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Vol. 68 No. 16
THE LEADER IN PROPERTY TA X REDUCTION
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APRIl 16 - 22, 2020
Thinking ahead to life after coronavirus By TIMoTHY DENToN tdenton@liherald.com
With hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers unemployed, thousands of businesses shuttered and tens of thousands of cases of Covid-19 in Nassau County, each day seems like a universe in itself. In the midst of the chaos of a pandemic on a scale not seen for more than 100 years, though, stakeholders have been asking from the start: When out of work the virus finally As recently as passes, what next? January, Nassau The Herald has County had the lowbeen speaking with est rate of unemployelected officials, busiment in the state. But ness leaders and rep23,000 unemployre s e n t at ive s o f ment claims were schools and churches filed in the week over the past month. ended April 3, a nearSeaford and Want- STATE SEN. ly 40-fold increase agh have not been as JoHN BRookS over the same week a hard-hit by the coroyear ago. navirus as neighborL o c a l l y, “ f o o d ing Levittown, which had 419 banks, the Army Corps of Engicases by Sunday night, or East neers — many, many people have Meadow, which had 453. But with stepped up” to fill voids where 110 cases in Seaford — and one government agencies lacked fatality — and a total of 255 in material and human resources, Wantagh and North Wantagh, the said State Sen. John Brooks, a crisis has definitely hit home. Continued on page 3
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Christina Daly/Herald-Citizen
No better way to escape Hundreds of people gathered at Jones Beach State Park’s Field 10 last week in what has become a daily ritual since the beginning of the coronavirus sheltering — watching the sunset.
Seeking to avoid sewer ‘wipeout’ Residents’ flushing the unflushable strains system By J.D. FREDA jfreda@liherald.com
The necessity of keeping homes clean using disinfecting wipes, facial tissues and other products during the coronavirus pandemic is having an impact on Nassau County’s sewage system — and it stinks. Suez, the wastewater and sewage maintenance company in Cedar Creek Park, on the Wantagh-Seaford border, is contracted
to manage Nassau County’s sewers through 2035. In a newsletter released in late March, company representatives wrote of a large uptick in the amount of flushable wipes coming through its pipes. The problem isn’t uncommon. According to first-quarter reports in each of the past three years, wipes that have bundled and twisted together, commonly referred to as “rags,” accounted for an average of around 15 percent of sewer blockages. In the
first quarter of this year, however, the figure jumped to 47 percent. “There are a couple of different factors,” explained Lauren Sternberg, Suez’s Nassau County communications manager. “First things first: The sewer system we manage in Nassau County has about 3,000 miles of piping. More people are home, and more people are flushing. Continued on page 10
Both are residential communities with mostly small businesses. “Many of those have been able to convert to online businesses,” Wantagh Chamber of Commerce President Cathy McGrory Powell said. “There’s a lot of ingenuity, a lot of creativity in the community. I think we’ll see some interesting things come out of this — like businesses partnering with each other” to speed their recovery.
f [Covid-19] turns out to be temperaturesensitive, it might make sense to start school during the warmer months.