Suffolk County police said John Bertuzzi was driving a Kia northbound on North Ocean Avenue when he crossed over into the southbound lane and struck a Volkswagen near Shaber Road at 5:29 p.m.

Bertuzzi was taken to Brookhaven Memorial Hospital Medical Center in East Patchogue, where he was pronounced dead.

The woman driving the other vehicle, 32-year-old Louise Cervelli of Coram, was airlifted to Stony Brook University Hospital where she is listed in serious condition.

Her 35-year-old husband, Garrett, and their 13-month-old son were taken to Brookhaven Memorial Hospital Medical Center. The father is being treated for internal injuries and the baby was treated for minor injuries and released.

Fifth Squad detectives impounded the cars for safety checks and are continuing the investigation, including  whether a medical condition may have contributed to the crash.

Suffolk County police said David Longford, 17, was driving a Toyota with three passengers northbound on Gray Avenue when he lost control of the vehicle, struck a tree and overturned at 1:20 a.m.

David Ross, a passenger who was ejected from the vehicle, was taken to Brookhaven Memorial Hospital Medical Center in East Patchogue where he was pronounced dead.

Longford and a 17-year-old male passenger, 17, both of Medford, were taken to Brookhaven Memorial Hospital Medical Center for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries.

The third passenger, a 15-year-old boy, was taken to Saint Charles Hospital in Port Jefferson, also for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries.

Longford was ticketed for unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle.

Sixth Squad detectives impounded for a safety check, are continuing the investigation and ask anyone with information about this crash to contact them at 631-854-8652 or call anonymously to Crime Stoppers at 1-800-220-TIPS. All calls will remain confidential.

Supporters of the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe in Shoreham Monday, May 13. Left to right: David Madigan, former Assemblyman Marc Alessi, Jane Alcorn, and filmmaker Joe Sikorski. (Photo credit: Spencer Rumsey/Long Island Press)

The same day that Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced plans in Albany to overhaul the Long Island Power Authority, the executive board of the nonprofit Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe hosted an informal gathering for the media on the overgrown grounds and the decayed buildings in Shoreham, where visionary scientist Nikola Tesla once hoped to transmit free energy to the world.

The event on May 13 marked the first time since the 16-acre site was acquired from the Agfa Corporation for $850,000 earlier this month that the media was invited to view the laboratory that famed architect Stanford White had designed for Tesla, with financial backing from J.P. Morgan.

Built from 1901 to 1905, the brick lab was connected by an underground tunnel to a nearby transmission tower, which once stood 187-feet above ground and could be seen from Connecticut. Torn down in 1917 and sold for scrap after Morgan stopped funding Tesla, today only the foundation of the tower remains, plus an ongoing mystery about the all the other tunnels that Tesla reportedly constructed as part of his design electrify the ionosphere and “grip the Earth” with resonating chambers somehow connected to the aquifers.

Jane Alcorn, president of the Tesla group, told the Press she hopes to clear up that mystery soon because someone with “ground-penetrating radar” has offered to do some pro-bono exploration. For years, it’s been rumored that Tesla’s lab equipment was tossed into the tunnels as landfill.

The group had been unable to locate Stanford White’s designs for Wardenclyffe until recently when Alcorn connected with the director of the Tesla Museum in Belgrade, which has a large collection of Tesla’s archives.

“It turns out that all his papers, including the Wardenclyffe blueprints, are in Belgrade,” she says excitedly. The museum officials have promised to send copies of the significant paperwork to the board soon.  “We hope that it will help us with the restoration process and answer some questions regarding the tower and the tunnels.”

Those details would come in handy for filmmakers Joe Sikorski and Vic Elefante, who are working on a documentary about Wardenclyffe, “Tower to the People,” which they hope to complete by this summer “to bring as much attention as possible” to the project, Sikorski says. The filmmakers had donated $33,000—all the seed money for their fiction film about Tesla, “Fragments From Olympus”—to help the science center meet its original goal of $850,000. Online comic Matthew Inman helped spark an online fundraising campaign on Indiegogo.com that netted more than $1.3 million.

