Briefing 8/10: Deaths, Aging Elevators & Radioactive Dead Horse Bay

Zainab Iqbal -
Crape Myrtle in full bloom in Kensington. (Photo: Zainab Iqbal/Bklyner)

It’s Monday, and it’s hot and it will remain hot! There’s a three-day heat advisory in NYC. Please remember to stay cool, stay hydrated, and check on your neighbors.

  • ConEd has changed its claims policy to allow customers who lost power for more than 48 consecutive hours after Isaias to submit claims for lost food or medicine. Here’s more information.
  • Two people were shot and killed in the 77th Precinct over the weekend. Shootings have more than doubled in the 77th this year.
  • Dozens of Bushwick’s small business owners and community members gathered to rally behind efforts to relieve commercial tenants of their rent burdens.
  • We did a data check – COVID-19 infection rates vary greatly by neighborhood, and southern Brooklyn is trending in the wrong direction. Do check it out!
  • “Struggling to contain the spread of the virus, NYCHA cut back on preventive maintenance of its 3,193 aging elevators — with planned outages for elevator work dropping nearly a thousandfold between April and late June because of the pause,” THE CITY reported.
  • Lauren Sobel, a 25-year-old Brooklynite, was rock climbing at Mohonk Preserve in the Shawangunk Mountains region of the Hudson Valley, when she fell to her death, Patch reported.
  • Mohammed Kamil, a 25-year-old Brooklynite, was killed in a chain-reaction crash involving three motorcycles in Orange County on Sunday. His funeral will be taking place at Beit El-Maqdis Islamic Center tomorrow afternoon.
  • “A Brooklyn man pled guilty in federal court Monday to attempting to provide material support to ISIS and distributing bomb-making instructions,” NBC reported.
  • Business is booming for NYC psychics amid COVID-19 pandemic, the Post wrote.
  • “A baby girl born almost 3 months premature amid the COVID-19 pandemic has come home to a house full of supplies thanks to the generosity of the Bed-Stuy community,” BK Reader reported.
  • “Authorities closed the southern half of Dead Horse Bay after finding radioactive material at the park and former landfill, which has become a destination for scavengers,” the Brooklyn Paper reported.
  • “Public Place is now going to get less of a clean up than was originally promised.  Instead of digging up and removing 8 feet of soil across the entire  9.6 acre site as initially planned, the State environmental watchdog decided that they will allow National Grid, the polluter, to only dig up 2 feet of dirt on most of the site and replace that two feet with clean soil, which DEC calls a “cover system,” Katia Kelly reports in PMFA. DEC says the site clean-up will be good enough for “restricted residential” use.