Volunteers help repair a Shore mainstay

FORTESCUE, N.J. - As volunteers had done at least a half-dozen times in the last few months, a group came to scrub, scrape, and paint to try to save the old Charlesworth Hotel, inundated two years ago by Hurricane Sandy.

When the sunny morning rolled into a dark and cloudy midafternoon, one of the 20 or so volunteers noticed a piano among the still topsy-turvy mess of the main dining room. An impromptu concert broke out featuring Bach, Chopin, show tunes, and that beginner's favorite, "Heart and Soul."

"That's just how it is here. . . . This place has always just inspired that kind of thing, that kind of fellowship among people, I guess," said Shirley Fonash, 81, who owns the Charlesworth with her husband of more than 20 years, Jim, 67. "People really do just love this place."

Volunteers are pushing to help the Fonashes meet a Dec. 12 deadline to reopen the hotel, a beacon along the windswept water's edge in a town with no lighthouse.

Fonash said her mind was still boggled by the dozens of people who have shown up to help, from regular customers to people she had never met.

"We all just want to see this place reopened. It's been here a long, long time, and it's part of the lifeblood of our community," said Kathy Ryan, one of Fortescue's 400 residents, who owns a small bed-and-breakfast nearby called the Mayflower II. "It's always been a beacon, and its recovery is a symbol of our town coming back after Sandy."

The Oct. 29, 2012, storm tormented New Jersey's 127-mile coastline with lashing winds and relentless flooding and caused more than $38 billion in property damage.

The storm pulled away a massive deck from the Charlesworth's exterior and flooded the interior, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to the Dutch colonial building, which dates to 1924, when speakeasies lined the coast.

Fortescue, a tiny bayfront town within Downe Township, came to be known for two decades starting in the 1970s as the "Weakfish Capital of the World" among anglers when massive amounts of the fish were landed there. The village boasts a waterfront marina and is part of the 1.1 million-acre Fortescue State Wildlife Management Area. It is characterized by mostly paint-peeled, ramshackle cottages passed through generations of the same families. The few waterfront homes for sale cost about $100,000.

The Fonashes, like many business owners along the coast, found themselves in a particularly vulnerable financial position after Sandy: They had a 100-seat dining room and five-room hotel that couldn't reopen until extensive repairs were made, but they needed the business to generate the cash to pay for the work.

The couple had to use nearly all their savings to pay to remove debris from the premises and backfill around the pilings beneath the building, where the winds and tides had scoured away the sand.

"Just doing that took all our savings because insurance doesn't cover that," Jim Fonash said. "And then the question becomes: Where do we go from here?"

The Fonashes finally secured a Small Business Administration loan of $135,000 - about a third of the initial estimate to pay for supplies and labor to make the repairs.

"So now we had the money to make the bare-bones repairs, but we just didn't have the money to pay for the labor to do it," Shirley Fonash said.

In stepped the Cumberland County Long Term Recovery Group and other county volunteer agencies, which helped organize work parties for the Fonashes.

"Our goal as an agency is to help restore and rebuild communities and lives in the wake of a major disaster or catastrophe," said Phillip Tomlinson, project manager for the county group. "Fortescue and the other bay shore communities have been made particularly vulnerable by Sandy, and we have really needed to take a hands-on approach to helping them."

Though there was extensive damage along New Jersey's coast, and four Shore counties - Atlantic, Cape May, Monmouth, and Ocean - were declared disaster areas, almost no government grants or loans were made available to Fortescue and other Cumberland County waterfront towns until recently.

"Nobody has been cutting any big checks here, so any help has really had to come from a grassroots level if we're going to see any progress," said Meghan Wren, director of the Bayshore Center in Bivalve, who last week was helping paint the walls of the Charlesworth's dining room.

The Bayshore Center, the county long-term recovery group and Department of Health, the Inspira Health Network, as well as residents and visitors, have turned out to help with repairs of the Charlesworth and of some of Fortescue's houses.

"There has just been such an outpouring of community support," Wren said. "It's really been inspiring."

Though there hasn't been much government funding made available to home and business owners to repair storm damage, about $8 million in state and federal funding has recently been committed to help the township repair the infrastructure in Fortescue and neighboring bay villages of Gandy's Beach and Money Island, according to Downe Township Mayor Bob Campbell.

He expects the funding to start trickling in and the projects to be finished within the next year, he said. The plan includes repairing bulkheads and reestablishing shoreline protection for beaches, dunes, and marshes.

Campbell contends rebuilding the bay shore's infrastructure is key to the area's recovery. The township lost 9 percent of its taxable property after Sandy.

"Things are full steam ahead now," Campbell said.