{"id":2701,"date":"2007-09-04T00:13:05","date_gmt":"2007-09-04T08:13:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2007\/09\/helicopter_nice_touch.html"},"modified":"2007-09-04T00:13:05","modified_gmt":"2007-09-04T08:13:05","slug":"helicopter_nice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/09\/helicopter_nice.html","title":{"rendered":"Helicopter . . . Nice Touch"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maybe you were wondering whether there are ever sharks at city beaches. The answer is of course there are sharks at city beaches<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Rockaway Beach looked like Amity Island yesterday as hundreds of screaming swimmers scrambled out of the surf after a 6-foot shark — and its ominous dorsal fin — was spotted close to the shore.<\/p>\n

“It was scary,” said Julio Lento, 15, of Brooklyn.<\/p>\n

“I didn’t want to get eaten.”<\/p>\n

Experts believe it was a relatively harmless thresher shark — but during the mad dash for land, the killer great white “Jaws” was on everyone’s mind.<\/p>\n

Sunbathers shouted, “Shark!” and “Get out of the water!” while lifeguards frantically blew their whistles to warn people.<\/p>\n

Those who dared look behind could see a fin circling about 20 feet from the shoreline.<\/p>\n

The beach was shut down immediately from Beach 107th Street to Beach 121st Street, said a Parks Department spokesman.<\/p>\n

It reopened some five hours later.<\/p>\n

Emergency responders from the FDNY and NYPD rushed to the scene, and a helicopter hovered over the water searching for the menacing-looking creature.<\/p>\n

The shark was first spotted around 10:30 a.m. near Beach 109th Street by a couple of eagle-eyed beachgoers about 15 feet off the shore.<\/p>\n

“They were saying, ‘What’s that?’ And I looked up and I said, ‘What is that?'” said the lifeguard on duty, who only gave his first name, Justin.<\/p>\n

At the time, few people were in the water.<\/p>\n

They watched incredulously as the tail flapped in and out of the ocean.<\/p>\n

Moments later, the big fish — alive but clearly suffering — washed up on shore near Beach 109th Street.<\/p>\n

“This thing was sick or lost its mother,” said Justin.<\/p>\n

“It was flipping around. He had a big, floppy tail like an eel.”<\/p>\n

Three do-gooders took matters into their own hands and dragged it by its tail into the water, he said.<\/p>\n

Once back in the surf, the shark seemed to swim away. He was spotted going out about 50 feet.<\/p>\n

But an hour later, when the water was full of swimmers, the shark returned — scaring the daylights out of people and prompting officials to keep swimmers out of the water until about 3:30 p.m.<\/p>\n

The fright put a serious damper on the holiday weekend.<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

Keith DiLorenzo was so thrilled to see the rare sea dweller that he didn’t want to leave the water when the frenzied mob came rushing out.<\/p>\n

While his relatives yelled to him — “Get out! Get out!” — the 12-year-old marine buff tried to get closer to the action.<\/p>\n

“I wanted the shark to get close to the shore, so I found a sharp clam and I cut my finger and put drops of blood in the water,” said DiLorenzo, of Floral Park, L.I.<\/p>\n

His grandmother, Pat DiLorenzo, said afterward, “When he got on the shore, all I thought was, ‘Thank God summer’s over.'”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And not to let a great story get in the way of the truth, but this was a downer, thanks a lot:<\/p>\n

After looking at a photo of the shark that was beached, [Hans Walters, the New York Aquarium’s animal department supervisor and resident shark expert] said it was a thresher shark.<\/p>\n

“These are deep-water fish,” he said. “It makes me believe someone caught him and released him.”<\/p>\n

“I’m just surprised he’s this close.”<\/p>\n

Telltale signs of thresher sharks include a tail that’s about half as long as their body, as well as weak teeth and jaws.<\/p>\n

“These shark are not dangerous,” said Walters.<\/p>\n

“The fact that he kept swimming toward shore leads me to believe that he’s dying.”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The shark later died<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Location Scout: Rockaway Beach<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maybe you were wondering whether there are ever sharks at city beaches. The answer is of course there are sharks at city beaches: Rockaway Beach looked like Amity Island yesterday as hundreds of screaming swimmers scrambled out of the surf after a 6-foot shark — and its ominous dorsal fin — was spotted close to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-queens","category-were_all_gonna_die"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2701\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}