Waukena Ave. residents claim homes shake from trucks

Town says NCPD have stepped up enforcement on illegal commercial traffic

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Waukena Avenue residents don’t have to gaze out their front windows to know when a truck or bus traveling on the residential street passes by their home.

“Every manhole cover [or] a bump in the road is magnified,” said Anthony Boland, a 40-year resident of the street, “and the shock wave goes into the house.”

Boland said he hardly uses the second floor of his home due to the “earthquake tremors” caused by illegal commercial traffic on Waukena Avenue. The road, which connects Long Beach Road to Brower Avenue, has become a popular thoroughfare, and in the late hours of the night, he added, gas tanker trucks make it sound like his residence will collapse.

But repeated pleading from residents to the Town of Hempstead and Nassau County to repave the road and increase enforcement of the 8,000-pound weight limit on truck drivers and their companies have come up empty, according to Boland. Many school buses, which are exempt from the weight limit, do not pick up children on Waukena, Boland also claimed.

According to Boland, the weight regulation was well-enforced until about the 1990s, when “except local delivery” was added to the signs scattered throughout the neighborhood. He said that “local delivery” is unclear, and contests that truck companies have been able to get out of paying tickets because of it.

“We’ve been telling [the town] for years that our homes are literally shaking from the trucks,” he said. “It kind of goes in one ear and out the other, and you kind of wonder why.”

Mike Deery, the Town of Hempstead’s director of communications, said the Town has brought up the issue to the Fourth Precinct, which has “dramatically stepped up patrols” on the road.

Detective Vincent Garcia, of the Nassau County Police Department’s public information office, said that the NCPD issued 220 summonses to commercial vehicles on Waukena in 2016, and as of earlier this month, had issued 109 so far this year.

Overweight summonses may not be issued if vehicles have business in the immediate area, Garcia said. In addition to local deliveries, landscapers, furniture or construction vehicles may not be written up, he added, depending on the circumstance.

“Some trucks do use Waukena as a cut through to get to the dumps,” Garcia wrote to the Herald in an email. “If we see them, we write them.”

Deery added that after an analysis of the road’s conditions by the town’s engineering department, West Waukena — between Long Beach Road and Fulton Avenue — is scheduled for repaving this spring. “Just normal roadway wear,” he said.

He and dozens of other residents, who said they were fed up with trucks using their residential street as a shortcut, have gone back and forth with the town and county for the last several years.

In 2013, Waukena residents sent a petition to current Town of Hempstead Supervisor Anthony Santino asking for stricter enforcement of the weight restriction that he said has been in place since 1966. Santino, senior councilman at the time, told Boland in a letter that the town, in addition to working with the Fourth Precinct, had contacted several companies and a bus company about the matter.

“With the increased police enforcement and the digital warning sign that has already been placed on Waukena Avenue by Nassau County, I am hopeful that this will deter some of the truck traffic,” he wrote.

Though Nassau County police issued some tickets, Boland said, the issue was not fully addressed. Two years later, more than 100 of the residents sent emails to Santino and other local leaders.

Still, Waukena resident Brad Hartman said his home vibrates and his windows shake each time one of the many buses, or a truck — about 20 per day — pass by. “Stuff falls off my walls,” he said. “The street is not built for commercial traffic.” He added that the heavy trucks are dangerous for high school students on foot as well as pedestrians that often walk to the nearby Young Israel of Oceanside.

Sheldon Wald, who has lived in his Waukena Avenue home for more than 50 years, said the water main in front of his house has broken six times in the last year, and he claims that the heavy trucks are the cause. The last time, the blacktop on his driveway, began “buckling.” A private contractor came to fix it at no cost to him, he said.

Deery said despite one resident’s claim, the town’s engineering department found no correlation between overweight trucks traveling on the road and water main breaks.

Wald said he worries about traffic when the Costco officially opens in the coming months in Oil City, especially with what he expects to be a spike in supply trucks. The membership warehouse club is expected to be 151,000-square-feet, and some residents are worried about not only traffic from shoppers, but also from bulky supply vehicles.

Wald lamented: “I really wanted to sell my house as soon as I heard that they were putting up a Costco.”