Transcript :[Claudia McKenna] This is Singulair pills that I take everyday, it’s a pill for breathing problems.

We’re trying to live here, we rebuilt everything and I wanna live in a safe environment. And right now it’s not safe.

People get in and out of the houses…

I have seasonal asthma bronchitis and I am afraid I am gonna have to start using my inhalers because you can’t smell when the wind comes by, you can’t smell the mold.

Look, look at this here…I don’t know if you could see it. But the roof is gonna caved in, there’s big hole…on the roof. The door is open… the breeze… This is a mass here.

18, 19 months later, the houses are still in the same condition. They still need to be got out, they still need to be cleaned out in the back and nobody has done anything.

The houses on the outside are deteriorating, inside the mold…

(Title card) The storm covered over 16 percent of the island’s residential areas. Many residents were forced to leave their homes. A year and a half later, some houses still stand empty.

He is a very good protector. I don’t need an alarm system. He doesn’t let anybody come near the property, which is very good because it’s very isolated here.

We were out of the house six months. I had five and a half feet water in each room of my house. Everything was destroyed. They had to be rebuilt. Now I am in the middle of two abandoned houses.

I feel very uncomfortable in the middle of very unsafe hazards.

[Deidre McGrath] We were walking in this area to show people in America that people were still suffering from the effects of Hurricane Sandy.

That’s one of the problems that we have that abandoned houses like this, when the bank owns it, you have to contact… first you have to find out who owns the house. When you find them, you gonna contact the owner and get them to sign a waiver that lets volunteer groups go in and clean it up.

Nobody is taking responsibility for the interior of the homes that were saturated with ocean water and whatever other debris came up in that title surge. You know you had oil from home, you had gas from cars, you had sewage… I mean all the stuff went into these homes and has now sat for a year and a half inside these homes with the windows closed door shut and it’s just festering.

[Claudia McKenna] I really hope politicians, the local and state officials take this seriously that there’s big concern about this. Not everybody is back from Sandy. People still owe a lot of money. And the country, the state’s dragging their feet on this.

more info:
Hurricane Sandy coincided with the expected seasonal increase in respiratory viral infections, which exacerbate asthma and other chronic respiratory conditions, according to the city Department of Health. Some people were exposed to irritants, including dust produced from home repairs, cleanup and debris removal, mold growth caused by wet and damaged buildings materials.Indoor exposure to mold can cause asthma symptoms, hypersensitivity pneumonitis, and coughing and wheezing in otherwise healthy people.

Adrienne Sprouse is medical director of Manhattan Health Consultants, specializing in physical and mental illness caused by environmental and chemical exposure. She said that if there’s one building next to another or there’s a very moldy building that people walk past all the time, they can definitely get sick.