City Crews 'Working Tails Off' to Correct Flooding Problems

Since Hurricane Sandy the City of Long Beach has done “a tremendous amount of work” on the sanitary sewer and stormwater systems, and after the storm the New York State Department of Transportation helped the city blow sand out of all the storm sewer lines to get that system running again, Commissioner of Public Works Jim LaCarrubba said at Tuesday’s City Council meeting.

“That doesn’t mean that sand hasn’t infiltrated some of those drains since then,” he added. “And we’ve been dealing with that on a case-by-case basis as we move through.”

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“We’ve had crews going out literally around the clock and they’ve been doing an incredible job on those drains,” Schnirman said.

LaCarrubba said the amount of cuts and caps the sewer department is presently performing on lateral home sewer lines that connect to the city’s main line is about 10 times higher than usual, he said.

“Our sewer maintenance crews have been working on maintaining the storm sewer system as well as dealing with all the sanitary sewer issues throughout the city, which includes a lot of the cut and caps, which residents require when they’re doing work on their homes, whether they’re elevating or demolishing them,” he said.

The commissioner said the flooding Long Beach experienced during the recent heavy rainstorms wasn’t any different than other areas in Nassau County and parts of Suffolk and New York City. He indicated that the city’s flooding is due in part to a higher than normal water table.

“Since Sandy, and because we have had so much rain, the ground can only take so much water and the storm system can only take so much water,” he said. “And when it hits its peak, when the rains come down like they did last Friday, the system backs up and it takes a little while for it to catch up.”

During his address, LaCarrubba recalled that a resident who stopped him on the street asked why “everyone is paying so much attention to the boardwalk” at the expense of working more on correcting the storm drains. “Sewer maintenance doesn’t work on the boardwalk; Grace Industries is working on the boardwalk,” he said, referring to the Plainview-based firm the city hired to rebuild the 2.2-mile walkway.

LaCarrubba said his department would address the larger flooding issues as they are found, whether they are blockages or inadequate and outdated piping. He cited a proposal he would make later in the meeting to correct a sewage system problem at National Boulevard, south of West Walnut Street, as one example.

“With the limited work force that we have, the amount of work that they have to do, besides staying on top of the storm system as well, has been inordinate,” he said of city workers. “They’ve been working their tails off to try to keep up with this work.”

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