HULL — For most 6-year-olds, skinned knees and playground fights top the list of traumatic moments. But for Scott Sandonato, now 46, it was seeing his mother and grandmother hug each other and cry as water rushed into their Samoset Avenue home in February 1978.

"I remember the water coming into the backyard and you could hear it when it broke through the basement door. There was a big crash and all the water rushed in," he said. "We had no way to get out."

Sandonato's father had left for his job plowing roads the morning before the blizzard began. It was days before he could return to his family, which was stranded in their home two blocks from Nantasket Beach and unable to leave because of flooding. Sandonato's grandparents lived in the basement.

"My grandparents had to find a new place to live. We had to go down and shovel wheelbarrows full of sand out of the basement," Sandonato said. "We ripped everything out and to this day it's still like that. We never bothered to refinish it again." 

The family was eventually rescued by National Guardsmen who backed up a truck to the front porch and took the Sandonatos to a relative's house on higher ground.

"We knew the storm was coming and we knew there would be floods, but we never thought it would reach us," Sandonato said. "In the whole time we lived there, it had never reached us."

Forty years later, Sandonato said memories of the blizzard are still fresh.

"I was scared because my dad wasn’t there. We all were," he said. "When you’re a kid you just think you’re going to die when things get scary. You cut your finger and think you’re going to die, so this was a big deal for us."