“Reality hit me and I realized I don’t have any real friends, I’ve been f***** stranded on the street,” Jennifer, a recently re-arrested drug abuser whose name was changed to protect her identity, writes in an online plea for help. “Gimme a reason to keep on living.”

Hers is just one of countless similar stories of compounded despair that emerged, then snowballed, after the historic Oct. 29 hurricane.

Far from the camera glare cast on heroic nurses who evacuated newborn babies from the Sandy-crippled NYU Langone Medical Center in Manhattan at the height of its wrath, local drug rehab facilities faced similarly Herculean tasks in fighting a surge of relapses among patients. Three months later, treatment providers who were already unable to meet the demand of LI’s drug epidemic warn of a coming wave of additional substance abuse cases, sparked by the widespread trauma still reverberating throughout the region and among those in addiction’s grasp. The new onslaught strikes as many of the region’s addiction treatment services are still on life support due to the damage they sustained and others remain shuttered—such as the Long Beach Medical Center, one of LI’s main detox centers, which is closed through March.

“Like any other crisis, if things were not good before the crisis, the crisis will make things worse,” says Jamie Bogenshutz, executive director of Massapequa-based YES Community Counseling Center and president of the Nassau Alliance of Addiction Services, a rehab umbrella group. “The crazier life becomes for people, it becomes more obvious there are not enough resources.”

Studies show illicit drug use spikes in the aftermath of natural disasters. Adults who were displaced from their homes for more than two weeks after Hurricane Katrina—the one storm more damaging than Sandy—had increased drug use, more mental health issues and unmet treatment needs, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

In New York, 40,000 were displaced after Sandy. Providing them and others with Psychological First Aid are 17 LI mental health agencies among 35 statewide deploying 1,000 door-to-door crisis counselors as a part of “Project Hope.” The Federal Emergency Management Agency awarded $8.2 million to the New York State Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which allocated $1.8 million to Nassau and nearly $1 million to Suffolk in November for the program, which runs nine months.

“The enormity of the personal challenges and material loss experienced has overwhelmed the usual coping capacities of most people,” said Dr. James Dolan, director of the Nassau County Office of Mental Health, Chemical Dependency and Developmental Disabilities Services, in a statement.

That includes previously sober superstorm survivors self-medicating with drugs or alcohol to deal with catastrophic losses of their homes, vehicles and belongings, as well as pre-Sandy substance abusers who’ve upped their doses to cope.

AFTER SANDY

With trains, gas, power and phone service largely unavailable in the days, weeks and even months after Sandy, an untold number of Long Islanders with heroin or prescription-drug dependencies were unable to meet their dealers and went into withdrawal—in some cases, revealing hidden addictions to their unwitting families.

“You had a whole bunch of young people literally hiding in their basements going through withdrawal, and their parents thought it was the flu,” says Jeffrey Reynolds, executive director of the Long Island Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence [LICADD]. He recalls a client telling him, “A few days in the house with no lights, no power, no heat, and the demons are bound to come knocking—and, boy, did they.”

Many of those who were getting help found themselves displaced from blacked-out inpatient substance-abuse facilities or cut off from outpatient service providers, who were often dealing with their own stormy troubles at home. The severity of the fallout for this particularly unstable and vulnerable population varied.

“Some of those people were disengaged from treatment; they have been almost impossible to get back,” says David Cohen, director of Outpatient Addiction Services at Eastern Long Island Hospital in Riverhead and president of the Quality Consortium of Suffolk County, another rehab umbrella group. He’s most concerned with chemically dependent patients he describes as “pseudo homeless”—those one step from the streets.

For others in treatment, the disruption was relatively minimal, such as those at the Phoenix House Hauppauge Center Men’s Program—though residents were moved to the Phoenix House Brentwood Campus for one day until the power was restored at the Hauppauge facility.

Stories of doctors making house calls—or in some cases, shelter visits for displaced patients—were also commonplace in the immediate aftermath as providers desperately sought not to have their clients’ recovery undone by the storm’s disruption, considering the difficulty of getting many into rehab to begin with.

