OPINION: We too easily forget our Island is an island

Christopher Bodkin, a former Islip Town council member, works for the Suffolk County Legislature.

A fatal gasoline tanker crash last month brought to light a startling statistic about one of Long Island's main arteries: 20,000 trucks drive on the Long Island Expressway every day.

Just think for a moment about the paltry number of bridges that bring them here. Then think about Mayor Michael Bloomberg's warnings last week about the threat of a debilitating dirty-bomb attack on New York City, coming after federal intelligence officials testified that an attempted terrorist strike on U.S. soil was "certain" within the next six months.

What would happen to Long Island if our tenuous connections to the mainland - the RFK-Triborough, Throgs Neck, Whitestone and Verrazano-Narrows bridges - were out of commission?

Long before a workman's torch set fire to the scaffolding underneath the Throgs Neck Bridge last summer, I had been contemplating the vulnerability of Long Island, because of the fragility of those few bridges that keep us supplied. No one talks about the fix we'd be in if something happened in New York City and our bridges were rendered useless.

Every drop of gasoline and home heating oil, every loaf of bread, every item you see in your supermarket, every stick of furniture - virtually everything you see and touch on Long Island - comes across these few bridges. Should anything catastrophic happen, cutting off all access, just how long do you think it would take before the food runs out and the gas tanks are empty?

Long Islanders, and all of our planners over the years, seem to have forgotten that we are an island and that almost everything we have comes from somewhere else. Emergency plans tend to focus on getting people off the Island, instead of considering alternate scenarios - the times when we may need all those trucks to get onto the Island to keep us all fed. Even the Island's several airports wouldn't be up to the task; from the East River to Montauk live some 7.5 million people.

Ideally, a large island like ours would be developed to be sustainable to a certain degree. But the farmland we have is rapidly being paved over or plowed up for vineyards meant to produce expensive wines for a small number of people. That's nice, but it's not exactly food for the masses.

So we depend more and more on a few bridges to bring us everything - bridges we do not control, that are already operating over capacity and that will, in 20 years or so, begin to fail. Look at a map of the world. There's nothing that comes close to the miserable situation we find ourselves in here.

Other islands with high populations that are connected to their mainland by one or two bridges also have deep-water ports to supply them. This concept could hold the key to our security here on Long Island. We need two deep-water ports: one for gasoline and home heating oil, and the other for container ships. The petroleum port could be a small, offshore island connected by pipeline to a Long Island tank farm. The container port would be for food, medicine and everything else.

An East End bridge would also help. Proposals for bridges across the Long Island Sound to either Connecticut or Rhode Island have been floated since 1938 but have gone nowhere. Perhaps it's time. While bridges can be problematic - and can contribute to even more traffic and development in Suffolk County - such a crossing would give us a degree of control that we don't have now. And both an East End bridge and deep-water ports would have the advantage of cutting truck congestion in New York City.

Although my concern is for everyone on Long Island - and that means God's Long Island, including Brooklyn and Queens - the people on the South Shore and the East End are in the most trouble. In the event of any evacuation, these groups would be the last off. In the event of the bridges becoming disabled, supplies would have to come across Long Island Sound, and South Shore residents would be the last to get help.

Think of Long Island as a very, very long hallway, stuffed full of people with no back door. Those on the South Shore are the ones in the back.

Planning for the future should begin now. The federal government, recognizing the security threat, should ensure that a few civic associations or enclaves of the rich don't hold up the planning and construction of any bridge and port facilities for years and years.

Ferry service across Long Island Sound should be increased. And what about the long-proposed cross-harbor rail freight tunnel connecting New Jersey to Brooklyn, thus allowing freight trains to easily come to Long Island - an extremely important first step? This project has been stalled for far too long.

To help us to better understand our predicament, one of Long Island's great colleges or universities should start a department of Island Studies. It could be modeled after the Institute of Island Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island in Canada. Its mission would be to study just what Long Island is and how its isolation from the mainland not only shapes our unique economic challenges, but also brings with it certain dangers.

Research from the department would look at the Island as the single entity that it is. Continuing to think of Long Island as two places - Nassau and Suffolk on the one hand, and Brooklyn and Queens on the other - is a dangerous mindset. If we are to survive any calamity, we have to plan to act as one.

Changing a collective mindset is a monumental challenge, and Long Island has proved itself to be a particularly complex place to get anything done. But, at the very least, we must all strive to better comprehend the situation that we find ourselves in. Only by doing that will we be better prepared for the future, whatever it may bring.