10 years since Sandy: Former Action News NJ correspondent Nora Muchanic recalls night of storm

LONG BEACH ISLAND, New Jersey (WPVI) -- It's been 10 years since Superstorm Sandy hit the Jersey shore.

One person who remembers the storm well is former New Jersey correspondent Nora Muchanic.

It's been five years since her retirement, but the storm is something she says she'll never forget.

October 29th, 2012, the night Sandy made landfall at the Jersey shore, Muchanic and her photographer found themselves evacuating on a bus with Long Beach Township Police.

Video captured the wild ride. You could see that the ocean had breached the dunes and was rushing down the streets. The driver of that bus remembers it well.

"We just had to forge through it. We had water coming in the door, the side door of the bus, and we just had to make our way through," said Sgt. Brendan Kerlin with Long Beach Twp. Police.

"The only time I got kind of nervous is like when I said the water was pushing that bus around on the main drag and I said to myself, 'Wait a minute now, this is really strong now.' And I'd been through a lot of hurricanes, Sandy was the worst," said retired Action News photographer Andy Doane.

In New Jersey, well over two million homes lost power, 346,000 were damaged or destroyed and the damage estimates topped $29 billion.

Holgate, at the southern tip of LBI, was decimated -- trailers toppled over, homes flooded, and the dunes were destroyed.

"There were other parts of the island that were really unscathed and not that they didn't feel it, but it wasn't devastating. It's like a bomb went off here," said Barbara Strokovsky of Rydel, Pennsylvania.

"There was cars and sand all over the place, water everywhere, you know, the telephone poles were down," recalled Lt. Butch Hartmann with the Long Beach Twp. Police

Sandy was the biggest natural disaster to ever hit the Jersey coast. A storm that changed the shore and many of its residents forever.