Dan’s Papers September 30, 2011 danshamptons.com Page 19
The Clinton Stairs Famous Historic Stairs to the Beach are Ticketed by the Village By Dan Rattiner The wooden stairs you see in the picture above were built illegally on September 1, the day after Hurricane Irene slammed into the Hamptons, and so this past Wednesday, the Town Trustees cited the owner of the stairs, Elie Hirschfeld, for having them built without a permit. If you want to see these offending stairs, you can drive down to Georgica Beach in East Hampton and there they are on the beach in front of the first mansion to the east. The story of the offending stairs is this. The mansion was rented by Elie Hirschfeld to President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary for the period of August 22 to September 5, and so
they came out here just in time to get smacked by Hurricane Irene on August 28, which blew away the old stairs that had been there, legally, before that time. From the time the Clintons arrived, the original stairs had been guarded by Secret Service men standing on the lawn next to a black SUV to keep curiosity seekers from climbing up them. During the hurricane, of course, the Secret Service abandoned their post temporarily as the big waves thundered in and crashed over the revetment and onto the lawn. After the hurricane passed, the Secret Service returned to find the stairs gone, washed away. And so, they dutifully reported this fact
to their higher ups, who quickly ordered a new set of stairs to be built so the former President and the current Secretary of State would not hurt their tootsies trying to climb over the boulders to get down to the beach. The new stairs, designed exactly as the old ones—they looked at pictures—were in place before the next morning, answering the demands of “security and access” for the President and his lady. That’s how it is with both Presidents and former Presidents. This was done without anybody getting a permit. Thus were the laws violated. These laws had been put in place by the Village of East (continued on page 24)
SATELLITE CRASHES, MISSES THE HAMPTONS By Dan Rattiner Pieces of an American Research Satellite— one of which is the size of a school bus— came down through the atmosphere on Friday afternoon at 3:45 p.m. and landed without hitting anybody in the Hamptons. That’s probably all you need to know about it. But if you’re interested in more, read on. The satellite, launched in 1991 into a high orbit, was “repositioned” into a low atmosphere orbit when the International Space Station got seriously under construction. Doing this, the scientists knew, meant that someday pieces of their satellite would hit the earth when its work was done. But what was more important? The people on Earth? Or the Space Station? They made the choice.
In 2005, the satellite was decommissioned and abandoned. It would now break up into thousands of little pieces. Most would burn up in the atmosphere. But 26 of them—they did the math calculating the satellite’s weakest points—would not burn but would instead come down possibly onto the heads of one of the 9 billion people here. Too bad. NASA sent out a press release two weeks ago that said 26 pieces of a satellite were coming down, one of which was the size of a school bus. Get ready. It did not say where it was going to hit but it did say that the debris would get sprinkled over a 500-mile path with the school bus as a sort of exclamation point when it did. That left it up to the rest of us to wonder why they wouldn’t tell us where this was going to
happen. Since they didn’t, we worried about it. Look up in the sky! Is it there? They wouldn’t tell us what time or day either but that it would be sometime between Thursday and Saturday. Some said that NASA knew it would be coming down to hit Muammar Gaddafi and we didn’t want to alert him. Still others said it was coming down on an historic city in Europe— this was going to be a huge embarrassment. Others sold T-shirts with bull’s-eyes on them that said HIT HERE! This was a contrarian approach. The sellers said these were lucky shirts, since NASA couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn or a bull’s-eye, so wearing them would make you completely safe. Still another view was that NASA wasn’t (continued on page 24)