“If they couldn’t make it to us, we were going to get it to them,” Christina Noonan, program director of the Huntington outreach facility for Daytop Village, Inc., says of her staff’s doctor delivering Suboxone to clients despite blocked and flooded roads. “He somehow found a way.”

Not everyone in recovery was as lucky. A Daytop facility in Far Rockaway was forced to release 150 court-mandated patients onto the streets west of the Nassau-Queens line after the New York State Office of Alcohol and Substance Abuse Services stalled patients’ transfer to upstate Daytop facilities, the New York Daily News reported.

Some from the Rockaways joined those from LI’s ravaged South Shores, packing mental health wards as a spike in substance abusers became suicidal—along with people without prior mental health diagnoses.

“We were full, full to capacity for the first two months,” says one LI psychiatric nurse who asked that neither she nor her employer be identified in order for her to speak freely. “There was an increase in suicidal patients because they could not get their medication or because the pharmacies were closed or a lot of addicts who had no place to go.”

THE COMING STORM

Local substance-abuse professionals and anti-drug advocates worry that having the additional Sandy-inspired substance abusers referred to the already overburdened inpatient and outpatient treatment facilities limited by government austerity measures is a prescription for failure.

Bogenshutz of YES says Project Hope, while beneficial, will ultimately “unearth the next layer of issues” that will require additional resources.

“We just don’t know how far-reaching the demand for services is going to go,” concurs Joe Smith of Long Beach Reach, which has joined Project Hope and has been treating patients spilled over from the still-shuttered Long Beach Medical Center. “The resources are limited already…it’s really eaten into the safety network.”

Before the storm, Nassau cut funds to youth groups involved in anti-drug counseling last year, and Nassau University Medical Center replaced some of its detox beds with outpatient care. Post-Sandy, LBMC’s repair costs are estimated between $32 million and $56 million—although hospital officials are reportedly prioritizing their rehab’s reopening.

LBMC representatives did not respond to requests for comment, but Patricia Hacken, director of alcohol and substance abuse services at the hospital, told the Press last summer that LBMC had applied to double its detox beds from eight to 16 because of a “significant increase” in requests for inpatient care.

“It is a significant loss, and I don’t necessarily see anybody picking up the slack,” says LICADD’s Reynolds, who fears the treatment gap will force some into “do-it-yourself detox,” which “isn’t a winning formula for most people.”

Smith, whose offices were not damaged in the flooding but finally got power and heat back the day after Thanksgiving, expects the surge of additional people seeking treatment to last into next year.

“We know from past experience that in the aftermath of disasters the surge in demand for treatment begins…three to six months after,” he says. “That surge in demand lasts for quite some time.”

Others interviewed for this story were optimistic that some of the recently approved Sandy aid funds will eventually be allocated to help fill the gap in post-Sandy substance-abuse services.

“Not surprisingly was that folks most impacted by the storm were somewhat isolated,” says John Cappola, president of the New York State Association of Alcohol and Substance Abuse Providers. “It took a while before we had a sense of how people were doing out there…I’m hoping that we learned a lot from this.”

New York State residents experiencing emotional distress as a result of Hurricane Sandy can access free, confidential crisis counseling 24/7 by calling LifeNet at 800-543-3638.

There’s a stretch of Cantiague Rock Road in Hicksville, just north of Hicksville High School, its middle school and Lee Avenue Elementary, where pedestrians aren’t permitted to stand on the sidewalk.

There are no signs stating this, no barricades cordoning the area off, no flashing lights demarcating a construction zone or telling passersby it’s private property. But if you stop there for even a few moments to take a gander at the fenced-off property—three decrepit-looking buildings and their equally decrepit-looking parking lots—any day of the week, during any time of day, 24/7, someone will unquestionably instruct you to keep moving, to shuffle along, scram.

If your intention is to snap a few photos, as mine was at about 3 p.m. on the Sunday before Christmas Eve, you’ll get more than advice; undoubtedly you’ll receive an angry visit by one of several charged-up, plain-clothed men shouting for you to buzz off—they might even chase you away.