Tesla Science Center has to decide whether this dilapidated interior of the photo products warehouse will have to be torn down. (Photo credit: Spencer Rumsey/Long Island Press)

Helping the cause was a $400,000 state grant, originally set up by the former Democratic Assemb. Marc Alessi, which the Town of Brookhaven was administering. According to Alessi, who was beaming with pride as he talked with reporters at Wardenclyffe (while proudly proclaiming that he’s out of politics), there’s an additional state grant of “close to $600,000 that needed some matching money.”

The former Superfund site, polluted from decades of photo-product use, has been officially cleaned up, Alessi tells the Press, adding that “one thing the town could do is stay out of their way as they redevelop the property and make sure it’s done without a lot of red tape.”

The building’s interior is in very bad shape. This reporter was shown inside what had been an annex of the original lab used to ship products. Graffiti covered the walls, a 15-foot puddle was on the cement floor, days after it had rained.
Pointing into the darkness of a corridor that led to the original laboratory, David Madigan, president of a commercial real estate company in Holbrook and a member of the Tesla Science Center board, cautioned reporters from going further because of the high concentration of mold, asbestos and lead paint. The remediation will cost millions, the board predicts. They say $10 million, but that’s just a number “we plucked out of the air,” says Alcorn. Besides raising that daunting amount of money, the board will commission a feasibility study to determine what to renovate and what to demolish.

In the mean time, the Suffolk County police K-9 unit will begin using the site for training and provide security.
Interestingly, the job of transforming Wardenclyffe into a world-class museum was actually made a little easier by Peerless Photo, which bought the site in 1935, because “they boarded up the original arched windows without dismantling them,” Madigan says. “They created a labyrinth of other uses within the building but never tore the building down.”

Today there’s a large warehouse on the west end of the original laboratory, plus a storage area and loading docks attached to the east end.

“When they did build the surrounding buildings,” Madigan says, “they created a space between [them] so perhaps in the future, if a museum was ever created here, the original building would not have to be destroyed to take the other buildings down.”

Like the other board members, Madigan continues to find inspiration in Tesla’s vision and the mission of preserving “the last place on Earth” where Tesla actually did experimental work.

“Everything he did embodied embracing the future,” Madigan says, adding that the goal of the Tesla Science Center is to create “a living thing that looks forward rather than a static thing that only celebrates the past.”

But, of course, the Shoreham facility would honor the inventor of the x-ray photograph, robotics, wireless technology, desalination, bladeless turbines, as well as the induction motor for the long-distance transmission of alternating current, which, Madigan points out, “is the reason we can turn the lights on where we live today from a power plant miles away.”

Robert Cleva shows off his Crasche Middie women’s lacrosse helmet.

Many years ago, Robert Cleva, who runs a commercial real estate business in Woodbury, fell off his bike, landed on the grass and hit his head. An avid exercise enthusiast, he got back on his bike the next day and wore a baseball batting helmet. Dissatisfied with other bike helmets and unhappy with his fallback version, he came up with his own design, eventually patenting a product for bikers, skiers and skateboarders—even police officers.

“People who don’t want to look like they’re wearing a helmet but want to have protection are our clients,” says Cleva, whose online head gear company is called Crasche New York. Last year they began marketing the Crasche Hat, which looks like a woolen ski cap (it’s actually 100 percent Acrylic) but has hidden “impact-resistant protective inserts” made out of polycarbonate plastic and padded with neoprene rubber and air chambers to cushion the shock.

Cleva noticed that parents were buying the Crasche Hat for their daughters playing lacrosse—especially if the girls had suffered concussions—and that surprised him. He had it tested to determine its effectiveness against the impacts of lacrosse sticks and balls to the player’s head.

“It turned out to be a very good product for stick to head but it was marginal for ball to head,” Cleva says.

In February 2012 he’d submitted the hat model to US Lacrosse (USL), the sport’s national governing body, based in Baltimore, where the first women’s lacrosse team played in the United States in 1926. The league itself has been debating how to address the concussion issue—a debate that Cleva inadvertently got caught up in. At first, he got an encouraging reply from Melissa Coyne, the women’s game director at USL.

