Relief efforts shower down on Sandy-struck Long Island

Joyce Beckenstein and Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY

Long Island residents, slowly regaining post-Sandy power and rail service, relied on shelters and stations for food and phone-charging.


South Oyster Bay can be seen through the broken windows of a heavily damaged home in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy in Massapequa on Long Island, N.Y. (Photo: Jason DeCrow, AP)

7:08PM EDT November 3. 2012 - EAST MEADOW, N.Y. — On hurricane-swept Long Island Saturday, there were two Federal Emergency Management stations, five Red Cross food stations, dozens of recharge-your-phone stations and, at long last, stations offering the very next kind of comfort on many a Sandy-survivor's list — free hot showers.

Shower havens were open at multiple locations with locker rooms, from an aquatic center to a golf course club house. BYO towel and soap. After scrubbing up and toweling down at the Nassau County Aquatic Center in East Meadow, John Gariola said with a happy sigh, "I gotta be honest with you: It felt great!"

Gariola and his wife, Donna, evacuated from their basement apartment in Long Beach ahead of the storm and they've been staying in a shelter at a trade school in Levitttown since Sunday night. By Saturday, they were optimistic: They'll never get back to the flooded basement but will work with FEMA on Monday about finding a new place to stay. And the pet shop he manages is still standing.

Not all were as fortunate. There have been six deaths attributed to the storm and the dangers in its aftermath on Long Island's 118-mile stretch from the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens east to the celebrity beach hamlets of the Hamptons.

Nassau County executive Edward Mangano, said the county of 1.3 million residents was rife with uninhabited homes, cell outages and damaged infrastructure including a damaged sewer system serving 500,000 residents with daunting health consequences.

Four of the confirmed storm-related deaths were in Nassau County including a drowning in Island Park, a fallen tree fatality, a car accident in Garden City at an intersection without functioning lights and one fatality from an individual using a propane grill indoors who died of carbon monoxide poisoning. There are also four unconfirmed deaths awaiting a coroner's report, Mangano said.

Mangano praised President Obama, who called twice with promises to supply information and outreach needed from FEMA, and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who supplied additional state police. Mangano said the governor also pledged to hold the Long Island Power Authority accountable for leaving hundreds of thousands of people still in the dark.

By Saturday afternoon, the Authority announced it had restored power to more than 600,000 customers, with approximately 450,000 (including nearly 300,000 in Nassau County) still without power. Nassau, with 1.3 million residents, and Suffolk, with nearly 1.5 million, cover most of Long Island's length.

Cars try to bypass a fallen tree and downed power lines on Oyster Bay Road in East Norwich, N.Y., on Long Island.(Photo: Kathy Kmonicek, AP)

While 90% of customers are likely to have power back by the end of Wednesday, the authority said it may take another week to restore power in Brookville, St. James and Port Jefferson. "There are up to 100,000 customers from the most severely flooded areas whose homes and businesses may currently be unable to receive power," the Authority's web site says.

The Long Island Railroad was partially in operation by Saturday. The Metropolitan Transit Authority had restored hourly service from Penn Station to the railroad's four largest branches: Port Washington, Ronkonkoma, Babylon and Huntington.

Election officials were assessing over the weekend how to deal with Tuesday's vote. Half the polling sites in Nassau County still lacked power on Friday and five of 342 polling places in Suffolk would be relocated, according to the New York Times.

Administrators in several towns along the North and South Forks —- slithery strands of light-drenched real estate that are separated by Great Peconic Bay with the Atlantic on the south and Long Island Sound on the north — credited pre-emergency planning with minimizing their losses.

In advance of Sandy, low-lying towns were evacuated and local merchants were encouraged to have back-up generators to stand them through a predictably long stretch without power, said Scott Russell, town supervisor for Southhold on the North Fork .

Administrative quick thinking In East Hampton may have saved Montauk from being cut off the end of the South Fork. Town supervisor Bill Wilkinson said they found flood waters taking over roads on the quarter-mile wide stretch of land between Amagansett and Montauk.

"We found a breach early and filled it within five hours. By 11:00 pm. the highway was cleared and it stayed open. We dodged a huge bullet," Wilkinson said Saturday.

In Southampton, town supervisor Anna Throne-Holst described a 20-mile area of dunes down to the shore as "wiped out. Our beaches are flattened. Our fishing dock in Hampton Bays, the second most active in the state, is gone."

But Throne-Holst had praise for the prompt response from federal, state, county and leaders and charitable groups that have swept in with fuel, heat, shelters and more.

And neighborly kindness steps in where power lines are still down. In Mattituck, Frank Distefano, owner of Michelangelo's, a popular pizzeria and restaurant, was uncertain his power would stay on. but he still lent his generator to a patron.

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