Storm slams Rockville Centre

Thanks to hours of preparation, Rockville Centre’s response to Hurricane Irene was described as a nearly seamless interdepartmental effort.

“The most important thing is that nobody was killed and nobody was hurt,” Village Administrator Frank Quigley said on Monday. “We’re just very lucky, and we should be very thankful. But as of right now, there’s still plenty of work to do, and that means dealing with some of the more intractable, challenging problems around the village so that we restore power to every home and we make sure the roads are safe to travel on and that people resume their lives in safety.

“To me,” Quigley continued, “the headline is that Electric Department crews are working at full throttle in combination with the Public Works team to clear the fallen trees off roadways and to safely restore power. I think we’re proceeding in a methodical, professional way. To a certain extent we’re dependent on Verizon for telephone poles, and I think Verizon is pitching in to get us the help we need. We also have the upstate [electric] crews, and they are tremendously valuable in supplementing our own staff.”

“Everybody has to keep in mind, Quigley added, “that dealing with the projections we had and the evacuation order from Nassau County, we also devoted resources to preparing to shelter people who might have been homeless at the height of the storm. It turned out it wasn’t necessary to activate the safe havens, but it’s just one of the things that received our attention. And probably the nicest thing that I think happened as a result of this storm is that the Rockville Centre community opened its homes to family and friends who were evacuated so that it wasn’t necessary for [them] to find shelter elsewhere.”

Quigley also said that lessons learned from Irene and previous storms will be applied to future emergency planning.