“Your product complies with current USL rules for women’s lacrosse,” Coyne emailed Cleva in March 2012. “Hope that helps!”

But with the test results in hand, Cleva decided to redesign his product so it could withstand a ball speeding to the head at 78 mph and reduce the impact below the concussive level.

“We re-engineered it, and informed US Lacrosse that we’d made some changes,” Cleva says. “We opened it up—took the top off—because the girls didn’t want the skull cap, they wanted their hair [coming] out the top.”

He named the new model the Crasche Middie, after a lacrosse position. It resembled a head band, available in red, white, black, navy blue or light blue.

“It’s designed to rest on the head,” Cleva explains. “It’s attached to the goggles. When you pull the goggles down, it goes back with it.”

He’s most proud of the material used in the new headgear’s inserts. “You could hit the thing with a sledge hammer and you can’t crack it,” he says.

At this year’s January national lacrosse convention in Philadelphia, Cleva set up a booth featuring the Crashe Middies underneath a big banner proclaiming, “The future of headgear in girls lacrosse.” The future was short-lived, however. USL officials shut him down and escorted him out of the building. Cleva thought USL’s previous approval of the Crasche Hat extended to the Crasche Middie. He was mistaken, they informed him. He would have to submit his new design for approval.

“It happened to be seen by one of our rules committee members who brought up the fact that this product was different from the one that we had approved and this had not been approved,” Coyne tells the Press. “It’s significantly different!” She added that the Crasche Middie brochure “made some pretty incredible claims of its protective value, and that concerned some members of our organization, specifically our sports, science and safety committee…”

After Cleva submitted his new headgear for their examination, the USL’s rules subcommittee determined that the product was “deemed illegal for play.”  In their email to him, they said it violated “portions of Rule 2” regarding “Soft Head Gear…defined as any head covering without hard or unyielding parts that have the potential to injure another player. The product, Crasche Middie, contains hard inserts that are not unyielding which could possibly pose a danger to other players. Additionally, those inserts which [sic] are not adequately padded or appropriately secured and can be easily dislodged. They could potentially injure the player wearing the product or another player.”

Cleva was infuriated by USL’s response and wrote Coyne the following: “To claim that the inserts can come loose is patently false. To claim that they become a danger to other players is ridiculous.”

He sent them an impact test from ICS Laboratories in Ohio, which he’d paid for, claiming it showed that not only did his headgear pose no threat to another player it actually reduced the force of two players knocking heads if one wore the Crasche Middie and the other girl didn’t. USL’s Coyne was not persuaded.

“Parents are looking for protective headgear. We understand that,” says Coyne. “But we as a governing body also have a responsibility to make sure that consumers are protected.”

Coyne told Cleva that US Lacrosse is working closely with ASTM International, a nonprofit organization based in Pennsylvania formerly known as the American Society for Testing and Materials, to create a women’s lacrosse headgear standard. She suggested his company become a member. Cleva says joining would cost only $75, but he’s concerned that the terms of the membership could impinge on his patent rights. He is having his lawyer look into that issue before he signs up. Without a doubt, he insists, “My product will be the standard because it’s so effective.”

Of more immediate concern, he says, is that one of ASTM’s current members told him that setting standards could take two years at least. Any delay is hard for Cleva to take.

“How many girls who are denied the use of the Crasche Middie will subsequently suffer a preventable head injury?” Cleva wrote Coyne back in February after she suggested he wait until USL’s committee meeting in June.

The answer is that nobody knows.

A researcher at George Mason University, Shane Caswell, partnered with two members of USL’s sports science and safety committee to examine head injury incidents reported during 2008 and 2009 involving high school girls’ lacrosse players between the ages of 14 and 18 years old. Their study came out in February 2012. Gathering data from 529 varsity and junior varsity games, they found 21 concussions. Most of these injuries resulted from stick-to-head contact in front of the goal.

Coyne says that USL is constantly monitoring national research on the occurrence of concussions in the sport. “I don’t necessarily see that we’ve had this huge jump in the actual injury,” she says. “I think the actual diagnosis has been what’s changed.”

