Living without power has been hard on the seniors, many of whom are disabled, require medication or are too sensitive to handle the cold in their homes.
7:32AM EDT November 3. 2012 - TOM'S RIVER, N.J. — In the days since Sandy barreled through this Jersey shore community, Betty Goselin's one-story ranch has become like that house on the block where all the teenagers go to hang out.
Except that instead of teenagers, it's all her friends in the Holiday City senior community where she lives, all of them seniors who been without power since Monday.
Goselin, 78, has a gas stove, so she can make coffee and hot meals. Four days after the storm, her dining room table has become the place where they can find solace in each other's company and escape from cold, dark houses for a few hours at night.
The dark nights are the worst, says her friend Lynn O'Toole, 69, as she, Goselin and other friends kvetch around the table. The community, which lost power Monday evening, has more than 1,500 homes.
Living without power has been hard on the seniors, many of whom are disabled, require medication or are too sensitive to handle the cold in their homes, O'Toole says. They need electricity to keep their medications refrigerated or to run their medical equipment.
"We're very frustrated and unhappy, and there's not a darn thing we can do about it," Goselin says.
For these seniors and residents in this hard-hit shore community, anxiety is rising as they face another night without power, another night in the cold, another night of not knowing what happens to them or where they go next.
At a Red Cross shelter at the local high school, close to 450 people are staying in cots lined up in rows in the gymnasium. The shelter stopped taking registrations because they were full, says volunteer Robert Thies.
Tom's River Police Chief Michael Mastronardy said his agency was beefing up its presence after people staying in the shelter complained of illegal drugs in the gym and thefts.
"Every day people are in the shelter, it is more difficult," Thies says. "Nobody wants to be here. They'd rather be home."
He says now is the time when the shock of what they've been through wears off and people start to realize what they've lost. Now is when they start to think about what's next.
Kara Pabers, Joe Savastano and John Digley were outside of the shelter, taking a smoke break. They had no idea what was next, but they're anxious, they say.
"People are on edge," says Savastano, 60, who lived in a rooming house in Seaside Heights that was destroyed by the storm. He lives on Social Security and says he had a hard enough time finding a place to live that he could afford.
"It's the anxiety of not knowing where you are going and how long we have here, because we can't stay here," he says.
Pabers has been in the shelter with her husband since Monday when they evacuated their Seaside Heights home. She says she is grateful to the shelter volunteers and the Red Cross for the hot meals, the clothes and the place to stay.
Her No. 1 worry right now is finding a home. "I want to be home with my kids, in my own bed," she says. She's applied to FEMA for help. And she knows one thing for sure: "I'm not going back to Seaside."
Digley, 52, who is disabled, says he doesn't know what he'd do without the shelter, but he says he sleeps with one hand on his cane and keeps his medications locked in his car so no one steals them.
"Everybody is waiting to see what's next," he says.
In the senior community Holiday City, the residents say they recognize they fared much better than others in the area. But they, too, don't know when they will get power back.
At least 100 residents, several of them over 90 years old, have left their homes to stay with relatives or friends with electricity, O'Toole, the homeowners' association president, says. She and other residents check daily on those who are disabled or too elderly to get around.
Melody and Hans Lorenzen's home has become a bed-and-breakfast of sorts. Her house is one of the few with electricity. She says Thursday night every outlet in the house was being used by someone recharging their phones.
Melody Lorenzen, 67, brought in a neighbor on oxygen whose house had no electricity, but which she needed to run the breathing machine. She said she made the neighbor come to her house after she found her wrapped in three blankets because there was no heat in her home.
"It's dire for older seniors," she says.
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