3 Sucked Into NY Cesspool

HUNTINGTON, N.Y. — A 71-year-old man who went outside in the rain to pick up the Sunday newspaper plunged into a cesspool in his front yard, and his son and neighbor were sucked in when they tried to rescue him.

Firefighters said they helped pull out the victims — covered in raw sewage but not badly hurt. Andrew Palladino said the soggy ground, which had been soaked by two days of rain, gave way outside his Long Island home.

I walked across the lawn, and all of a sudden I disappeared," he told cable television station News 12 Long Island.

He yelled for his wife, Louise, to help him, and she threw a rope and called their son, Dan, who lives with them.

"Oh, my God," the wife said. "A little more, he's sinking. He's a goner!"

The son said the scene "was like a horror picture."

It's not the first time a cesspool — a pit that collects waste from toilets and sinks — has swallowed someone in the area. In 2001, a Huntington man practicing archery in the backyard with his two children died when his cesspool caved in and consumed him. And in 1998, a Huntington Station man was rescued after he fell 65 feet into one.

Yuck!

When I first saw the words New York, newspaper and cesspool, I thought this was going to be a story about the NY Times. Unfortunately, although NY Times subscriptions are declining heavily, plenty of New Yorkers still get sucked into that cesspool on a daily basis.