Sun & Surf Beach Club in Atlantic Beach on the road to recovery after damaging tornado

For Daniele Dichiara, the "E" wing of cabanas at Sun & Surf Beach Club in Atlantic Beach has always felt like home.

Dichiara, 42, of East Rockaway, spent her summers growing up at cabana E-21, and more recently, at cabana E-19 with her husband and daughter. So Dichiara slipped into a state of shock Aug. 20 on a drive home from Washington, D.C.: Friends and family members were sending her videos of the havoc wreaked on the club by the tornado.

She spent the next couple of days texting with fellow club members to check if anyone had been hurt.

"My phone was on, like, 3% [battery power] the whole time," Dichiara told Newsday.

A call to the Inwood Fire Department at 7:12 p.m. on Aug. 20 reported severe wind damage at the club, Newsday previously reported. The National Weather Service gave the tornado an EF1 classification, with gusts of about 97 mph, putting it on the second of six levels of the enhanced Fujita scale.

There were no injuries caused by the tornado, club officials said, but about 300 members were on hand at the time and witnessed the destruction: large pieces of cabanas and walkways ripped to shreds. About 50 of the 315 cabanas were damaged.

This weekend, members returned to the club for the first time since the tornado struck, some to soak up the sun and others to clean out their cabanas, including Dichiara.

"I was nervous, but I'm pleasantly surprised that it's just dirty," she said. "We're just going to put it back together, and we'll come back next year, ready to go."

Bill Baumert, president of Sun & Surf, said club employees handled the cleanup in the immediate aftermath of the tornado. Contractors will be on site starting Monday to begin repairs.

Baumert said it was crucial for the club to reopen to signal to members that it wasn't going anywhere.

"The optics of that are important to us for the future," Baumert said. "This way, if we get the place rebuilt, and we email pictures and such to the members, they'll see that we mean business."

Baumert said about 30 or 40 cars in the parking lot had broken windows as a result of fence posts that "shot through the air like spears." He noted the impact of the tornado was much different from Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

"It picked and it chose areas to hit," Baumert said. "It just kept bouncing. Every time it hit the ground."

Rita Greco, of Rockville Centre, has been a member of the club for about 40 years. She said it had been raining for about an hour on Aug. 20 before she left about 6:40 p.m. Then the tornado hit, and she pulled over to the side of the road.

"We've seen thunder and lightning. Usually what we do is go into the back of the cabana," said Greco, 75. "So that's probably what I would have done, and the whole top of the cabana blew off. So I would have been in the middle of harm's way."

Sun & Surf has been in operation since 1948, and the tornado is not going to stop the club from continuing on, Baumert said.

"It's a way of life," he said.