The girls’ game is intended to be safer than the boys’ game, says Stephanie Degennaro, who manages the Lacrosse Unlimited store in Miller Place. She played varsity lacrosse at Longwood High School in Brookhaven and at Stony Brook University. When she’s not selling merchandise for “the fastest sport on two feet,” she’s coaching and refereeing girls’ games.

“Basically women’s lacrosse is supposed to be a non-contact sport,” she says. “Everything is supposed to be finesse and controlled… Men’s lacrosse is a contact sport like football.”

Degennaro’s store does not carry headgear for girls, but she has noticed players wearing “these headband things” and “those soft foam ‘ugly’ helmets” on the field.

“Approving headgear is going to make the girls’ game more violent,” she says. “To be completely honest, I wouldn’t want to see the game go that way. Some of the girls out there wearing these helmets act as if they’re invincible. I would only want to give [headgear] to girls who’ve had prior concussions.”

One of those girls playing lacrosse with a concussion is Cindy Dreher’s 10-year-old daughter, Darby, who picked up the sport after watching her two older brothers play. The Babylon Village mother bought her a Crasche Middie because she had gotten a concussion from a serious horse-back riding accident last year.

“My daughter has dark hair so you don’t even notice she’s wearing it out there,” Dreher tells the Press. “It looks like a band for sweat. It doesn’t look like a helmet at all.”

Dreher had looked for a long time before she found Cleva’s product online.

“I had to do some research because what’s available for girls right now is this ridiculously stupid, soft helmet that doesn’t protect at all,” Dreher says. “They say it’s a ‘non-aggressive game’ but I don’t care because it’s got a stick and a ball, and those girls are very capable of hitting each other pretty hard with it…”

Lacrosse Unlimited’s Hauppauge store manager, Jason Sweet, a high school and college lax (lacrosse) player who still plays, thinks that giving girls’ more protection will change their game. “They might as well get gloves, too, and go out there and beat each other up like we do!” laughs Sweet, who’s had three concussions himself, but none since he started wearing a $234 helmet. By comparison, the Crasche Middie retails for under $30.

“I would say that most parents want headgear [for girls],” Sweet says, “Most players don’t.”

Cleva thinks one obstacle facing his product’s approval is growing tension within girls’ lacrosse about the future of the game.

“You have one camp that says, ‘Let’s put helmets on and protect the girls, and become like a boys’ sport. If it’s rough and tumble, who cares?’” Cleva explains. “The other side is saying: ‘That’s the worst thing. We don’t want the game to change. Leave it alone.’ US Lacrosse is in the ‘leave-it-alone’ camp. This is a big controversy, and I’ve kind of fallen into the middle of it.”

As of now only goalies in girls lacrosse are permitted to wear hard helmets. Goggles were mandated for all female players in 2004—New York State reportedly led this initiative—but now USL is considering whether the eyewear standards should be revised. “We’re taking a good look at that,” Coyne says.

Last week, Cleva got his hopes up when a USL official asked him to send his headgear to the rules committee at the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Then he learned that the USL’s own subcommittee, scheduled to convene this month, had tabled discussion of his headgear until June “when they can get the entire rules committee together,” Cleva says.

“Mr. Cleva has been told on several occasions that if he adjusts his product to fit the two elements that we wanted fixed – if he makes those adjustments—we are happy to look at his product again,” says Coyne. “But he has to address them just like anyone else. He’s not the first person to be rejected.”

Cleva has demonstrated the headgear’s ability to hang onto its inserts to Rep. Tim Bishop (D-Southampton) and to an aide in the office of Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford). He doesn’t believe USL is giving his product a fair shake.

“They’re saying it can come out and it can’t come out!” Cleva exclaims. Given the opportunity, this reporter shook the Middie as hard as possible for almost a minute and finally an insert dislodged when the head gear was hurled against the floor.

“When a 10-year-old comes to your office and her mother is terrified that the girl’s going to get hurt, it’s the human element that’s overpowering,” Cleva says. “We think we offer a very reasonable product that is going to offer impact protection and give some peace of mind to people and these people won’t let your daughter buy it.”

