See this story at BrooklynDaily.com.
By Will Bredderman
Brooklyn Daily
The Bay Ridge family who couldn’t use their car since Hurricane Sandy because a stump from a toppled tree blocked their driveway are on the road again — and they have Brooklyn Daily to thank.
Forty-eight hours of the online appearance of our article about a Ridge family’s plight , the city uprooted the stump and patched up the pavement, 80th Street resident Yanina Krubitski said.
“You made it happen,” said Krubitski, who spent the last month ringing 311, the Parks Department, the Department of Transportation, and the Department Design and Construction for help — but was either given the runaround or told that the stump wouldn’t be removed until the spring because her problem wasn’t considered an emergency. Even private contractors told her that they wouldn’t be able to tackle her problem for several weeks because they had a backlog of Hurricane Sandy-related jobs.
“I feel like a ping-pong ball,” Krubitski told us on Dec. 1. “Everyone just bounces me around, and nobody could give me a time frame for when my driveway would get fixed.”
Community Board 10 had been lobbying the city to get the stump removed, but Krubitski’s non-emergency suddenly became a city priority once Brooklyn Daily wrote about her situation.
“You wrote an article, and the next minute city Councilman [Vincent Gentile’s] office called and said they were working on it,” said Krubitski.
State Sen. Marty Golden (R–Bay Ridge) also reached out on Krubitski’s behalf, according to aide John Quaglione.
“I called the Department of Design and Construction, and they told me that they were making it a priority,” Quaglione said.
Krubitski, who needed her car to get to work and transport her daughter — a nationally competing gymnast — to practices at the Aviator Sports and Events Center in Mill Basin, still has to wait for the cement outside her driveway to dry, but is glad she can finally take her Nissan out for a spin.
“I feel great,” she said, gratified by all the support she’s received. “I’m so grateful that it’s fixed.”
Reach reporter Will Bredderman at (718) 260–4507 or e-mail him at wbredderman@cnglocal.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/WillBredderman