Town sites back in business for holiday

They've put out the deck chairs, umbrellas and picnic tables at pools.

On the beaches they've reinstalled the lifeguards' chairs and rescue equipment, and at parks hundreds of trash cans have been restored to their pre-Irene places.

Across Long Island, town-owned beaches, parks, marinas and pools are back in business for the Labor Day weekend, officials said Thursday.

Along with dealing with trees downed in town facilities, local parks staff have spent the days since Tropical Storm Irene undoing their hurricane preparations.

In Islip, where there are 106 town parks, staff spent Thursday and last Friday carefully stowing more than 500 trash cans from parks, packing up outdoor furniture from the four town pools and moving lifesaving equipment and lifeguard chairs from bay and ocean beaches to indoor storage on higher ground. "A lot of things had to be locked away to ensure they didn't become projectiles," Islip parks Commissioner Greg Dawson said.

All that work was methodically undone by about 45 staff this week, who worked 13-hour days and longer to have facilities shipshape for the weekend, Dawson said.

Before the storm, the town opened its ramps to boaters to help with lifting vessels out of the water and let residents bypass fees being charged by private marinas to do the same. Half of those in Islip's more than 1,400 boat slips elected to take their craft out, Dawson said. The south dock of East Islip Marina was the only storm casualty, but boats were safely moved to other locations.

On Fire Island, the storm destroyed half the docks at Brookhaven's Davis Park Marina, but Thursday morning the marina reopened, an accomplishment Brookhaven Supervisor Mark Lesko called "a miracle."

The storm destroyed a dock that leads to a two-story control tower from which marina staff communicate via radio with boaters and bay constables. Brookhaven parks crews replaced the dock within 48 hours, and the marina and tower are fully staffed, Lesko said. The tower itself suffered only minimal damage.

Some other docks that were destroyed will not be rebuilt because the town was going to replace them anyway, he said. "We were going to replace those docks with floating docks, so Mother Nature did some of our work for us," he said.