Suffolk County police said Thomas Smith was riding a Yamaha southbound on Longfellow Drive when he struck a Dodge that was backing up into a driveway shortly before 7 p.m.

Smith was thrown from the motorcycle and taken to Brookhaven Memorial Hospital Medical Center in East Patchogue where he was pronounced dead.

The other driver, 52-year-old Joseph Garraffa, was not injured.

Seventh Squad detectives impounded the vehicles, are continuing the investigation and ask anyone with information on the crash to contact them at 631-852-8752.

Suffolk County police said Bennie Demaro, 86, was making a left turn in his Cadillac from County Road 83 onto Canal Road when his vehicle was hit by a southbound Mazda pickup truck at 2:35 p.m.

His passenger, Salvatore Anselmo, was taken to John T. Mather Hospital in Port Jefferson where he was pronounced dead.

Demaro was taken to Stony Brook University Hospital where he was listed in critical condition.

The Cadillac also struck a Dodge Magnum driven by 53-year-old Lauren Pedone of Port Jefferson Station. Neither she nor her 16-year-old son was injured.

The driver of the pickup truck, 27-year-old Timothy Grady of East Patchogue, was taken to Brookhaven Memorial Hospital Medical Center in East Patchogue where he was treated for non-life-threatening injuries.

Vehicular Crime Unit detectives impounded the vehicles, are continuing the investigation and ask anyone with information to contact them at 631-852-6555.

Suffolk County police said James Redman was walking on Old South Country Road when his 71-year-old neighbor, Lynn Leistman, backed into him with her Toyota Highlander at 12:45 p.m.

Redman was taken to Brookhaven Memorial Hospital Medical Center in East Patchogue where he died shortly later. Leistman was not injured.

Fifth Squad detectives are continuing the investigation and ask that two other pedestrians walking on Old South Country Road at the time contact them at 631-854-8552.

A Suffolk County police spokeswoman said officers responded to search town hall in Farmingville after receiving the tip from Nassau County police.

A Nassau County police spokeswoman said Emergency Services Unit officers responded to a report of a suspicious envelope at News 12 Long Island in Woodbury, opened it and read the threat.

“It was for a different date, not today’s date,” the Nassau police spokeswoman said.

Brookhaven town spokesman Jack Krieger said the building was evacuated at about 1:30 p.m. and workers were allowed back inside an hour later.

The incident comes after Suffolk County police found “Bomb Town Hall” written in graffiti on Jan. 13 at Martha Avenue Recreational Park in Brookhaven hamlet, about seven miles from town hall.

It also comes about a week after Brookhaven drew harsh criticism for its extremely slow response in plowing many local streets following a blizzard that dumped a record nearly three feet of snow while Brookhaven Town Supervisor Ed Romaine was on vacation.

Romaine has since apologized. Acting Superintendent of Highways Michael Murphy who was also away during the storm resigned last week. John Capella replaced him until a March 5 special election to pick a new highway chief.

Town Councilwoman Kathy Walsh, an independent, is running on the Democratic Party line for the highway post against New York State Assemb. Daniel Losquadro (R-Shoreham).

Such threats are nothing new on LI, although they’re usually outnumbered by shooting and bomb threats at local schools, which have been increasingly sensitive to similar scares after the Newtown school massacre in December.

Ronald Kellman of Central Islip pleaded guilty in October to phoning in four bomb threats to Islip Town Hall over nine months. He was sentenced to six months in jail and five years probation, court records show.

Town of Brookhaven Supervisor Ed Romaine responds to criticism regarding his town’s lackluster blizzard response at a press conference Thursday, Feb. 14.

Brookhaven Town Supervisor Ed Romaine emerged from his vacation Thursday amid fury over the town’s mishandling of last week’s blizzard, apologizing to media outlets for his absence during the storm while blaming its highway department for the lackluster response.

“I want to say to the people of Brookhaven that I’m sorry that the storm happened and I’m particularly sorry that I wasn’t here when it occurred,” Romaine said to more than a dozen media outlets packing Brookhaven Town Hall, reading from a prepared statement.

