Irish strongest lead Hurricane Sandy efforts - NYC’s Sanitation Department on the front line

This Irish flag was recovered by the Sanitation Department in Belle Harbor.
Pictured are supervisor Matt Ryan, sanitation worker Ed Shevlin and supervisor Joe O'Keefe.

Frank O’Keefe has seen a lot in his 20-plus years as a member of New York City’s Sanitation Department -- massive blizzards, hurricanes, even 9/11.

Nothing prepared him for what he saw when he reported for work in the Rockaways after Hurricane Sandy.

“Any pictures you’ve seen do not do it justice,” said O’Keefe, whose parents were born in Kerry.
“It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

O’Keefe, a Sanitation Department superintendent, was dispatched to the Rockaways after the storm. He, along with countless other members of the department, immediately began cleaning up ravaged, heavily-Irish communities such as the Rockaways, Breezy Point and Broad Channel.

The Sanitation Department, known as “New York’s Strongest,” has transformed Jacob Riis Park into a massive trash storage facility. Many of the workers and supervisors cleaning up Queens have not had a day off since the storm hit.

Not long after the clean up got underway, O’Keefe noticed something.  Many key leaders of the department’s Queens clean-up effort are Irish Americans, active in the department’s Emerald Society and Pipe and Drums Band.

The top supervisor on the operation, for example, is Deputy Chief Jim McGovern.  Deputy chiefs Danny O’Leary (an Emerald Society vice president) Roger Leahy (a pipe major) and Keith Woods, as well as Assistant Chief Joe Hickey (a piper with the band) are also key players. 

Sanitation workers on the streets in the Rockaways include Jimmy McGoorty as well as Ed Shevlin, who is well known in Irish circles for his fluency with the Irish language. 

Shevlin has studied Irish in Galway, after wining a grant from the Fulbright Commission, and is working toward a bachelor’s degree in Irish studies. He has said he plans to earn a master’s degree and eventually teach college.

Read more on Hurricane Sandy and the clean up efforts here

Does having all of these Irish Americans help the clean up operation?

“Absolutely,” says O’Keefe. “You have everybody’s cell phone numbers.  It’s easy to get in touch with people.  You know where everybody is.  And maybe there’s even a bit more camaraderie.”

Other key Irish Americans on the clean-up effort include superintendents Timothy Fox, an Emerald Society vice president, and Dennis Cleary, an Emerald Society member, as well as supervisor Joey O’Keefe, a pipe sergeant in the band.

Given all the pain and suffering caused by Sandy, it’s been easy to forget the tremendous job done by all of New York’s Sanitation workers, and what they’ve done to help bring some kind of sense of normalcy back to New York. 

Sandy, in short, gave New Yorkers a chance to sing the praises of New York’s unsung heroes.  (Full disclosure -- my own father retired from “The Strongest” back in the late 1980s.)

Among those working to clean up the Rockaways were many sanitation workers who themselves suffered property damage, lost homes or had family members displaced.

“Coming to work was almost therapeutic for them,” said O’Keefe.  “It took the focus temporarily off of their personal issues.”

Whatever their background, sanitation workers tasked with cleaning up what Sandy left behind faced unprecedented challenges.

“Never ever in the history of the department have we had a clean up like this,” noted O’Keefe, who grew up in the Woodlawn section of the Bronx.

“People had to get together and use their experience and the knowledge they acquired over the years.”

O’Keefe added, “There’s still a lot of work to do, but given what it looked like two weeks ago it’s almost a miracle.”

And while residents have been hit hard by power outages, homelessness and looting, O’Keefe has been blown away by the strength of Queens residents.

“The people here are incredibly resilient.  They have loved us and they’ve really responded to our contribution here,” he said.

The Irish American sanitation workers and residents have actually started looking ahead to the first Saturday in March.  That is the traditional date of the Rockaways annual St. Patrick’s Day parade.

“They want to have it,” O’Keefe said of local Irish residents.  “I think that’s going to be their big comeback.”

And will the Sanitation’s Pipe and Drums band be there?

“Absolutely,” O’Keefe vowed.  “We march in it every year.”

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tdeignan.blogspot.com or tomdeignan@earthlink.net)

Childhood Staten Island memories shattered by Hurricane Sandy -- Superstorm dubbed the Katrina of New York by locals

Homes and lives destroyed in Staten Island after Hurricane Sandy

When I was younger, if I had a Sunday morning baseball or soccer game, I attended Mass at Our Lady of Lourdes Church on Cedar Grove Avenue in the New Dorp Beach section of Staten Island.  The church was conveniently located right next to Miller Field, where thousands of kids and parents congregate on weekends for sports, picnics, sunbathing and more.

