Village Crews Praised for Cleanup Work

Repair and cleanup crews in the Village of Mineola received praise for their efforts in cleaning up in the wake of Hurricane Irene from the .

“By far, our was the cleanest, by far our had the most passable roads,” Trustee Lawrence Werther said, imparting the words spoken to him by a friend who was a sanitation official in a neighboring municipality.

Superintendent of Public Works Tom Rini began prepping for the storm three days before it hit by participating in emergency management conferences with the Nassau County Department of Emergency Management.

On Thursday and Friday village crews spent time preparing equipment, emergency lighting and generators while Rini rented an additional wood chipper so the village would have two fully equipped tree-trimming units. At the September 7 meeting of the board, he also said that due to the , he was able to negotiate agreements with contractors for additional equipment the Saturday before the storm – one for a dumptruck and extra manpower and a second for tractor-trailers to supplement crews in moving storm debris.

Despite not having to use the contracts, Rini said one of the benefits of having them in place was that if the Federal government had declared an emergency, “we had rental contracts already in place prior to the storm that any of those costs should we need to use them would be refundable.”

Saturday night crews reported at the yard, including eight workers from sanitation, 10 from the highway department, two mechanics and six from water and sewer who worked in two-man shifts making sure wells or engines were working in event of a .

At about 8:30 p.m. Saturday night, village garbage tucks went out collecting trash since “people still put their garbage on the streets,” Rini said. “We had to go out there and make sure all of that was off the streets so we didn’t have garbage projectiles, basically.”

Highway crews were also out from catch basins, but had to stop at 3 a.m. due to high winds. At 8:30 a.m. Sunday, crews returned to work with four garbage trucks, two tree crews and two small dumptrucks with clearing debris until 10 p.m.

“Basically we moved from east to west going street by street,” Rini said.

Crews worked 12 hour shifts on both Monday and Tuesday clearing by Wednesday afternoon. Of the 60 trees that went down, “none of them were on our tree removal list,” Rini said.

The two remaining sites of a tree on a house on Latham Road in wires and a site on Wellington Road were both completed on Saturday.

“I’m really proud of the work that they’ve done,” Rini said of the village crews, noting that normal garbage collection was not suspended “because we were able to get out there on Sunday and take care of as much damage as we did as it was happening.”

During the storm village office staff were also answering phones for the water department.

“This village board thought it was important, as well as I did, to ensure that when a resident called that they got a voice on the other end of that phone, not a recording,” said, adding his appreciation for the crews who did “tremendous tremendous work in getting the village back to normal operating levels as quickly as possible.”