There’s really not much to look at, though. Sandwiched between a distribution warehouse on its south, a driving range and children’s playgrounds of Nassau County’s Cantiague Park on the east, and the county’s Department of Public Works headquarters on the north, the three parcels at 140, 100 and 70 Cantiague Rock Road are silent and devoid of life.

The latter’s facade is a beat-up, worn-down brown, with cloudy windows, drawn blinds and the faded outline of its former tenant, Air Techniques, tattooed on its side. At 100 next door stands a naked flagpole, a vast loading dock area long since abandoned and weeds towering several feet high. Several massive metal frames arch above an alley between it and the 140 building, which has part of its exterior wall peeling off and is covered in shredded plastic.

It’s here where an outhouse-shaped guard booth is manned around the clock.

“Off the property,” said an agitated, bespectacled, middle-aged man sporting a moustache when a camera crew and I recently visited to ask a few questions. A mock “Terrorist Hunting Permit” was fastened to his window. “This is private property. Get off the property,” he commanded, refusing to explain who he worked for before slamming the door.

[Click here for more photos of Hicksville's atomic waste site]

There’s a secret in Hicksville. It’s a secret that only a handful of residents of this suburban hamlet know all too well while way too many others haven’t a clue. A secret that has already cost one of the biggest communications companies in the world millions and may end up costing them much, much more. It’s a secret that no matter how tight a lid the security guards stationed there or the site’s owners, Verizon, try to keep on it, the truth is literally leaking out—bleeding into the soil, contaminating the air and poisoning Long Island’s precious groundwater supply.

It’s a revelation that Ronkonkoma resident Gerard Depascale, a father of three and recent grandfather, and his former coworker Liam Neville, of Bayside, Queens fought relentlessly to find out, a reality they live with every single moment of their lives, one the global communications giant is doing everything in its power to control. It’s an ongoing tragedy that a federal judge recently made even more tragic for the plaintiffs; a reality that will undoubtedly affect more families in the future.

This vacant 10.5-acre stretch of land, just north of those schools, separated by a chain-link fence from the public park and situated directly across the street from Nassau BOCES Career Preparatory High School, is a radioactive toxic waste site where nuclear elements and fuel rods were fabricated and processed during the nation’s early atomic energy program in the 1950s and 1960s.

Uranium was burned here. It was released into the surrounding neighborhood from an open “smelting oven,” according to one former worker—or within a “burning building,” according to another. It was also buried here, along with nickel and much more. Unknown amounts of chlorocarbons—Tetrachloroethene, or Perchloroethylene, known as PCE and PERC, respectively—and byproduct chlorinated hydrocarbon Trichloroethylene, or TCE (classified as a human carcinogen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency), were dumped into unlined sumps and leeching pools, and currently reside in the soil, the groundwater and have volatilized into the air.

People who unknowingly worked atop the site, such as Depascale and Neville, have contracted rare—make that extraordinarily rare and obscure—cancers.

Neville has a rare kidney cancer called membranous nephropathy. Following years of dialysis, he was lucky enough to find a donor and receive a transplant, though now he’s currently facing some complications.

Depascale has an even rarer cancer, called extra-skeletal myxoid chondrosarcoma. It’s Stage Four and it’s in his bone marrow.

Besides the unquantifiable pain and anguish suffered by the two and their loved ones are insurmountable medical bills and an inability to work, not to mention their shortened lifespan.

Depascale and Neville, both former employees of Magazine Distributors, Inc. (MDI), who worked at the 100 building and its warehouse from about 1990 till 2002, when the company suddenly moved (employees were told it was the end of their lease; court transcripts reveal General Telephone and Electronics Corp. (GTE), who merged with Verizon in 2000, “assumed” the lease from MDI after purchasing the 140 property in 1999 for contamination remediation efforts and the 70 location in 2004) are literally battling for survival.

They’re also fighting for justice.

