New York

Woman Is Bitten by Shark in First New York City Attack in Recent Years

Published

11 months ago

August 8, 2023

Woman Is Bitten by Shark in First New York City Attack in Recent Years

A 65-year-old woman was bitten by a shark Monday afternoon at Rockaway Beach, the authorities said, in what appears to have been the first confirmed shark bite in New York City in decades.

A shark bit the woman on her left leg as she swam near Beach 59th Street, a spokeswoman for the New York City parks department said. The woman had been swimming alone and lifeguards heard her screaming for help, according to a police report.

Lifeguards removed her from the water, applied a tourniquet, and administered first aid before emergency responders took the woman to Jamaica Hospital in critical condition.

“We hope for a full recovery for this swimmer,” the spokeswoman, Meghan Lalor, said in a statement. “Though this was a frightening event, we want to remind New Yorkers that shark bites in Rockaway are extremely rare.”

A spokesman for the New York City Police Department said on Tuesday morning that the woman’s condition was “serious but stable.” The woman is believed to have lost about 20 pounds of flesh because of the bite, according to the police report. (The parks department initially misreported that she was 50 years old.)

Lifeguards ordered everyone to exit the water after the woman was bitten, and helicopters searched for sharks but did not spot any. The beach was closed for swimming and surfing on Tuesday.

Park officials described Monday’s shark bite as the first on Rockaway Beach “in recent memory.”

“It’s not very common that we would see this,” said Gavin Naylor, the program director of the International Shark Attack File.

But he noted that bait fish, such as blue fish and bunker fish, had become more plentiful in recent years in the Long Island region, and that the water quality appeared to be improving.

“That brings in a lot of animals that belong there that haven’t been there for a while, and with that, we get the animals that prey on them,” Mr. Naylor said.

“We can expect that as the ecosystem recovers that we’re going to see a bit more of that,” he said, adding that people should be more educated about the increased risks of being in the water.

Mr. Naylor said that it would be possible to identify the type of shark that bit the woman on Monday once more was known about her injury and how deep the water was where she was swimming.

By midday Tuesday, Beach 59th Street was largely deserted. A Police Department helicopter whirred overhead, and police vehicles moved slowly down the boardwalk, lights flashing. Red flags prohibiting swimming flapped in the wind along the length of the shore.

But a few beachgoers were making the most of the sunny day.

Nancy Ugalde, 58, a Brooklyn resident, was set up on a colorful beach blanket with two relatives. They had planned to swim on Tuesday, she said, and they were alarmed to hear that a woman had been bitten by a shark.

Beach 59th Street is her favorite stretch of the Rockaways, Ms. Ugalde said, describing it as a quiet area that is secluded from the crowds further down the shore. In her 30 years of visiting the beach, she had never heard of another shark attack.

“I’m not going in there today until they say it’s OK to go in,” Ms. Ugalde said. “It’s very scary.”

All of Rockaway’s beaches were closed for one day last July because of shark sightings, leaving only the boardwalk open to beachgoers.

The last known potential shark bite at Rockaway was in 2017, according to Patch.com, which reported that a surfer, Michah Behrend, required 40 stitches in his right foot after the incident.

A baby great white shark was spotted near where Mr. Behrend had been surfing, but one expert told Patch that the wounds didn’t appear to have been caused by a shark.

Mr. Behrend, 38, said Tuesday that he never found out what exactly caused the wound on his foot. He said that he was out surfing at Rockaway as recently as Saturday, and had heard of recent shark sightings in the area.

“The water temperatures are warmer than usual, I think that’s been drawing the sharks in,” Mr. Behrend said. But he said that the sightings and Monday’s attack wouldn’t deter him from surfing when the beach reopens.

“I don’t think sharks technically like humans, but I think you just need to be careful when going out at certain times of day,” Mr. Behrend said, adding that he loved the ocean and visited the beach every week.

“You have to be respectful of the ocean and the things inside of it and be mindful of when you’re out there,” he said.

