When night falls in the Rockaways, the hoods come out.
Ever since Sandy strafed the Queens peninsula and tore up the boardwalk, it’s become an often lawless place where cops are even scarcer than electrical power and food. Locals say they are arming themselves with guns, baseball bats, booby traps — even a bow and arrow — to defend against looters.
Thugs have been masquerading as Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) workers, knocking on doors in the dead of night. But locals say the real workers have been nowhere in sight, causing at least one elected official — who fears a descent into anarchy if help doesn’t arrive soon — to call for the city to investigate the utility. Further exacerbating desperate conditions, it could take at least a month to repair the the bridge that connects the Rockaways to the city subway system, officials said.
“We booby-trapped our door and keep a baseball bat beside our bed,” said Danielle Harris, 34, rummaging through donated supplies as children rode scooters along half-block chunk of the boardwalk that had marooned into the middle of Beach 91st St.
“We heard gunshots for three nights in a row,” said Harris, who believed they came from the nearby housing projects…
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No preparation whatsoever was done to protect the city by the government. Noaa warned New York two days in advance that the lowest subway entrances needed to be sand bagged well enough to hold back two feet of water to prevent the subways from flooding, because a storm surge of 11.5 feet was predicted, and the lowest subway entrances are at 10 feet. Yet the people in charge there opted to not protect the subways when it would have been easy. Sandbagging against two feet of water is childs play. That’s NOTHING. Why was it not done? Furthermore, the World Trade Center site needed only 2 feet of sandbags as well. So why were the workers at that site not told to go out for a couple hours and sandbag the place? I guess Lucky Larry wanted a photo op there as well…
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