Dan's Papers - January 16, 2009

It happened about a month ago, when Suffolk County began to desperately look for a new stream of income for its 2009 budget. With the downturn, revenues were off.

"We've got millions and millions of dollars worth of junk in a bunch of pits out at the Gabreski Airport in Westhampton," somebody said.

"Let's sell it," somebody else said.

"What a great idea," still somebody else said.

And so it was that when the budget was presented, there was this $1.2 million item of income, derived from selling the stuff at the Westhampton airport, which meant that somebody was now going to have to go out there and do something about it to make that happen.

It also revealed a little known fact. For nearly the entire last half of the 20th century, Long Island was very quietly armed to the teeth by the military, early on against a possible invasion by the Nazis during the Second World War, and later against nuclear attack from the Soviets. Indeed, at many top secret sites, including the one in Westhampton, nuclear weapons were poised on the tips of guided missiles waiting for trouble. As people drove out to the eastern end of Long Island to vacation with their families during those years, they were unknowingly passing literally hundreds of nuclear missiles poised in the woods, each of which packed enough explosive power to obliterate two Hiroshimas. They were in Rocky Point, Lloyd Harbor, Amityville, Brookville, Long Beach and Westhampton. (Montauk, which had an extensive radar station and lookout station during the Cold War, never had missiles.)

Westhampton consisted of 56 reinforced concrete underground missile silos, each with a 40-foot high BOMARC missile capable of shooting down Soviet Bombers in it. Above ground, over each, was a badly built cinderblock building with a metal roof that swings up and open. When the Russians came, which they never did, the roofs would open, the button would be pressed and all hell would break loose.

When the Cold War ended, the missiles were removed. The empty silos and buildings are, of course, still there today. You really can't remove the silos, although you could have filled them in.

Indeed, when Suffolk County took possession of the airport from the Air Force around 30 years ago - it was built so fighter planes could go up there to harass the Soviet bombers - they decided that these silos should be filled up and the cinder block buildings littered with the county's old, unused crap. Today, that area is used as a junk yard and burial ground for old desks, broken lamps, water coolers, typewriters, cafeteria refrigerators, crashed County cars that were undriveable, outdated telephone systems and anything else that the County had no further use for and which had sunk to the depths of below repairable.

The silos are big. They are so big that the County legislators, in an acknowledgement of that fact, assigned each silo to one of eight different County departments. You keep your trash in your silo, we'll keep our trash in ours.

Thus, in the silos and around the buildings, you will find rusted delivery trucks, old stoves and outboard motors. A recent visit to the site by reporters - now that the County expects to turn it into $1.2 million in gold - uncovered all sorts of odd items. What was the County doing with an old dentist's chair? Who used a washer and dryer? Why would 100 pairs of unused work boots, still in their original boxes, be over there? What about that rider lawn mower?

What an exciting prospect this is, selling all this crap. I know plenty of people who might like an old Remington upright typewriter, even if it is missing several keys. It could be fixed. Then look what you've got.

And what ELSE might be found down in the other former nuclear missile bases around Long Island? Think of the silos that housed the surface to air Nike Ajax missiles that were up at Rocky Point, Lloyd Harbor and Amityville. Or the surface to air nuclear tipped Nike Hercules Missiles at Brookville and Long Beach? Is it a gold mine down there?

I might note that the addition of this $1.2 million to the County budget did not come easy. And it did not come out of the blue. The County had originally been considering the exciting prospect of adding some new regulations for the scrap metal industry here on Long Island. There has been a growing problem involving theft of scrap metal because of its increased value in the marketplace. It should have more regulation.

But in the middle of this conversation, Legislature Presiding Officer William Lindsay (D-Holbrook), got the brainstorm about Westhampton. The $1.2 million was immediately approved and inserted into the budget because it meant that some expense of $1.2 million might not have to be cut. It then went to County Executive Steve Levy who vetoed it, saying it was wildly overestimated and would be very labor intensive to sort. It went back to the Legislature to see if it could be overridden. And Lindsay said they could use prisoners from the County Jail to sort through everything. And he said this was also cleaning up the environment. And so the veto was overridden.

Anybody want to buy a dot-matrix computer printer? The county has dozens of them. They were all the rage in the late 1980s. Most need repair, but after that, look what you've got.