Depascale, his wife Joanne and Neville filed a toxic tort lawsuit against Verizon and its predecessors claiming negligence and liability, among other charges, in Nassau County State Supreme Court in 2007. The case was moved to federal court at the request of the defendants, who argued defense under government contractor immunity law—which protects contractors who perform federal work from lawsuits such as theirs. The jury heard expert testimony from both sides, also learning that an untold number of records relating to the Hicksville site had simply disappeared from GTE/Verizon’s files. Near the end of the trial, the presiding judge in that case, U.S. District Judge Leonard D. Wexler, impaneled an additional two alternate jurors, and according to Neville, ordered that for them to win, the verdict would have to be unanimous.

It was, and on Nov. 12, 2009 after just eight days of testimony, the jury issued its verdict, awarding the trio $12 million on the grounds of causation, negligence and damages, finding they got past the federal contractor immunity.

That detail of this saga has been reported before—as well as the settlement of a 2002 complaint alleging that nearly 300 Hicksville residents who live near the site developed cancers and related injuries because of it.

Unreported is that more than five months after Depascale and Neville’s win, following an appeal by Verizon, Wexler, in the rare instance of a judge going against the will of a jury—ordered the case be retried, on limited grounds, effectively nullifying the award and ultimately, deeming the jury’s verdict a “miscarriage of justice.”

They lost that trial—Neville bleeding through his shirt in the courtroom, though restricted to tell the jury that he or Depascale were even ill. They appealed, Verizon filed a cross-appeal, and now the pair is set to present oral arguments for why Wexler’s order for retrial should be overridden and the jury’s award reinstated before the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Jan. 15. Yet it’s not simply reparations for their medical debts that they’re fighting for now.

The fate of countless other former residents, former MDI employees and others who’ve worked at the site may literally hang in the balance, since Wexler ordered a stay on another pending class action “medical monitoring” suit that could include innumerable plaintiffs until Depascale and Neville’s appeal has been decided.

A Press investigation—part of an ongoing series into how its industrial and military past is affecting the Island’s current-day environment and residents and consisting of the analysis of hundreds of pages of state and federal records, including investigative reports concerning contamination to the soil, air and water at the site, remediation plans, maps, assessments, internal correspondence and thousands of pages of court filings and transcripts, among others—has discovered that GTE, Verizon and state regulators certainly knew or should have known about the site’s contamination years before Neville and Depascale and the hundreds of others who worked along Cantiague Rock Road ever stepped foot there.

It reveals a twisted and unconscionable game of pass-the-buck when it comes to informing these workers of even the potential for adverse health effects, a game that continues to this day. What’s absolutely indisputable is that many people living around that site and who’ve worked there have developed horrific cancers. And that some have already died from these.

Additionally, the records reveal that despite several state-supervised “voluntary” remediation efforts at the site—the largest conducted by GTE, which one report states included the excavation and removal of at least approximately 100,000 tons of contaminated soil and unearthed, partially filled tanks of radioactive and carcinogenic elements and chemicals—it remains contaminated and its true ramifications on the health and safety of not only Hicksville residents, but all Long Islanders (since we all share drinking water aquifers), may never be known.

Neville, a bachelor, self-professed pessimist, horse bettor and the more outspoken of the pair, staked he and Depascale’s odds in court at 60-40 in Verizon’s favor when I first sat down with them six months ago. Recently, those self-ascribed odds have gotten worse. He says 70-30 now, in Verizon’s favor.

“You ever feel like punching someone in the face and there’s no one there to punch, you’re that angry?” says Neville of how he felt when he learned what was beneath his workplace. “This is a 60 Minutes episode. This happens to somebody else. This doesn’t happen to me. This is insane.”

For Depascale, who has a family to provide for, things have been even worse. Adding even more insult to so much injury, his workman’s compensation claim—which he originally won, is back in court again following two appeals.

“Betrayed,” is how he feels. “They should have told us that that place was contaminated. If I knew about it, at least it would have been my choice to be there, not their choice.

“It’s been a nightmare since I got sick,” he says.

Requests for comment to the plaintiffs’ attorney, Joseph D. Gonzalez, and William H. Pratt, a lead attorney for the defendants in the litigation, went unanswered for this story.