Long Island, NY – Four days after Hurricane Sandy forever changed the face of the Five Towns, area residents are baffled, frustrated and angered by the total lack of progress in their area.
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According to Larry Gordon, editor of the Five Towns Jewish Times, two substations that serve the Far Rockaway area were destroyed by Monday night’s storm. Instead of splitting the crews and working to repair both substations simultaneously, all restoration efforts have been dedicated exclusively to rebuilding the substation that serves the nearby minority community. No plans have been announced yet to repair the substation that serves the Jewish community in Far Rockaway and the Five Towns.
“We pay the highest taxes in the United States here in Nassau County,” Gordon told VIN News. “Yet we have been groveling for five days and still have no response from anyone. Why do we have to wait for them to finish work on the other substation, and live totally in the dark? We have large families with lots of children who have no place to go and no one to take them in. The bottom line is people are suffering. It is cold, people are getting sick and there is no end in sight.”
Compounding the problem is the total lack of police presence in the area and according to Gordon, a Lawrence resident, all resources of the local precinct have been committed to patrolling the higher crime area in the Beach 30’s and 40’s.
“There are no police here at all,” declared Gordon. “This is a high crime area under normal circumstances and there have been numerous robberies and a lot of looting in stores. Several stores on Central Avenue have been broken into under the cover of darkness and without electricity there are no alarms. You walk in Cedarhurst at night and it is pitch black, like walking on the dark side of the moon. Shabbos is coming, even more people are leaving the area and quite frankly, people are afraid.”
Gordon alleges that much of the lawlessness in the area is the result of political bickering.
“Governor Cuomo wants to send in the National Guard to help patrol the area, but Mayor Bloomberg is against the idea, considering it an affront to the police department,” explained Gordon. “The mayor of Lawrence was also in favor of bringing in the Guard but it is a politically sensitive issue that could have long term implications with the Nassau County Police Department for the same reason.”
Bringing the National Guard in could also solve another problem that has been plaguing the area: traffic.
“There are no traffic lights and there are accidents all over the place,” said Gordon. “Things are crazy here. I spoke to Assemblyman Phil Goldfeder and he told me he hopes that in a few days maybe things will improve to the point where we can be at a disaster level. Right now things are so bad we don’t even qualify as a disaster.”
They cannot “split” the crews to work on these substations. There are minimimum numbers of employees that must do this kind of work for both safety and logistical reasons. The priority has nothing to do with the skin color or income of the residents. The standard formula used by EVERY utility is to repair the substations and transmission/distribution lines in a sequence that will restore the greatest numbers of customers first (with a separate priority for hospitals, fire stations, fuel terminals etc). The substation being worked on first will restore service to more customers than the other one…Too bad. You will have to wait.
hahem yerachaim!
in Boro park or Williamsburg this would not never have happenned. The machers would have been all over Bloomberg and Cuomo andit would have been up and running in a day or two. When it comes to Tzarchei Tzibbur nobody does it like the chassidim.They don’t take no for an answer and use whatever means necessarry to get things done.
stop voting already ! Maybe tge politicians and machers will learn their lesson they knows Jews vote anyways got whomever they are told.
#4 - write in English and not whatever language you wrote.
I recall 10000 black hats were told to go to hell by King Bloomberg.
excuse me, mr gordon. the police presence is there. not only that, but enough with the ‘im jewish and i should get preferential treatment’. . tell that to Staten Island.the preposterousness of your stating that ‘minority’ areas are getting preferential treatment only serves to display your ignorance about disaster relief, and about how the repair work has to get mandated. i live here, and im freezing, and i have no food, in fact, i have alot of things to say very clearly about this area and the people in it. maybe,, jsut maybe,, though, should you be correct in asserting that we’re getting the short end of the stick, its no more than the obnoxious, rude, insolent and ‘we have money and we pay taxes’ neighborhood deserves– its commeupence, cause really, nothign makes anyone that special, not even being a jew.. oh, and go check your facts mr ‘editor’… the five towns isnt on the top of the highest taxes in the us. if you edit a paper, its not worth the cost of the paper you print it on.
Mr. Gordom is 100% right! LIPA should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extand of the law. Bloomberg himself said today that their behaifor is not accaptable and its not only now, its always! LIPA never delivers but updates every 15 minutes that they are working on it. Disaster!
texas jew, there’s nothing wrong with #4 ’s english, save for the double negative in the first sentence
bring in the guard thats what theyre for!!!! NYPD does nothing anyway on a normal day.
We should be careful, not to make this a Jewish issue of suffering, from the hurricane. In fact, from what I’ve seen on the news, the vast majority of those suffering, (i.e. Staten Island, and NJ), are gentiles.