Better Late Than Never

The state is moving to sue Exxon for the like 800 trillion gallons of oil floating under Greenpoint:

New York State environmental officials said yesterday they would sue Exxon Mobil over a big underground oil spill in Brooklyn that is still seeping sticky goo into a city waterway, decades after the leak was first noticed.

An estimated 17 million gallons of petroleum once lay in a vast plume beneath the streets of the Greenpoint neighborhood that was home to many oil refineries for more than a century.

The oil business has largely moved elsewhere, but countless small and large spills went unnoticed for decades and eventually formed a subterranean blob of more than 50 acres.

Authorities have been aware of the problem since 1978. Exxon Mobil accepted responsibility for much of the damage in 1990 and has since pumped some nine million gallons out of the ground.

The slow pace of the cleanup, however, has increasingly angered Greenpoint residents and elected officials, who have launched a series of lawsuits against Exxon in the past year.

The Department of Environmental Conservation said yesterday that it has joined the fray, and asked New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to initiate legal action against Exxon “to ensure that the company fulfills its obligation to clean up petroleum contamination” in Greenpoint.

Lighthouse Lovers Soon Will Be Able To Crash The (Sea)Gate

The Coney Island Lighthouse in the ultra-exclusive — or at least gated — Seagate neighborhood will be opened for public tours for the first time ever:

Brooklyn’s oldest lighthouse could be opened to the public for the first time in its 116-year history, the Daily News has learned.

The Seagate Association signed a five-year lease on the 80-foot-tall lighthouse this month, ending a century-long ownership by the U.S. Coast Guard and a ban on public tours.

“There are millions of lighthouse lovers from all over the world who have heard about this lighthouse and would love to see it but have never had the chance,” said Seagate Association Treasurer Michael Breslof.

By next summer, the association could begin hosting tours of the Beach 46th St. tower and a nearby home, where light keeper Frank Schubert lived until his death in 2003.

The tours would cost about $5 and would include visits to Schubert’s home at the foot of the tower, which is known both as the Coney Island Lighthouse and Norton’s Point Lighthouse.

You Know You’ve Jumped The Shark When . . .

The CD11 primary has officially jumped the shark now that Al Sharpton is involved:

The Rev. Al Sharpton got involved yesterday in a racially charged congressional contest in Brooklyn, asking Senator Charles E. Schumer, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to take a position in a primary where a white candidate is running for a seat historically held by blacks.

The race involves the seat now held by Major R. Owens who, after 24 years in Congress, is not running for re-election this year.

A well-financed white candidate, City Councilman David Yassky, faces three black candidates: State Senator Carl Andrews, City Councilwoman Yvette D. Clarke and Chris Owens, the congressman’s son.

Many Brooklyn officials have accused Mr. Yassky of taking advantage of the fact that there are several black candidates in the race, raising the prospect that he could win against a divided black electorate.

In his letter to the three officials, Mr. Sharpton said that his intention is “not about a rejection of a white candidate or Yassky’s general right to run for whatever office he’d like. This is about a calculated undermining of the Voting Rights Act,” which sought to assure that minorities would not be disenfranchised.

In the letters to the three officials, Mr. Sharpton explained that “we in the African-American community have stood by you,” adding that “we now ask you to stand with us in making clear that the goals of the Voting Rights Act have not yet been entirely achieved particularly in the state of New York.”

Backstory: Unite To Stop White Individuals!; Nothing Against Your Policies, It’s Just The Color Of Your Skin; Barack Obama: Some Guy They Stuck In There; How Do We Put This? Let’s Just Say Identity Politics Still Exists . . ..

Who Hasn’t Caved To Police Interrogators While Hungover?

The main suspect in the 500 gazillion-alarm Greenpoint Terminal Market fire has recanted his confession, claiming he was hung over when the police interrogated him:

Looking rested and even cheery during a jailhouse interview yesterday, the man accused of starting a blaze that destroyed a warehouse complex on the Brooklyn waterfront last month denied that he had confessed to starting the fire and insisted that he had been in upstate New York when it occurred.

“I never told them I did it,” said the man, Leszek Kuczera, speaking in a crowded visiting room at Rikers Island. “They must have misunderstood.”

Mr. Kuczera, who spoke through a translator, retraced in varying detail his movements since April, saying he had been out of town until May 14 or 15. He said that two Polish-speaking detectives and others who interrogated him after his arrest had misunderstood what he acknowledged were his own confusing words to them.

Saying he was “hung over” when he was arrested, Mr. Kuczera said he told detectives about a fire at the warehouse complex, called the Greenpoint Terminal Market, on June 3, 2005, nearly a year before the one he is charged with starting. That fire also started when some homeless people salvaging metal started a bonfire, singeing a roof and the floor of one of the warehouses, he said.

Mr. Kuczera said he remembered the date of the fire because it occurred on his name day. The name day is a Polish tradition that celebrates certain names on dates that are usually tied to patron saints. He said he had been outside the warehouse when the fire started and had called the Fire Department.

Hurricane Ekaterina? Or, Katrina The Great Freaks Out Brighton Beach

The Russian-language press is stirring up fears of a catastrophic hurricane hitting Brighton Beach:

Russian immigrants in Brighton Beach are living in fear of a hurricane threat to which the rest of New York City seems largely oblivious. Speculation that a severe storm could soon descend on Brooklyn has been rife among immigrant senior citizens, many of whom are reportedly stocking up on water and medicine in preparation for an emergency that is much less likely to happen than some of the local Russian press and broadcast outlets have reported.

. . .

“I know one businessman who closed his business,” the editor in chief of a local paper, Russkii Bazaar, Natalia Shapiro, said. “He went back to live in Russia until the hurricane season is over.”

Employees at Pharmacy Express on Brighton Beach Avenue said that in May, senior citizens started coming in saying they were worried about a hurricane. “People read the Russian-language newspapers, and they believe every word,” a pharmacist, Tatiana Shmaian, said. Ms. Shmaian said her daughter lives in Moscow and called her to make sure she was okay after hearing about a potential hurricane on Russian television.

“They’re hearing there’s going to be a hurricane in 24 hours,” Pat Singer of the Brighton Neighborhood Association said. Ms. Singer said senior citizens have come into her office and asked what they should do if the city declares a weather-related evacuation. “They’re old, they can’t run, and they’re scared,” she said. “Katrina scared a lot of people.”

Ms. Singer, who cannot read Russian, blamed the local Russian newspapers for the speculation, saying editors are trying to scare their readers in order to boost sales. “It’s a ghetto, a Russian ghetto neighborhood. They read their own newsletters, watch their own television stations,” she said.

The scare appears to have started in March, when several Russian-language newspapers in America published a re port that said: “In the coming summer, a powerful hurricane could descend on New York with a force no less forgiving than Katrina, which emptied New Orleans last year.” That warning also was picked up by news sources in Russia. Then, at the end of last month, the New York Russian paper V Novom Svete ran a cover story citing a French scientist who said a tsunami would rip through Manhattan on May 25.

Then again, the prospect of a hurricane hitting New York does seem pretty frightening . . .