Coming Back - A Year of Recovery - NYTimes.com For all the heightened alarm and panicky warnings that a monstrous storm was heading New York City's way, no one was quite prepared for the deadly lashing that Hurricane Sandy delivered one year ago, on Oct. 29, 2012, to the coastline stretching from Connecticut to New Jersey. As dawn broke the next morning, the immensity of the damage was revealed. Whole neighborhoods had been submerged, their houses ripped clean off their foundations. Miles of New Jersey's coastline were in tatters. Much of Breezy Point, Queens, was not only destroyed by the powerful surge, but some 130 homes were reduced to cinders by a conflagration that firefighters could not reach. More harrowing were tales of the lives lost: of elderly people drowned in their homes, of people electrocuted by downed electrical wires or crushed by toppled trees, of children swept from their mother's arms. Yet the waters had barely receded before people set their sights on rebuilding their homes, their businesses and their lives. In the days after the storm and for months afterward, The New York Times profiled storm victims in four communities, chronicling their heartbreak and grit as they painstakingly inched their way toward recovery. For some, this meant restoring things to the way they were before, for others it meant rebuilding much better, and for others still it meant starting afresh elsewhere. No one would ever forget the storm's toll, yet all could take solace in knowing that they put their all into coming back, or being able to walk away.