Hewlett Harbor Officials Rip LIPA Over Irene

Hewlett Harbor sustained some , power outages and flooding as a result of Hurricane Irene, but board members agreed that damages weren’t as bad as they could have been.

The trustees said at their meeting last Thursday that they are hoping to get some financial relief from FEMA, although exact figures of the damages have not yet been determined.

“I truly believe that even though we are a small village, we really do set a standard for how to prepare for, how to deal with and how to react to all of the challenges a storm presents,” said Mayor Mark Weiss. “But we did not take a direct hit, and we are not suffering in the way [people] are in upstate New York. We are very lucky.”

On the other hand, Weiss didn’t mince words about his disappointment in LIPA, saying that the utility exhibited poor leadership and performance in regards to lack of communication with municipalities and ineffective coordination of the situation in general.

“It was a failure on their part,” Weiss said. “Part of the problem was the inability of LIPA to take reports and leave people who had a complaint with the sense that it was recorded and being communicated to their people in the field. It’s clear to me that the left hand didn’t know what the right was doing.”

Trustee Leonard Oppenheimer said he went to LIPA's building on Peninsula Boulevard three days after the storm following residents calling him to complain. “The building was locked," he said. "There was no customer service during regular business hours. There was nobody there. You’ve got to be kidding me.” 

The board needs to get the phone numbers and email addresses of two senior officials at LIPA that they can communicate with in case of similar situations in the future, said Trustee Kenneth Kornblau. The mayor agreed, but also said the best contact person would be a LIPA field marshal.

According to the mayor, many residents are now considering buying a generator, but he is concerned about safety issues such as how to properly store the gas can and using the generator in a safe location and manner. He said that he was stunned by a resident he knows who tried to use a generator in their closed garage, which is extremely dangerous. He suggested that the fire department hold a seminar on generators.

The mayor also discussed the board’s confusion over conflicting reports from the Nassau County Emergency Management and County Executive Ed Mangano as to whether the village was considered part of the evacuation zone.

Trustee Michael Yohai questioned whether mandatory evacuations in certain areas were an example of being overly cautious.

“You can’t always say the Titanic is going to sink, because if it doesn’t go down, then the next time you say it, nobody’s going to pay any attention to you,” he said. “They’ve got to try to make the right call. If we call for evacuations, and we don’t have a biblical storm, I’m worried that we’re going to use up our credibility. I think you have to strike a delicate balance.”

But Kornblau made the point that predicting the strength and path of storms is not an exact science.

“When you have a category-1 storm, and then it suddenly intensifies to category-2," he said, "you won’t have the time to suddenly tell people to evacuate.”