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Lovebirds Who Met as Hurricane Sandy Volunteers to Wed in Rockaway Church

By Katie Honan | May 6, 2016 8:28am | Updated on May 6, 2016 7:30pm
 Danielle Redmond and Matt Kehoe met as volunteers after Hurricane Sandy. 
Danielle Redmond and Matt Kehoe met as volunteers after Hurricane Sandy. 
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DNAinfo/Katie Honan

BELLE HARBOR — Matt Kehoe was without hot water and electricity, and hadn’t showered in five days when he walked the 12 blocks from his apartment to St. Francis de Sales church, a major relief site in the days following Hurricane Sandy.

It was Nov. 5, 2012, and he’d been volunteering since the deadly storm left him without much else to do. He took time off from his job at an engineering firm to organize donations, assist other volunteers and muck out homes in his neighborhood.

That morning, Danielle Redmond was also on her way to the church from Astoria, her first time ever on the beachside peninsula. She had a day off from her job at Hertz, and a car full with gas, and found out where to volunteer through a Facebook group.

“I don’t know why I chose Rockaway,” she said. “I almost got lost and turned around. I’d never been there before.”

Still, she found her way to the school gym attached to the church, which was filling up with donations from around the country.

While sorting donated clothes, Redmond, now 38, briefly met Kehoe, now 30.

“I figured I’d introduce myself to every girl I met,” he said. She joked that he was “really loud,” but his blue eyes stood out to her from across the table, she said.

Three and a half years after the storm, the two are set to wed Saturday at that same church where they first met — at 129-16 Rockaway Beach Blvd. — in what relief organizer Meghan Courtney Flanagan called "love at first disaster site."

Neither said they were looking for any sort of connection that day, considering the circumstances. 

But "she stood out from the other volunteers that day,” Kehoe said. The pair ended up spending the day together, teamed up by a volunteer organizer because of Redmond’s car.

“One of the people said, ‘We have a girl here with a car, can you show her around?’” they recalled. At the time, cars with gas were a rare asset, so they drove a family with supplies back to their home in Far Rockaway.

While there was a little light left, Kehoe showed Redmond around the peninsula.

As they drove back down the street to the church, she drove by a shuttered flower shop — which shared her name, Danielle’s Florist, and had piled its soggy inventory on the street outside.

He told her to stop the car, then ran out to grab a rose from the garbage — a suave move they both laugh about now.

“Thank you for coming to volunteer,” he said, as he handed her the rose.

Kehoe continued volunteering throughout November, later starting his own underwater inspection company, working with many Hurricane Sandy-impacted homes on Long Island.

Redmond, who now works at the Jewish Theological Seminary, returned to Rockaway a few more times to volunteer. On their first official date, in Astoria, she said she barely recognized Kehoe, who had showered.

From then on, they were a couple, a real relationship that began at a clothes-sorting table, they said.

Redmond said her grandmother — who died Oct. 29, 2011, exactly one year before the storm — would always tell her to go to church to meet a nice boy to marry.

“A year later, I did,” she said.