Bathers looking for a respite from the summer heat have a choice — jostle with crowds at one of the bigger ocean beaches, or find a less crowded bayside beach.
For many, Hewlett Point Beach in East Rockaway is a nice option, especially for families with little kids who want to enjoy the water but avoid bigger waves.
Locals, however, know that after a heavy rain, the beach is likely to be under an advisory against swimming.
In May, a 20-foot deep sinkhole swallowed part of a Lido Beach road. In June, another one opened in Baldwin. In late July, a third appeared in Oceanside, its dimensions less impressive than its predecessors but big enough “that cars can’t drive safely over it,” a Nassau County police spokesman, Officer Kenneth Palmieri, said at the time.
New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Commissioner Basil Seggos today announced four appointments to new and existing leadership positions with DEC's Executive and Regional teams.
Brookhaven Landfill rises behind the Frank P. Long Intermediate School and playground in North Bellport.
An underground plume of PFAS and other dangerous chemicals has emanated from the Brookhaven Landfill for decades. The Town of Brookhaven is now ordered to measure how far they must go to remediate affected drinking water sources.
Javien Coleman, 13, attended Frank P. Long Intermediate School when he was diagnosed with cancer. He died last year.
Outside Nacole Hutley’s home there is a shrine to her son, Javien Coleman. Decorated for each holiday, it is a place where the family can honor him with photos and his football jersey, number 21.
Inside the house, photographs of young Javien fill the walls and tables, keeping his memory and smile alive.
13-year-old Javien died in 2022, a year after being diagnosed with lymphoma. Just a year before his diagnosis, he had begun attending Frank P. Long Intermediate School, half a mile from the Brookhaven Landfill.
Nothing lasts forever — though there are some notable exceptions: love, according to the poet; sadness, according to the painter; and polyfluoroalkyl chemicals, or PFAS, according to U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.
She was at the Quogue Wildlife Refuge last Friday, July 28, to announce that she had introduced the Clean Water Standards for PFAS Act of 2023, which sets out to regulate the toxic but widely used “forever chemicals” under the aegis of the Clean Water Act.
The state Department of Environmental Conservation is negotiating an agreement with the Town of Islip for cleanup at Long Island MacArthur Airport in Ronkonkoma, which was declared a state Superfund site in February, both the DEC and the town told Newsday.
“You could see the bottom of the water,” Montefusco recalled Thursday as he stood on the dock with several friends including Marty Lange, 86.
“Now, you can take a bright yellow, a chartreuse piece of line, drop it 2 inches into the water and you can’t see the line anymore,” Lange said.
Just a few feet away, Christopher Gobler, a professor at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, stood with local environmentalists and unveiled troubling data that showed water quality hitting an “all-time low” on Long Island since he started monitoring it about a decade ago.