“This is devastating for a lot of people,” he continued. “I understand their frustration and their anger, please accept my apologies.”

Characterizing the town’s response as a “failure of [a] branch of town government to adequately respond to this storm,” he added that it is “something that weighs heavy on me, something that I do not take lightly.”

The blizzard struck Friday night into Saturday morning, leaving many roads impassable until Monday or later. Many residents complained their roads weren’t plowed until Tuesday morning, with entire neighborhoods stranded in their homes into the workweek. Some parts of Suffolk County saw up to 30 inches of snow from the powerful storm, a Nor’easter. It shut down several major throughways, including Middle Country Road, Sunrise Highway and the Long Island Expressway, which was closed for three days as crews maneuvered around more than 150 abandoned vehicles left during Friday’s commute home. More than 1,000 abandoned cars littered the roads in Brookhaven, officials said.

The supervisor’s statements Thursday were his first public remarks about the weather emergency since leaving for warmer climes a week earlier.

Romaine’s staff prohibited reporters from asking the supervisor open questions during a press conference at Brookhaven Town Hall following his official statement. Instead, subsequent one-on-one interviews were permitted inside his office.

“My role here is to give you the basic ground rules for this conference and let you know how things are going to run,” announced Romaine’s Chief of Staff Garrett Swenson. “[The] supervisor is going to make a few brief remarks, I would ask that there be no interruptions and allow him the courtesy of making his remarks without interruption.”

A town spokesperson then emerged with a list of at least 14 outlets that would interview the supervisor. Romaine justified the unorthodox measures during a phone interview with the Press later in the day, saying it was in the interest of fairness.

“I met with everyone and I answered everyone’s questions, which I know I aggravated some people but we originally thought it would be better rather than answer five or six questions and then leave to meet with everyone so no one felt that there questions weren’t getting answered,” he said.

His staff ultimately relented when it became apparent that system was overly time-consuming.

Romaine has taken heat for not only remaining on vacation throughout the crisis, but for the town’s failure in dealing with it.

Romaine explained that under New York State law, the supervisor, nor the town council, has authority to issue directives to the highway department, which was headed by acting-highway superintendent Mike Murphy, whom resigned Tuesday at the Romaine’s request.

“It is an independent entity,” Romaine said of the highway department. “The people elect a highway superintendent who reports directly to the people, not to the supervisor, not to the town board. The only thing that the supervisor and town board does is vote on their budget in November.”

“Nevertheless,” he continued, “they are part of town government and it concerns me that they failed. And I cannot tell the people of Brookhaven how sorry I am personally that that failure took place.”

Other observers agreed with Romaine’s explanation.

“Traditionally, I think with what you’ll find all over the place where there are elected highway superintendents that they tend to think of themselves as kings of the road and they like to operate independent,” said a source familiar with town operations who asked not to be named. “And they do because they’re independently elected to operate independent of any other parts of town government that not subject to the supervision of anybody on the town board.”

Still, the top levels of government should be able to step in during a moment of crisis, one Brookhaven town official said.

“The highway department has their own elected official but in light of the fact that we have an interim highway department, our job [is] as public servants that are elected and we should have been there to support the acting superintendent of highways and the staff over at highway, we should have been there to assist them,” Brookhaven Councilwoman Kathleen Walsh, an Independent running for the highway superintendent position on the Democratic line, told the Press.

As the criticism mounted and residents desperately called out for help, change in the power structure became necessary, officials said.

“Eventually it got to the point where we asked for the acting superintendent’s resignation,” Romaine said. “He didn’t have to give it to us, he did, and we are appreciative for that.”

Romaine has repeatedly declined to reveal where he was vacationing last week. The Press reported on Wednesday that Romaine was in Jamaica, according to a town source.

The supervisor said he regretted his time in the sun when so many of his residents were swamped with unforgiving cold, snow and ice—saying, “Absolutely, I would’ve loved to had been here”—yet insisted he was receiving constant updates from town officials, and believes response efforts wouldn’t have been different if he was receiving updates in his office rather than over the phone, anyway.

