Portable lights sit in Central Park today. (Dan Brinzac)
What a run-around!
The city left more than a dozen generators and other pieces of heavy equipment — desperately needed by cold and hungry New Yorkers who lost their homes to Hurricane Sandy — still stranded in Central Park yesterday and this morning.
Five light towers, that can expand up to 30 feet in the air, were sitting unused on the east side of Central Park near 72nd Street today, as horrified passersby demanded to know why the equipment hadn’t been deployed to devastated neighborhoods.
The towers are owned by the New York City Parks & Recreation Department and a leasing company, which identified their machines as rented to the New York Road Runners.
“People could really use this equipment right now,” said Upper West Side resident Jamie Traffert, 29, as she jogged by the unused light stands.
“Well it’s not doing anyone any good around here. Seeing how there are still blackouts in parts of the city, it makes no sense to let them go to waste [here].”
There were 115,000 New York power customers still in the dark today, compared to 145,000 yesterday, according to Mayor Bloomberg.
“It’s still a lot of people without power,” the mayor conceded.
Stashed near the finish line of the canceled marathon yesterday were 20 heaters, tens of thousands of Mylar “space” blankets, jackets, 106 crates of apples and peanuts, at least 14 pallets of bottled water and 22 five-gallon jugs of water.
This while people who lost their homes in the Rockaways, Coney Island and Staten Island were freezing and going hungry.
Michael Murphy, of Staten Island, who had no power and no heat, said yesterday: “We needed 100 percent of the resources here.”
“If those generators were here, we maybe could have had some light for the cleanup effort,” he said. “Those generators would really have come in handy.’’
Larry Gold, 61, of Rockaway Park, who has difficulty breathing, can’t use his oxygen tank without electricity.
“I need power to breathe,’’ he said.
Mayor Bloomberg today admitted that some generators might have been left behind this weekend. But he assured New Yorkers that all available equipment would be put to use immediately.
“I’m not looking at any one generator,” Bloomberg said.
“We needed a 100-plus generators. We believe that we either have them, or that they’re on their way — some provided by the Army Corps of Engineers, some provided by FEMA, some provided by private contractors, some that the city had.”