Overnight Coney Island Boardwalk Reconstruction Has Locals Losing Sleep
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- The race to rebuild after Hurricane Sandy is creating some unintended victims.
Neighbors along the beach in Coney Island said it's a deafening sound -- pile-driving on the beach through the overnight hours, courtesy of the city Parks Department.
"It's so loud, we haven't slept. My husband has earplugs in and he can't sleep," Sandy Lichtenstein told CBS 2's Derricke Dennis on Thursday night.
Locals said heavy machinery is heard pounding and vibrating over and over again.
"It's terrible, it really is a terrible thing," Lichtenstein said.
"All night long, from eight o'clock 'till seven in the morning," Felix Sikar added.
Sikar lives on the 17th floor of a building overlooking the beach and the all-night construction. He said he can hear it and feel it, adding the noise and the light have affected his daughter's homework.
"It's that bright, I see it from the sides. If my shades are up, I see it," Sikar's daughter said.
Even more outrageous for neighbors is the fact that all the work and noise is a byproduct of the city building bathrooms and lifeguard stations in a rush for summer.
When asked if the construction had to take place 24 hours a day, Liam Kavanaugh, a spokesman for the city Parks Department, said, "We're doing a tremendous amount of work in a very short period of time."
Kavanaugh said the work is part recovery from the destruction Coney Island suffered during Hurricane Sandy and the building of bathrooms and lifeguard stands.
"And these are all things that you have to have in order to have a successful season. You can't have a beach without lifeguards; people on the beach, millions of people on the beach, they need a restroom," Kavanaugh said.
"Bathrooms are not that important. I mean, really, there's other bathrooms. Bathrooms are not that important. There's the ocean," Julie Sikar said.
The Parks Department said the pile driving should end no later than next Saturday.
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