kept howling and the flood waters kept getting higher. We were cut off from everything. Temperatures had dropped into the 30s, it was snowing, and we were getting cold.
Later that day, the United States Army evacuated my mother, grandfather, and me by helicopter from the Island to Southern Regional High School on the mainland in Manahawkin. My dad stayed behind at the firehouse. Flying through the storm was scary. But as a teenager, I thought flying in a helicopter was pretty cool. I remember that from the air we could see a lot of destruction and where the ocean cut through to the bay in Harvey Cedars at 79th Street, and snow on the football field at SRHS.
For the next two or three weeks we lived at the high school with a lot of other evacuees. It was not home but we were warm, and The Red Cross kept us fed. After that, we moved to a rental house in Ship Bottom. While we were at SRHS and living at the Ship Bottom rental my mom and other borough officials ran a temporary Borough Hall to hand out passes to Harvey Cedars residents that allowed them to go back to the Island to check on their properties. We lived at the rental house for around a month before we returned to our home in Harvey Cedars. Most people’s houses were lost or damaged. But we were very lucky. Our house was not damaged. But we had a lot of sand and debris to clean up. Of course, I was wrong about never living in Harvey Cedars again.
