The city must replace missing street signs in a Hurricane Sandy-ravaged section of Sheepshead Bay — even though it claims it is not responsible for maintaining them — before someone dies, locals are demanding.
The 2012 storm blew away the sign marking Lincoln Terrace — one of a handful of streets in a sub-neighborhood of beach bungalows served by narrow, alleyway streets — and no one ever put up new ones. So ambulances couldn’t find an elderly Lincoln Terrace resident who called 911 with chest pains and difficulty breathing in February, and her family blames the missing sign and the city for endangering her life, her grandson said.
“There’s no sign and no indication that Lincoln Terrace exists,” said Donald Sutcliffe, whose grandmother Donata Halstead has lived on the byway for 43 years. “They drove right past where she lives. So luckily I was standing outside to tell the dispatcher to back down the street. When someone is not breathing, seconds — let alone minutes — make a huge difference.”
Halstead’s home is a stone’s throw from Nostrand Avenue — her front porch overlooks the arterial roadway. But the ambulance drove right past the woman’s house after dark on Feb 27, Sutcliffe said.
Ambulances are not equipped with global positioning systems, and it is up to drivers to know how to get to calls, officials said.
“Units are familiar with their response area,” said Fire Department spokeswoman Elisheva Zakheim.
The ambulance arrived in five minutes, the average for an emergency call, according to Fire Department records.
Lincoln Terrace connects Nostrand and Emmons avenues and is only wide enough for a bicycle. But a dozen homes have Lincoln Terrace addresses. And a handful of such streets exist in an area bounded by Shore Parkway, Emmons Avenue, E. 29th Street, and Batchelder Street that locals call “the Courts” because many of the streets have “court” in their names.
But the city is not responsible for replacing street signs there, according to a Department of Transportation spokeswoman. Instead, residents must pay for signs, paving, and maintaining sewer lines, officials said.
Locals know they are responsible for sewers, which turned the below-street-level Courts into fetid flood zones during and since Hurricane Sandy. But many assumed fixing signs was the city’s job.
“That’s news to me,” said Jimmy Schneider, a Mesereau Court resident for four decades. “They put them up, they should be responsible.”
Halstead asked the local community board, 311, and some area politicians for a new sign, but no one gave her a straight answer, she said.
“I’ve been asking for years,” she said.
Homeowners in the area — a ghost town more than three years after Hurricane Sandy — are too fractured to organize around public needs, Halstead said.
“Nobody knows anybody,” she said.
Many homeowners have washed their hands of the nabe and are trying to sell their homes, others are still waiting on help from the city’s sluggish disaster recovery program Build It Back, and still others have abandoned the area entirely.
It’s time the city step in and take care of the vulnerable folks who remain, another resident said.
“We pay taxes, we get mail service, we get jury duty, why wouldn’t you put a sign there?” said longtime Lake Avenue homeowner Missy Haggerty.
