When Ian hit, Lynn Krinkey and Don Romano called 911 to ask to evacuate their friend, Scott Lumley. “We told them we had a handicapped person. They said they couldn’t come,” Krinkey said. First responders were ordered to shelter until wind gusts dropped.
he never wanted to return to his native New Jersey, despite entreaties from relatives. Never married, he got to know neighbors as a window washer at the strip mall where his mother once ran a bookstore, the Beach Book Nook, after she retired.So it was friends Lumley turned to for shelter as Hurricane Ian bore down on the island: A couple he had been living with since January, when they saw him at a local bus stop during another storm, his head bruised from a recent mugging.
“We told them we had a handicapped person. They said they couldn’t come,” Krinkey said. By then, storm winds had whipped up and the county’s first responders were ordered to shelter until the gusts dropped.They watched the afternoon news until the power went out, Krinkey said, and “the house was full of water in no time.”
“We tried to get him but we couldn’t,” Krinkey said. “I feel awful about it, but I think if we kept trying we three would have all been washed away.” About 200 pounds, Lumley was too heavy to budge, the couple said. The next morning, they walked about six miles to the hotel where Romano works, the Sand Castle. They had no cellphone service, but paramedics deployed to the island let them phone the hotel owner, who gave them a free room where they have stayed along with their two dogs, a Jack Russel terrier named Pork Chop and a chihuahua, Tiger Lily.“He thought we were dead,” Romano said of the owner as he stood outside his second-floor room at the hotel Friday.
Two other men had to be rescued Thursday from a home where they were swept after the storm, said Joe Orlandini, a contractor who has lived in town for 20 years. Orlandini said he helped a neighbor evacuate her 3-year-old asthmatic son after they ran out of medication Thursday.The town’s paved main street was buried Friday in a swampy mix of mud and sand. The storm had tipped trucks into pools of murky green storm water and sailboats into gutted restaurants.
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