While shark bites in New York City are almost unheard of, they are somewhat less rare on Long Island, where five people were bitten over two weeks last summer, according to The Long Island Press.

Eliza Fawcett and Chelsia Rose Marcius contributed reporting.

New York

We Counted 22,252 Cars to See How Much Congestion Pricing Might Have Made This Morning

Published

4 days ago

July 1, 2024

Press Room

We Counted 22,252 Cars to See How Much Congestion Pricing Might Have Made This Morning

By Ana Ley, Larry Buchanan and Francesca Paris

Ana Ley spent more than 12 hours at M.T.A. board meetings last week. Larry Buchanan, Francesca Paris and 25 of their colleagues spent the morning counting more than 22,000 cars.

July 1, 2024

Today would have been the first Monday of New York City’s congestion pricing plan. Before it was halted by Gov. Kathy Hochul, the plan was designed to rein in some of the nation’s worst traffic while raising a billion dollars for the subway every year, one toll at a time.

A year’s worth of tolls is hard to picture. But what about a day’s worth? What about an hour’s?

To understand how the plan could have worked, we went to the edges of the tolling zone during the first rush hour that the fees would have kicked in.

Here’s what we saw:

Video by Noah Throop/The New York Times; animation by Ruru Kuo/The New York Times

You probably wouldn’t have seen every one of those cars if the program had been allowed to proceed. That’s because officials said the fees would have discouraged some drivers from crossing into the tolled zone, leading to an estimated 17 percent reduction in traffic. (It’s also Monday on a holiday week.)

The above video was just at one crossing point, on Lexington Avenue. We sent 27 people to count vehicles manually at four bridges, four tunnels and nine streets where cars entered the business district. In total, we counted 22,252 cars, trucks, motorcycles and buses between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Monday.

We wanted to see how the dense flow of traffic into the central business district would have generated money in real time.

Though we can’t know that dollar amount precisely, we can hazard a guess. Congestion pricing was commonly referred to as a $15-per-car toll, but it wasn’t so simple. There were going to be smaller fees for taxi trips, credits for the tunnels, heftier charges for trucks and buses, and a number of exemptions.

To try to account for all that fee variance, we used estimates from the firm Replica, which models traffic data, on who enters the business district, as well as records from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and city agencies. We also made a few assumptions where data wasn’t available. We then came up with a ballpark figure for how much the city might have generated in an hour at those toll points.

The total? About $200,000 in tolls for that hour.

Note: The Trinity Place exit from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which would have been tolled, is closed at this hour.

It’s far from a perfect guess. Our vehicle total is definitely an undercount: We counted only the major entrances — bridges, tunnels and 60th Street — which means we missed all the cars that entered the zone by exiting the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive or the West Side Highway.

And our translation into a dollar number is rough. Among many other choices we had to make, we assumed all drivers had E-ZPass — saving them a big surcharge — and we couldn’t distinguish between transit buses and charter buses, so we gave all buses an exemption.

But it does give you a rough sense of scale: It’s a lot of cars, and a lot of money. Over the course of a typical day, hundreds of thousands of vehicles stream into the Manhattan central business district through various crossings.

Trips into tolling district, per Replica estimates

Queens-Midtown Tunnel	50,600
Lincoln Tunnel	49,200
Williamsburg Bridge	27,900
Manhattan Bridge	24,000
Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel	23,100
Queensboro Bridge	21,700
Brooklyn Bridge	17,100
Holland Tunnel	15,400
All other entrances	118,000
Total	347,000

Note: Data counts estimated entrances on a weekday in spring 2023. Source: Replica.

The tolling infrastructure that was installed for the program cost roughly half a billion dollars.

The M.T.A. had planned to use the congestion pricing revenue estimates to secure $15 billion in financing for subway upgrades. Many of those improvement plans have now been suspended.

Methodology

We stationed as many as five counters at some bridges and tunnels to ensure that we counted only cars that directly entered the tolling zone, not those that would have continued onto non-tolled routes.