“I don’t think it would’ve made much of a difference because all the decisions I made, when I made them, would not have changed one iota,” he contended, “but you know what, I would’ve loved to be here because you always want to show a presence, particularly to the constituents in Brookhaven Town.”

“I don’t want to talk about the fog of war,” he continued, “but I would be getting the same information. I mean people aren’t telling me one thing on the phone that would tell me something differently if they were sitting in my office, so I’m getting the same information, I’m giving the same directives. Do I think there would be much difference? No I don’t think there would be much difference at all.”

When Romaine left town hall Wednesday night to prepare for a Thursday flight, he said the weather predictions Wednesday called for “rain and then moving to snow, but it wasn’t said that there would be [a] blizzard.”

When notified that the National Weather Service Wednesday issued a statement predicting “significant snowfall and strong winds with near-blizzard conditions,” Romaine responded that he wasn’t aware a possible blizzard was on its way.

“I didn’t see that, honestly,” he said, “I didn’t see that, whatever news I got, I got out of TV news and I didn’t get that there was a blizzard coming.”

The National Weather Service then issued a blizzard watch for Suffolk County on Thursday and predicted eight to 12 inches of snow.

When the supervisor called his office Friday for an update on the storm he said the highway department assured him that they had “it under control,” and that it wasn’t until Saturday that “we were told that they had lost control of the storm in certain areas of the town and we began a frantic call to get other equipment in.”

Before departing for his island getaway, Romaine said he was notified of the department’s plan and was assured that they had the necessary equipment to clean up the snow.

Departments that the town does control—parks and waste management, specifically—had plows at the ready and were sent out to clean roadways Friday afternoon, he added.

Romaine continued making calls throughout the weekend, he said, and was notified that 95 percent of roads would be passable by Monday. Briefed on the hundreds of abandoned cars in the area, he tells the Press, he was surprised to learn that most of them were either on state or county roads, but still advised the town to assist in snow removal for those areas.

“People complained bitterly about Brookhaven Town and I’m like, ‘Wow, most of those cars were abandoned on either the [Long Island] expressway or Sunrise [Highway] or [Route] 25 or County Road 83 or [Route] 112 or Nicolls Road, they weren’t abandoned on town roads,’ but the town had to help in that effort and we all worked together,” he said.

Romaine now says that he intends to work with the acting highway superintendent and whoever is elected March 5 at a special election for the position. The supervisor will conduct a “top-to-bottom review” of the storm, he said, including a review of the equipment, how staff was deployed and the town’s communication system. He will also push for a computerized tracking system for the entire highway department, something that council members have opposed in the past, he said.

As for the criticism from residents frustrated with the town’s leadership, Romaine admitted that they have a right to be upset but promised that the town would use the storm as a learning experience.

“I would be too,” he said of residents’ frustration. “Unfortunately for me it was like the perfect storm, because there was a lot of things that needed to be done in highway that hadn’t been done. I was out of town, the storm was far more severe, and there’s a lot of things happening, we didn’t have a highway superintendent, we had an acting [superintendent] that didn’t have as much management experience as you had hoped. So many things seemed to go wrong that even if I was here, the only thing that we can do is try and learn from this.”

Snow plows clear the Long Island Expressway in Suffolk County on Sunday, Feb. 10, 2013.

Residents in pockets of Brookhaven town were still waiting for their streets to be plowed out Tuesday, four days after a blizzard left the town buried under almost three feet of snow. In the mean time tempers have been rising and accusations flying as officials struggled to bring the community back to normal.

“It took them three days to clean the Long Island Expressway, and that’s a straight road,” said Lori Anne Casdia, chief aide to Councilman Dan Panico, Brookhaven Town’s deputy supervisor, attempting to put the massive clean-up problem in perspective. “So you can only imagine what it’s like to do over 2,600 miles of road.” The town, she said, is “larger than the county of Nassau!”

