Lower-than-usual temperatures and sparse tourist crowds might have been the hallmarks of this Long Island summer, where each tourist season seems to take on a character of its own.
Local residents remember last summer, for instance, for the fierce forest fires that blackened hundreds of acres of scrub pines, which thrive in the sandy soil. Some still talk about the summer of 1938, when a hurricane created the inlet and barrier island beaches that made this town one of the premier destinations for New York City residents fleeing the summer heat.
But the summer of ’96 is fated to be remembered as the summer of the plane crash, forever linked to the sadness of the Flight 800 victims’ families, the morbid curiosity that has drawn hundreds of gapers to watch the goings on.
“It’s been like the movie `Jaws’–with each discovery more police, more cars, more people,” said 57-year-old George Perin, who last year purchased a summer house across from the Coast Guard station. He now has a CNN platform on his side lawn.
“Usually around here we only get beach traffic, but on nice days now, we get helicopters coming in and out, five or six police directing traffic. It’s been crazy,” he said.
The thoughts and nightmares of the families of the 230 people who lost their lives July 17 are constantly on the minds of the residents of this seaside community.
They have front-row seats for viewing the flow of wreckage that started as a trickle a few weeks ago and has turned into a stream, the results of the massive government effort to lift the pieces of debris from the ocean floor and haul them by truck to a hangar in nearby Calverton, where investigators try to figure out what caused the Boeing 747 to explode.
While serving customers at Cor J Seafood, Maggie Daly tries not to look out the window anymore. Across the street from the seaside fish shop where she works, Coast Guard and U.S. Navy personnel spend their days bringing ashore the wreckage of TWA Flight 800.
“I almost lost my son when his fishing boat sank two weeks ago,” she said. “I can only imagine how those families feel.”
More than half of the plane has been recovered. Every day, sometimes twice a day, a Navy launch carrying debris brought up by divers and by cranes on salvage vessels 10 miles offshore passes through Shinnecock Inlet to the Coast Guard station.
Sometimes a piece of wreckage is so large–a part of the wing or an engine– that huge cranes must lift it onto the trucks. Sometimes a small piece is considered so interesting that it is rushed by car to the hangar’s makeshift labs for immediate testing for chemical residues.
Gina Cariello was working the counter at Greg’s Oasis, a roadside food stand near the Coast Guard station, when a flatbed truck went by hauling a piece of fuselage with seats still attached.
“It was kind of eerie,” the 16-year-old waitress said. “It’s not so bad if you see a landing gear. But when you see seats, and seatbelts and windows, it makes you sad. You attach people to that.”
The section had come from the center of the aircraft near the wings, where investigators continue to focus their efforts. They theorize that an explosion came from underneath a seat or in an overhead luggage bin near where the jumbo jet broke apart.
Pete Charos, 54 and a lifelong resident of this community, this spring took over the Bayview House, whose century-old inn and bungalows lie directly across the street from the Coast Guard station. Television cameras peer out the second-floor windows of the inn, and makeshift studios dot the roofs of the bungalows.
“I’m very ambivalent about making money off a tragedy,” he said. “But then when they lift the big pieces, everything gets really quiet. It’s like a hush, very eerie. All you hear is the camera shutters, the generators.
“Then you see bits and pieces of the plane, with personal items attached to them. It makes you realize they were just like us–going on vacation, going to visit family. It opens your eyes to life, makes you think about living every day,” he said.