Our count also excluded certain exempt vehicles like emergency vehicles.

We used estimates of the traffic into the district to make a best guess at how many of each kind of vehicle entered the zone. Most of our estimates came from the traffic data firm Replica, which uses a variety of data sources, including phone location, credit card and census data, to model transportation patterns. Replica estimated that around 58 percent of trips into the central business district on a weekday in spring 2023 were made by private vehicles, 35 percent by taxis or other for-hire vehicles (Uber and Lyft) and the remainder by commercial vehicles.

We also used data on trucks, buses, for-hire vehicles and motorcycles from the M.T.A., the Taxi and Limousine Commission and the Department of Transportation.

For simplicity, we assumed all vehicles would be equally likely to enter the zone from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. as they would be in any other hour. We could not account for the other trips that a for-hire vehicle might make once within the tolled zone, only the initial crossing. And we did not include the discount to drivers who make under $50,000, because it would kick in only after 10 trips in a calendar month.

New York

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 30, 2024

Published

1 month ago

June 3, 2024

Press Room

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 30, 2024

-
Jury Deliberation Re-charge
SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK CRIMINAL TERM
-
-
PART: 59
Χ
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP,
DEFENDANT.
BEFORE:
Indict. No.
71543-2023
CHARGE
4909
FALSIFYING BUSINESS
RECORDS 1ST DEGREE
JURY TRIAL
100 Centre Street
New York, New York 10013
May 30, 2024
HONORABLE JUAN M. MERCHAN
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE PEOPLE:
ALVIN BRAGG, JR., ESQ.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK COUNTY
One Hogan Place
New York, New York 10013
BY:
JOSHUA STEINGLASS, ESQ.
MATTHEW COLANGELO,
ESQ.
SUSAN HOFFINGER, ESQ.
CHRISTOPHER CONROY, ESQ.
BECKY MANGOLD, ESQ.
KATHERINE ELLIS, ESQ.
Assistant District Attorneys
BLANCHE LAW
BY:
TODD BLANCHE, ESQ.
EMIL BOVE, ESQ.
KENDRA WHARTON, ESQ.
NECHELES LAW, LLP
BY: SUSAN NECHELES, ESQ.
GEDALIA STERN, ESQ.
Attorneys for the Defendant
SUSAN PEARCE-BATES, RPR, CSR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
LAURIE EISENBERG, RPR, CSR
LISA KRAMSKY
THERESA MAGNICCARI
Senior Court Reporters
Susan Pearce-Bates, RPR, CCR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter

New York

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 29, 2024

Published

1 month ago

May 31, 2024

Press Room

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 29, 2024

SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK CRIMINAL TERM
-
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
PART: 59
Indict. No.
71543-2023
CHARGE
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP,
DEFENDANT.
BEFORE:
4815
FALSIFYING BUSINESS
RECORDS 1ST DEGREE
JURY TRIAL
X
100 Centre Street
New York, New York 10013
May 29, 2024
HONORABLE JUAN M. MERCHAN
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE
PEOPLE:
ALVIN BRAGG, JR.,
ESQ.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK COUNTY
One Hogan Place
New York, New York 10013
BY:
JOSHUA STEINGLASS, ESQ.
MATTHEW COLANGELO,
ESQ.
SUSAN HOFFINGER, ESQ.
CHRISTOPHER CONROY, ESQ.
BECKY MANGOLD, ESQ.
KATHERINE ELLIS, ESQ.
Assistant District Attorneys
BLANCHE LAW
BY:
TODD BLANCHE, ESQ.
EMIL BOVE, ESQ.
KENDRA WHARTON, ESQ.
NECHELES LAW, LLP
BY: SUSAN NECHELES, ESQ.
Attorneys for the Defendant
SUSAN PEARCE-BATES, RPR, CSR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
LAURIE EISENBERG, RPR, CSR
LISA KRAMSKY
THERESA MAGNICCARI
Senior Court Reporters
Susan Pearce-Bates,
RPR, CCR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter