_________________ BALDWIN ________________ your HEALTH body / mind / fitness
and JUNE 29, 2023
with a focus on:
MEN’S
looK INsIdE YoUR HEAlTH
Men’s Health
Vol. 30 No. 27
long Island sports champions
Unwinding Covid: Hybrid worship
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JUNE 29 - JUlY 5, 2023
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Working out with Pride Baldwin’s Blink Fitness is raising money for the Out Foundation By BEN FIEBERT bfiebert@liherald.com
Deliah Roberts/Herald
Celebrating their graduation BHS Valdictorian Rachel Lyons, far left, Principal Neil Testa, Salutatorian Jean Charles-Andrews and senior class President Kwasi Bonsu at commencement. Story, more photos, Page 3.
Blink Fitness, in Baldwin, celebrated Pride Month by hosting a free workout class, raising money for the OUT Foundation — a group that removes barriers blocking the LGBTQ+ community from participating in fitness, health and wellness. Blink Fitness, on Grand Avenue, offered the free class on June 10, and for every participant who attended, the gym donated $1 to the foundation. In addition, for each green membership sold, Blink donated $10 to the foundation. The exercises consisted of
calisthenics, upper body, lower body and full body workouts. For the June 10 fundraiser, Blink Fitness tried to cater to the experience of its members, so the personal trainer asked participants what they wanted to work on a n d c u s t o m i z e d wo rko u t s around their responses. The workout also involved strength training, and although that may be intimidating to some, Blink Fitness wanted this free workout session to serve as a trial run just in case the participants did or did not enjoy the exercises. “We’ve never done this before,” Carissa Ganelli, Blink Continued on page 14
Preparing for communication outages across continent By BEN FIEBERT bfiebert@liherald.com
The Nassau Amateur Radio Club set up a station in Baldwin Park last week, teaming up with thousands of people across Nor th America in a drill designed to prepare for widespread communication loss. Last Saturday and Sunday, about 40 people gathered in the park to learn about the ham radio, how to obtain a ham radio license and how to talk to others around the continent taking part in the event. The exercise, dubbed Field Day Emergency Preparedness Drill, is an annual event that
started in 1933. Participants quickly put together self-sufficient, working communication stations and make contacts with other ham radio operators in the U.S., the Caribbean and Canada. The American Radio Relay League started the yearly drill as a tool to establish emergency communication nets during floods, hurricanes, earthquakes and other disasters. The ARRL estimates that tens of thousands of people participate in the field day each year. “This drill happens every last full weekend in June,” Mike Komza, a Rockville Centre resident and member of the Nassau Amateur Radio Club, said.
“What we do is, we set up in a remote place away from power lines, put up our own antennas, and the tents that we set up are connected to a portable generator. From there we make contacts, simulating a wide-area emergency.” Some of the disasters that Komza and the club prepare for include a nuclear explosion that would cut off communication, as well as the eruption of a supervolcano, such as the one in Yellowstone National Park. In these instances, Komza explained, communication would be cut off for hundreds or thousands of miles. Ham radios, on the other hand, have “historically been
proven to get through when other communications fail,” Komza said. “When we do these drills, I think of that big earthquake that happened in Haiti,” Komza added, referring to the catastrophic earthquake in January 2010 in which over 100,000 Haitians died. “A bunch of ham operators took it upon them-
selves to go to Haiti and set up communications with people back in Miami. And all of a sudden, within about three or four hours, communication were set up between Haiti and the U.S.” Komza made it clear that when the Red Cross g ets involved in post-natural disasters like the one in Haiti, he and Continued on page 24