NEW YORK, Nov. 12 (UPI) -- Rockaway Peninsula, where American Airlines Flight 587 crashed Monday, is one of the most isolated parts of the sprawling city of New York.
Most of the people of the city have never set foot there, although Rockaway Beach is a popular summer spot.
There are only two bridges and a subway line that connect the peninsula -- commonly known as The Rockaways -- to the rest of the city: the land connection to Long Island runs through the Five Towns area of suburban Nassau County.
Although the peninsula is part of the County of Queens, the subway there runs through Brooklyn. For most of the city's history, it required a second subway fare to get there. The Rockaways was, notoriously, a place in which many welfare apartments and social services were located because it didn't have enough political clout. Ethnically, it has been sharply divided between white areas and black areas.
Most of the plane came down in the Newport section, a relatively affluent white area of two-story single homes, and the sort of place where firemen, policemen and local politicians live. The collapse of the World Trade Center twin towers hit the area hard, and funerals have been a common occurrence in recent weeks.
JFK Airport is to the northeast of the peninsula, across Jamaica Bay, and overflying planes are another threat to the quality of life there. Only rarely, however, have planes actually crashed into the peninsula.
Aside from the original difficulty of getting enough fire-fighting equipment onto the peninsula, the general lock-down of bridges and tunnels made it very difficult for personnel from other agencies concerned with the fire to get there, especially when many of them were home for a national holiday.
One relatively large piece of the plane came down in the parking lot of a local Texaco gas station. The residents emerged from their homes with their own fire hoses to put out small fires or to limit them until the professionals got there.
Now EMS and fire department personnel have started going house-to-house, looking for small fires and pieces of the plane, or of bodies.
One of the dangers of the situation is that jet fuel has ended up in the sewers, according to city environmental officials. Most of it is not on fire, although it does present dangers: one can see smoke rising from some grates, and the filtration plants are not primarily designed to "treat" jet fuel.
This is one of the main concerns of the Department of Environmental Protection, which is in charge of both water and sewers, as well as of environmental quality.
On a windy day on the peninsula, most of the original black smoke dissipated quite quickly, leaving behind a faint smell, nothing like the acrid eye-watering odor of the WTC events. There are pieces of the aircraft floating in the water, visible from the shore. At midday, it remained unclear how much of the plane ended up on land, and how much at sea.
There are only half-a-dozen casualties in local hospitals, none seriously injured and all from the ground. There are no survivors of the plane.
New Yorkers, with their city locked down again, and only helicopters and fighter jets flying overhead, seem to be calm. Since it is a national holiday, most of them were home in any event. Those who were "in the country" for the three-day weekend may have difficulty in getting back tonight.
