By JOSEPH KELLARD
Horbachevsky had left his office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan early last Thursday, and was riding the Long Island Rail Road when the power went out at 4:15. The Oceanside resident was one of hundreds of thousands of people in cities from Detroit to New York stranded without a means of returning home.
"Initially I thought the problem was just with the Long Island Rail Road," Horbachevsky said. "But one of my friends on the train had a portable radio, and I heard about Detroit and other places. And everyone was thinking terrorism at that point. I guess that's how we're inclined to think nowadays."
Horbachevsky climbed down a ladder off the train near a train maintenance yard not far from the Jamaica train station. He banded together with three fellow Oceanside residents and started hitchhiking down the Van Wyck service road near Atlantic Avenue. Almost immediately they were picked up by a plumber in his truck, who took them as far as JFK airport.
From there, the band of men began hitching again and were picked up by two women from Woodmere, who offered to take them to Peninsula Boulevard in the Five Towns. The women ended up dropping them at the Oceanside train station, about 90 minutes after the train stopped.
"It shows how New Yorkers will do some real nice things," Horbachevsky said while waiting on the platform for his train back to the city on Monday morning.
During the blackout, Rosina Berdini had a problem that the four Oceanside men could never experience. Berdini has been an Oceanside resident for three months, the same amount of time she's been pregnant. While others entertained thoughts that terrorism was to blame, Berdini descended the 24 flights of stairs at her office at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street with perhaps greater caution than most people.
"I was concerned about walking down the steps and walking around too much," she said. She used her cell phone to call her husband, who works in Brooklyn, and planned to meet him in Queens. Also thinking the energy outage was possibly the work of terrorists, she met her husband on the Long Island side of the 59th Street Bridge, the same route she took when Manhattan was attacked two Septembers ago.
"I'm fine," she said at the Oceanside train station on Monday morning. "I'm happy everything went the way it did."
Some Oceansiders had transportation back home but decided to stay put. Jason Schneider, who owns a sneaker retail store in Sheepshead Bay, chose to stay the night instead of closing up shop once the northeast was taken temporarily back to the Dark Ages. He feared there might be a replay of the looting that took place during the 1977 blackout.
"My alarm system was out, so I stayed to protect the store," he said. "The power came back on about seven o'clock on Friday night. I went home early Friday morning. Went back there for a couple of hours that afternoon. If the lights didn't come back on, I was going to stay another night. But they came on."
No problems at SNCH
Meanwhile, little if any looting occurred, and particular centers of concern, such as hospitals, experienced no major problems, at least not at South Nassau Communities Hospital in Oceanside.
When the power went out, the SNCH followed the Hospital Emergency Incident Command System (HEICS), a system of government standards to follow in various types and levels of emergencies.
"We called [the blackout] a level three," said Chris Hendricks, a spokesman for SNCH. "But there weren't any major problems."
When the power went down, the hospital's own internal generators immediately kicked in. "Anything essential, like heart monitors or oxygen machines, automatically go onto backup generator," Hendricks said. "But ancillary offices, for example, the lights stayed off until Rockville Centre powered us back up. And that was fairly quick."
The hospital's greatest problems were low water pressure and alarms that went off regularly. "Our staff stayed on pretty much a 24-hour watch, with people patrolling the halls to make sure everything was OK. We kept all of our managers and administrators here."
Noticing the lights on in the hospital, some residents of the neighborhood asked to come inside. SNCH allowed some residents without air conditioning, for example, to rest in the hospital's open conference rooms, and the facility also supplied oxygen to local fire departments, Hendricks said.
For some others, who weren't stranded on a train or with child, the opportunities available to them made the experience, at worst, an annoyance.
Oceansider Bob Widder spent Thursday night at his office on the 24th floor of a building on Broadway and 35th Street. "A lot of people left to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, but I decided to hang out," said Widder, who sells promotional items for a corporate apparel company. "I didn't think it was necessary to carry about. You weren't going to get anywhere for hours."
Widder's office was stocked with food and a bottle of Jack Daniels. "We had a party that afternoon," he laughed.
At 6 the next morning, Widder and his coworkers descended the building's 24 stories with flashlights and walked to Seventh Avenue and 32nd Street to get a bus to Jamaica, but were told they'd have to wait five hours. Widder turned in the direction of Eighth and 42nd, where his son is comptroller of the the new Western Hotel.
"As it turns out, they had the best situation in the city," he said. "They had generated power, and they gave all their food away. All day long they had a banquet." At 2:30 Friday afternoon, Widder walked back to 32nd Street and found the MTA buses empty, so he took one to Jamaica, where he caught a train.
Rachel Kivel of Oceanside -- who descended 17 flights of stairs at work, walked to Penn Station from Union Square, ascended 12 flights by candlelight to stay at a friend's apartment overnight, and finally got a ride home from Manhattan -- summed up the blackout and her experience with a sentiment probably shared by most people: "I like electricity."
