By Nick Buglione
Though the Blackout of 2003, which rocked cities across the East Coast and further inland, would rob the area of power for about the next 24 hours, the seven-year East Meadow resident spent the next half-hour finishing up her daughter's party sans electricity.
Then came the hard part: She had to get home.
"It was horrendous," said Herlihy, speaking from the stoop of her Concord Avenue home. "There was so much traffic." With stop lights out and a sea of cars choking major roads, it took her over an hour to get from Roosevelt Field to East Meadow, a trip that takes 10 or 15 minutes under normal conditions.
When East Meadow lost power around 4:10 p.m., along with the rest of the metropolitan area, things were hectic. Volunteers from the East Meadow Fire Department were kept on their toes, immediately responding to a six-car pileup at the busy intersection of Hempstead Turnpike and Newbridge Road, as well as two house fires.
The blazes caused only minor damage, according to East Meadow Fire Chief John Priest. Firefighters responded to several false alarms that were inadvertently tripped because of the outage, he added. "Since we don't know if they're real or not, we have to respond to them," he said.
The fire department received a number of emergency calls for gasoline from elderly and ailing residents whose life-support systems run on fuel-powered backup generators. "You have no idea how many people living in a community are on life-support systems," Priest said.
Things quieted down considerably about three hours after the blackout began, with some 85 firemen on emergency standby.
Hospital staff at the Nassau University Medical Center's emergency room labored through Thursday night and well into Friday, admitting hundreds of people injured in car accidents, said Shelley Lotenberg, hospital spokeswoman. The hospital's generators kicked on immediately once power was lost and remained on through Friday at the request of the Long Island Power Authority, even after electricity was restored, Lotenberg said.
"Over the weekend we saw an increase of people with gastrointestinal problems," Lotenberg said, which most likely stemmed from residents eating food that spoiled in idle refrigerators and freezers.
As the sun set the evening of the blackout, East Meadow fell eerily silent. Normally busy thoroughfares like Hempstead Turnpike were inactive, though Nassau County police officers were stationed at every major intersection to direct the sparse traffic.
Residents appeared to take the power outage in stride. With air conditioners no longer humming and televisions out for the night, many cracked open cold beers, cranked up their barbecues, and took to their backyards and front stoops. Children playing in the streets added a sort of block-party atmosphere to parts of East Meadow. "There's no air conditioner, but what are you going to do?" said Steve Kochaniwsky, who has lived in the community since the 1950s.
Others shared Kochaniwsky's nonchalance. Though power had been out for hours and the sun was rapidly disappearing, jubilant bar-goers could be heard inside Road Rummers, a watering hole on East Meadow Avenue, just north of Prospect Avenue.
Small candles provided the only light inside the stiflingly hot bar, but the patrons couldn't have cared less. Since no jukebox or radios were working, one patron strummed an acoustic guitar, as others sang in a repetitive chorus, "We're gonna have some fun tonight."
But if they were going to have fun, it was going to have to be somewhere else, as bartender Mary Smith announced her intentions to close. When asked how she was going to persuade the primed crowd to disperse, the visibly exhausted, 12-year East Meadow resident said plainly, "Oh, they'll leave."
The power was not uniformly restored in East Meadow. Some residents reported that their electricity came back on early Friday morning, while other people's power did not return until about 4 p.m., some 24 hours after the outage began.
Still, the damage was done. The blackout impacted all East Meadow businesses to some degree, but hit the restaurants and supermarkets especially hard. With refrigerators down, they were forced to throw out pound after pound of spoiled food.
"The blackout obviously killed our dinner business for that night," said Mike Panagatos, owner of the Empress Diner on Hempstead Turnpike. Between lost sales and food, Panagatos estimates the blackout cost him several thousand dollars.
