ABC Producers Ride Out Storm in Fire-Ravaged Breezy Point

By Chris Ariens 

You’ve probably already seen the destruction in Breezy Point, Queens. 100 homes destroyed by a massive hurricane-whipped fire Monday night. Two ABC News producers rode out the storm, having been sent to Breezy Point earlier in the afternoon to do the “hurricane hold-outs” story. Jim DuBreuil and Keturah Gray recount the horrific night on ABCNews.com.

“I remember looking out the window around 8:30 at night, and all of a sudden, we just saw this,” DuBreuil says. “It seemed like we were in a national forest where you see all those fires with timbers flying around. It was off in the distance and I wasn’t thinking this is going to affect us. But as each hour progressed, the storm, the fire was just coming closer and closer and God, you [Keturah] looked at me and said, ‘We’re getting the hell out of here.'”

“I just remember when I first saw that fire thinking we have water on one side of the house, we have a TON of water on the back side of the house, and we have a fire that is inevitably going to get closer because of all of the winds,” says Gray “I was just like, ‘What do we do? Where do we even begin? Do we take this route or this route?’ I was so worried about the people that I knew, because we had been down that beach earlier that afternoon. There were a lot of people in that line of fire, and I just didn’t know how they were going to get out.”

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Elizabeth Vargas’s story, including video shot by DuBreuil and Gray, after the jump…

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