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Seaside Heights public works director Bill Rumbolo describes the frantic efforts it took to save the boardwalk, where neighbors came to the aid of neighbors when it counted most.

(Andrew Mills/The Star-Ledger)

Jim Elliott was standing on the Seaside boardwalk, cramming down a giant slice from Three Brothers. Behind him was the Casino Pier, where he is the construction manager and has spent the last 10 months — six, seven days a week — rebuilding from Hurricane Sandy.

Elliott was reluctantly telling a story, downplaying his role in containing Thursday’s boardwalk fire.

Almost on cue, a guy walked by and said, “There he is! The man saved the boardwalk.”

“No, no, no,” Elliott said. “Don’t start that. Don’t go spreading that around.”

Jim Elliott didn’t save the boardwalk. But he was the guy who took the first chomp out of it at Lincoln Avenue, to start the trench that contained the fire.

“You know what helped save the boardwalk that nobody’s talking about?” Elliott said. “It was the civilian effort. All the store owners and property owners who were out here, wetting down their roofs with garden hoses. You could see them up and down the boardwalk, pouring water on their roofs.”

Angie Lombardi was one of those people. Her shop, Angie’s Alley, was near the epicenter of the fire, on the south end of the boardwalk. She went down as soon as she heard the news, but the flames were already at her shuttered doors. As the fire moved forward, she went north and poured water on the roof of another shop, Sunny’s & Ricky’s, up toward Casino Pier.

"There were a bunch of us up there. The Whelans from Lucky Leo's, Lisa Barna (who owned Jack & Bill's, also destroyed), Eric Hersey (a Seaside police officer)," she said.



"Even though our places were gone, we had to spray down other places. We were putting out the embers that were flying. We weren't going to let it beat us."

In that statement is the truth about what saved the boardwalk: Defiance.

Ten months ago, Sandy knocked down the boardwalk, and it bounced up by summer. Not completely, but enough.

“We had an okay summer,” said Barna, who also owns the Aztec Motel near Casino Pier. “It wasn’t great but it wasn’t bad. It was nothing to cry about.

“This … ” she said, sweeping her hand toward the burned part of the boardwalk, “this is something to cry about.”

Aerials of Seaside Boardwalk fire aftermath 46 Gallery: Aerials of Seaside Boardwalk fire aftermath

The time for crying came Friday, while hot spots from the blaze still smoldered, and daylight brought the visual enormity of the destruction.

But during the fire, in the literal heat of the moment, there was very little despair. Just defiance.

“Damn right, we took it personally,” Seaside Heights Police Chief Thomas Boyd said.

Boyd sent out the call to “bring everybody” a half-hour into the wind-bellowed blaze that began on the Seaside Park side of the boardwalk, in or near a single unattached building.

But embers started flying, boards began burning, and soon a conflagration had presented itself.

Bill Rumbolo, Seaside Heights’ public works director, is also chief of Seaside Heights’ all-volunteer fire department, a 30-member force.

They were called to aid Seaside Park, but soon it was their town on fire, too, and the potential for the fire to ride up the 2½-mile boardwalk was not only very real, but imminent.

And so those “everybodies” came: Fire companies from almost every town in Ocean County and every surrounding county, 50 firetrucks in all, bringing 400 firefighters.

From Elizabeth came a monster pump called the Neptune system, obtained after the 9/11 terror attacks to put out potential gas tank explosions.

They all saved the boardwalk, but it was Rumbolo who cut the first trench.

“We were pouring water on it, but we weren’t beating it back. It just kept coming,” he said. “It was about an hour-and-a-half into the fire, I decided to make a trench cut.”

A trench cut in the boardwalk at Lincoln Avenue in Seaside Heights was credited with preventing the further spread of ThursdayâÂÂs fire.

Rumbolo drove to the public works garage about a mile away and returned with a backhoe. He attacked the boardwalk between Farragut and Porter avenues, ripping up boards and creating a 14-foot swath. He maneuvered the backhoe between pilings as black smoke engulfed the machine and fiery embers flew around the cockpit. He could slow the fire, but he could not stop it.

"I pretty much knew I had to get out of there," he said. "The fire was going to jump it."

He drove the backhoe north, to Dupont, and had to make what he called a "very tough decision."

The boardwalk at DuPont was brand new, built this spring after Sandy.

“It killed me to have to rip it up like that. It really did,” Rumbolo said. “We worked so hard to rebuild. But it was either that or lose the whole thing.”

He dug in again, but new boards created more of a challenge; they were reinforced and battened down, to never again be lifted by the force of water. Now Rumbolo smashed down on them and clawed at them with a two-ton bucket, doing his best to reduce them to splinters. It didn’t work. The fire was on him.

It was at about this time that Elliott knew the fire was coming his way. His men were pouring water onto the Casino Pier. A significant fire was started and extinguished, as was one on the Royal Sands condo.

“We were wetting down the (Casino) pier, the embers were flying,” Elliot said.

He got into a Caterpillar machine owned by the Weeks company, which removed the JetStar roller coaster from the water and is doing structural work at the pier, and drove 200 yards down the beach. He turned into the first place where there was a break in boardwalk stores and arcades — Lincoln Avenue, which Gov. Chris Christie would later publicly describe as the firefighters’ “last stand.”

“I got in as far as I could,” Elliot said, and while he never felt in danger, he did say the fire was “belching” at him from under the boardwalk.

“It would come up, then go back, then come up again,” he said. “I told people it was like a dragon, but don’t put that in the paper. It sounds stupid.”

A view of the wreckage from Thursday's Seaside Heights Boardwalk fire from the Beachcomber Bar and Grill's top deck.

Actually, it sounds apt. And to complete the metaphor, the dragon slayer was on its way: A 108,644-pound, orange Doosan DX480LC Crawler Excavator, the kind of machine that tears up roads like fingers through a birthday cake.

The machine belongs to George Harms Construction, which is doing some of the major work to rebuild Route 35. When the project boss learned of the fire, he sent down the large excavator on a flatbed truck, along with a second, smaller excavator and two front-end loaders.

Elliott was punching through Lincoln Avenue when the big excavator was delivered, and it rode down the construction ramps at Casino Pier onto the beach.

“That thing just started ripping it apart, pilings and all,” Elliott said.

With the fire 50 yards away, the Harms operators tore through the boardwalk at Lincoln Avenue in less than 35 minutes and removed the wood so it wouldn’t catch fire. The fire was so close, the flames from underneath the boardwalk would dance up and around the excavator’s bucket as it pulled up the boards.

“I was standing right there, and there was a concern, but I wasn’t too worried. Our guys excel at everything they do,” said Tom Hardell, the Harms project boss who sent the machinery.

Everything, except take credit. Hardell and Ken Harms, the son of the owner, declined to identify the Doosan operator.

“The heroes of the fire are the firefighters that sat over that thing and poured water on it,” Harms said. “We were glad to help. That’s it.”

“We had the machinery, we were in the area, so we helped,” Hardell said. “It was just us helping neighbors.”

So if the question is, “Who saved the boardwalk?” there’s the answer.

Neighbors. Neighboring towns. Neighboring counties.

From boardwalk storeowners with garden hoses to the firefighters running the Neptune system, pumping 5,000 to 10,000 gallons a minute.

From Gov. Christie, who keeps showing up in Seaside with the full muscle of his administration, to the unnamed heavy equipment operator, swinging a two-ton bucket through a smoldering boardwalk.

All neighbors. In a town, a region, a state that pulls together, one disaster after another. And will again.

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