That geography lesson was small comfort to Port Jefferson Station resident Jeffrey Musmacher, who wasn’t able to leave his house until Monday. “I’m putting the blame on the town; I’m putting the blame directly on the leadership of the town,” he tells the Press. “We knew back in the middle of last week. We were prepared. We were ready. I made sure I had everything—apparently the town did nothing!”

The town disputes that observation. According to a spokesman, highway department trucks were getting loaded with sand Friday morning and there was “no problem” with diesel fuel, despite some anecdotal reports to the contrary. The sheer intensity of the blizzard once it struck Friday afternoon, right before rush hour, proved overwhelming.

“A regular pickup truck with a plow is not going to move that much snow,” says Brookhaven Town spokesman Jack Krieger, who’s also the deputy mayor of Patchogue. “You’ve got to get the heavy equipment in there.”

The town ended up getting assistance from various New York State agencies as well as some equipment and work crews from the city. Nassau County sent some equipment and Suffolk sent 30 plows and 17 pay-loaders to help Brookhaven, according to a Suffolk spokeswoman.

Adding political fuel to the blizzard response blame game heating up Brookhaven is the pending special election March 5 to elect a new superintendent of highways, which pits town council member Kathy Walsh, who switched her party affiliation from Republican to Independence and will run on the Democratic line, against Assemb. Dan Losquadro (R-Shoreham).

Walsh was the acting town supervisor during Super Storm Sandy, after Supervisor Mark Lesko resigned to head Accelerate Long Island, a not-for-profit business lobbying group. The previous highway superintendent John Rouse was elected last November to be a Suffolk County judge. His deputy, Lori Baldassare, a Democrat, was not kept on when Ed Romaine, a Republican former Suffolk legislator, won the Brookhaven supervisor’s race.

When the blizzard struck, Romaine was on vacation in Jamaica and the acting highway superintendent Michael Murphy was on medical leave. Newsday reported it was a “toothache,” and a source in town government told the Press that “nobody heard from him” after Friday morning.

“You’ve got a supervisor who goes on vacation six weeks into the job,” said Ed Lenox, a former Republican committeeman in Brookhaven supporting Walsh in the special election, who was unable to leave his house in Selden for three days. “You’ve got a junior councilman, Dan Panico, who steps up but has no experience at all.”

Brookhaven Republican chairman Jesse Garcia was not alone in defending Romaine’s being away. “The man has not been out of town since his son passed away three years ago,” says Garcia, referring to Keith Romaine, a town council member, who died when he was 36 and had just been re-elected to his second term.

“Residents want service, not rhetoric,” said Garcia. “I’m not going to second-guess their decisions.”

The problem, according to one former public official no longer connected to the town, was not in the highway department, it was the lack of leadership in town hall coupled with the “thought of authorizing millions of dollars in overtime” for weekend work cleaning up the storm. “If you don’t have a signal caller at the top that’s telling people what to do, then people are not going to make their decisions at the lower level because they’re going to be worried.”

Overtime costs didn’t affect the town’s decision making, according to a spokesman.

Walsh, who was the only elected official in town hall Saturday answering the phones at the call center, was frustrated with Brookhaven’s response to the storm.

“What we need is to give our guys what they need, to be honest with the people, and, after this storm, we need to sit down and find out where things fell apart,” she said. “Right now the priority is to get these services out on the road where they need to be.”

“I think the men and women on the street—the folks driving the trucks—obviously worked very hard,” said Losquadro. “But there was a tremendous lack of coordination.”

Based on what he’d been told, he thought the town may have waited until the end of the weekend or the beginning of this week to contact outside contractors. “The town can’t handle something of this magnitude itself,” Losquadro said. “And by the time they reached out, those resources were committed elsewhere.”

On the town’s highway department website, former superintendent Rouse, is credited for revitalizing “the Highway Department’s snow removal program, clearing our roads during the worst winter weather in decades. John significantly increased the number of contractors available for snow removal duty.” Now he’s a judge.

“If he did all that, I would say he didn’t share it with the people who were left behind,” said Walsh. “I just want to let our employees know we appreciate all they’re going through because they’re getting the crap kicked out of them.”

-With Rashed Mian