COMMUNITY NEWS

Flooding, pollution mark Bellmore-Merrick pond

County promises fixes

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Kenny Martin, who owns one of 38 houses on a pond just north of Sunrise Highway in Bellmore and Merrick, fondly remembers the pond as it was 30 years ago, when he first knew it.

“I used to … race out there to go rowing around,” Martin said. “I used to see my father sailboat on there. In the past I saw people ice skate on there. I used to see neighborhood kids … swimming to the other side. This place has changed from being some sort of little paradise into a dump.”

Kieran Crowley, an author and retired New York Post reporter who has lived near the pond for decades, said this paradise was lost in the 1990s. “We fell in love with this place because it was unique and natural and beautiful,” Crowley said, recalling seeing snowy egrets, common terns, herons, banded kingfishers, snapping turtles and sunfish at the pond. “We built our homes here. I wanted to leave that to my daughter so she could have the same for her kids.”

A tour of the pond by boat this fall revealed that it was choked by elodea, a green aquatic plant also known as waterweed, and garbage, from paper and plastic bags to glass bottles and cigarette butts. It was hardly suitable for swimming.

Houses near the pond have experienced flooding since at least 2011. Unlike south Bellmore and Merrick, the area avoided the wrath of Hurricane Irene and Sandy’s storm surges, which ocean waves produced. But rain still causes the pond to overflow, as it did on Aug. 13, when pond water filled Merokee Drive waist-high.

Sharon Lavelle, a 50-year resident of Mitchell Street in Bellmore, said she was in her basement when 5 ½ feet of water gushed in from the pond. “I nearly got sucked down my sump pump,” Lavelle said. “I nearly drowned in my basement.”

Background

The pond — which Nassau County identifies as Merokee Pond and neighbors call Smith Pond or Newbridge Pond — is fed by an aquifer and in the early 20th century supplied drinking water to New York City, county officials said. It is now privately owned — the property lines of the houses that surround it extend into the pond, Crowley explained. There is no public access to it.

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