A couple of hours ago, the story was “there’s a fire at Kohr’s Ice Cream” – and I thought “Man, I hope the Sawmill (a pretty damn awesome bar/restaurant next to Kohr’s) stays safe”. Now, it’s become "Man, I hope the whole damn boardwalk doesn’t burn to the ground.
This place was absolutely trashed by Sandy (this is where the “roller coaster in the ocean” was located), and they did a fantastic job in rebuilding. Whoosh – all of it is going up. They’re bulldozing sections of newly laid boardwalk in an attempt to create firebreaks in order to try and stop this from spreading to the north end.
The wind today is what’s really causing trouble – huge cinders are traveling all along the boardwalk and spreading this faster and faster.
A joke, I know, but yes, yes they are – they can’t get pumper trucks onto the beach. So rather than pull water from the ocean, they’re having to draw water from the bay, roughly a half-mile away.
A fireman I know on my Facebook feed: “Route 35 is closed because they have to run 5” hose from the bay to the Boardwalk. They have already drafted out all the hotel pools in the area."
This is brutal. They weren’t even recovered from Sandy and at least 4 blocks of the boardwalk is wiped out.
They had to trench through part of the new boardwalk just to build a fire break. I saw the smoke from Rt 37 as I was driving home and I was miles away.
The Funtown Pier collapsed long before this – it’s been gone since Sandy, and was never rebuilt. It was the Funtown Pier office building that collapsed today. Losing the Beachcomber definitely sucks.
All I can say on this is that if they could do it, I’m sure they would. I don’t profess to know exactly how this works, but if it’s a situation where you need to have a truck very close to the water source in order to pump it along the line, then I can see the issue. The bay has water access very close to the road, whereas to pump from the ocean, you need to pull a truck onto the beach (if my theory is correct).