Imagine returning to the house you’ve lived in for 15 years and finding it utterly destroyed. Sand, sewage and sludge are everywhere. Fourteen feet of water gushes through your basement and first floor. From your daughter’s baby photos to your beautiful garden, everything is ruined.

What would you do?

If you were Fiorella Raimondi, a 2nd-grade teacher and the chapter leader at PS 20 on Staten Island, you’d dig in, rebuild and start over. And you’d do it with an amazing sense of gratitude toward your colleagues and neighbors.

“I lost everything I have ever owned in my entire life,” says Raimondi. “But as bad as my experience was, it has humbled me more than I have ever imagined to find out that people are so genuinely good when it comes to helping out.”

When Raimondi returned to her ruined Midland Beach home four days after Hurricane Sandy, her colleagues and neighbors took charge.

“Teachers are leaders,” she says. “My UFT members formed a committee to come to my house.”

Friends and strangers alike, including a neighbor who dished out hot soup, and Girl Scouts who brought food for her cats, pitched in.

Then, although the storm was over, “the chaos started, trying to get things done,” says Raimondi, who spent countless hours on the phone with her insurance company and FEMA.

With her house uninhabitable, Raimondi and her 9-year-old daughter first stayed with friends and then in January moved into the home of a colleague’s in-laws who spent the winter in Florida. Although she and her daughter tried “to live as normally as possible,” Raimondi spent her weekends “running to Home Depot” and hiring contractors to restore heat and remove mold from her house’s interior.

For nearly seven months, Raimondi and her daughter grappled with the difficult task of rebuilding — not just their house, but their sense of security.

“My daughter was affected tremendously,” says Raimondi, who describes the heartbreak of reading her daughter’s journal entries about “how she lost everything and she wishes the hurricane never happened.”

When they finally moved back home in April, Raimondi let her daughter share in the happier task of redecorating.

“I said, ‘You can have whatever you want in your room!’” she remembers with a laugh.

But although Raimondi is glad to be home, the storm still lingers.

“I’m not at ease the way I used to be in my home,” she admits.

Further complicating matters is the possibility that Raimondi will be billed for thousands of dollars worth of flood insurance — a prospect she calls an “insult to the people who just lost everything and tried to rebuild.”

Even so, Raimondi continues her restoration efforts — and she continues to be grateful to the colleagues and neighbors who helped her.

“I’m so proud to be a teacher and a UFT member,” she says, “because everybody really came through beyond anybody’s wildest expectations.”