Right now, if you ascend the steps of Our Lady of Lourdes, a landscape of breathtaking devastation unfolds before you. 

Muddy water.  Wind-battered bus stop signs.  Waterlogged couches.  Discarded appliances.  Pulled-up rugs. Sand.  

And, of course, people.  

People like Lou Cummiskey.  I attended Our Lady Queen of Peace grammar school  with Lou’s son, Danny.  A 40 year-resident of New Dorp Beach, Cummiskey has  served as an Ancient Order of Hibernians treasurer as well as an organizer for  the Staten Island Irish fair. 

In 2007, he helped a man from Derry return a Purple Heart medal to the family of an Irish immigrant New Yorker who believed the precious military memento had been lost forever. Cummiskey has also worked with the Irish Political Prisoner’s Children’s Holiday program which brings kids from Northern Ireland to America.

Now, Lou Cummiskey has no home.  

“They got a red tag,” Danny Cummiskey told me this week, referring to the seal left by city officials deeming his parents’ house unsafe.

“It’s been hard,” Danny added.  “This is Katrina in New York.” (To help the Cummiskey family visit this website). 

Danny says his  parents don’t “handle taking charity well.  They’re proud, Irish folk.” 

However, since Lou Cummiskey has spent his entire life helping others, Danny simply sees this as “karma.”

New Dorp Beach - a five minute drive from the home in which I grew up, and where my mother and sister still live – was decimated by Hurricane Sandy.  For days,  officials were looking for - and finding - dead residents after the superstorm hit.

In neighboring Oakwood Beach, one of my cousins was forced to evacuate after Sandy’s merciless tide flooded the home.

Last week, there were no picnics, no baseball games at Miller Field.  It was strewn with ocean debris and served as a staging area for volunteers and rescue workers who unloaded trucks full of food, clothes and other necessities for New Dorp Beach residents.

They had spent the bleak days after Sandy desperately, angrily demanding much-needed help. And now there’s cold weather, and another nasty storm to contend with.

The entire Northeast will be sorting through the debris left in Sandy’s wake for months.  But Staten Island will never be the same after Sandy. 

A small part of the world which had already been immeasurably scarred by 9/11 - a memorial with an angel and American flag was erected a few years back in New Dorp Beach - must now dig out from an unprecedented natural disaster. A landscape that I literally grew up with has been changed forever. 

My parents used to live down there.  I used to go fishing on a long, rocky jetty located in New Dorp Beach.  I played baseball at Miller Field and softball at the Bob Illig Memorial Field on Cedar Grove Avenue.

For three years, my wife lived in an apartment in nearby Oakwood Beach – this after being flooded out of another apartment on Father Capodanno Boulevard during a 1992 Nor’easter.

That boulevard, located just a stroll from New Dorp Beach, through Miller Field, will forever be linked to the most enduring tragedy of Hurricane Sandy -- a mother, Glenda Moore, whose car stalled on Father Capodanno Boulevard.  She attempted to carry her two and four year old sons to safety, but a massive wave knocked the boys out of her hands. 

They were discovered dead days later. Their father is a native of Co. Donegal.

Until last week, Father Capodanno Boulevard, running along Staten Island’s Midland and South beach areas, was a place of fond memories.  There were softball games with friends.  Trips to the adjacent playgrounds, boardwalk and beach with my own children.

Back in the eighties, thousands of teens would congregate along “Father Capodanno”  - as the locals call it - to do things the brave Vietnam vet priest for whom the  road is named might not approve. We did what teenagers do -- drink, fight, laugh, fall in and out of love and listen to music really loudly. 

There were no cell phones.  No Facebook. Somehow we managed.

Driving along Father Capodanno Boulevard this week brought only sadness.  Vast swaths of sand and mud still on the streets.  Traffic lights that still don’t work.  Piles of trash pulled from waterlogged homes.

And we haven’t even mentioned the place my parents took me - just as I now take my own kids - when we needed a break from Staten Island. Point Pleasant.  Seaside Heights.  The Jersey Shore.

Of course, people will recover from Sandy. Streets will be cleaned.  New homes will replace old ones. 

The Cummiskey family, like so many others in New Dorp Beach, is rallying around those in need.

The response from volunteers “has been phenomenal,” Danny Cummiskey says.  “The outpouring of support is a testament to humanity.”

But Staten Island’s waterfront communities will never be the same.  Fond  memories of the past will grow fonder, if only to help cope with the grim reality of the present. 

As for the future, it may be uncertain, but one thing is clear -- New Dorp Beach residents should not be forgotten.  

Go to www.gofundme.com/1gemg4 to help the Cummiskey family.  Otherwise, donate blankets, food and clothing, especially for young children.  

Help ensure that communities such as this are not lost forever.