George Santos Flies to Rio to Meet Hamptons Subway Experts

SCENE ON THE SUBWAY

Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor running for president, was seen on the Westhampton Beach platform waiting for a train heading east last Friday morning. Actress Julianne Moore of Montauk was seen ordering a footlong with her husband Bart Freundlich at the subway food kiosk on the Amagansett platform just past noon on Sunday.

Southampton’s Kelly Ripa with shopping bags was aboard a Hamptons Subway train on Monday afternoon stopping at the Hampton Bays station. Oprah Winfrey and Chelsea Handler were talking together on the Sag Harbor platform on Friday. Beth Ostrosky Stern was on the escalator in Southampton coming up the platform just minutes before the problems with that escalator occurred there on Saturday.

GEORGE SANTOS RETURNS EARLY

Our new General Manager George Santos, who had organized a meeting in Rio to discuss subway problems with Elon Musk, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs, returned a week earlier than expected to his penthouse office, which is only slightly smaller than that of Commissioner Bill Aspinall on the top floor of the Hamptons Subway building in Hampton Bays. Santos wore dark glasses so as to partially hide the black eye he sported from an encounter on the second day of the meeting.

“Elon Musk came,” Santos said, “but both Einstein and Jobs sent me telegrams to say that regretfully they were otherwise engaged. As a result, Musk sucker-punched me for wasting his time.”

It wasn’t really a fair fight. Musk has been in training for months to have a showdown fight with rival Mark Zuckerberg. And furthermore, Musk is swift of feet and so left the meeting hurriedly to return to Texas unhindered.

“Had I got him, I’d have shown him a thing or two,” Santos said. In his 20s, he was the welterweight champion of Brazil. And undefeated to boot.

THE ESCALATOR PROBLEM

Sometime after noon last Saturday, some of our riders appeared not down on the platform but up on the street near the stairways to the Southampton station very confused. Most had been reading newspapers or using their iPhones down below on the platform waiting for the train, when suddenly, they found themselves up on the street. They tried to get back down to the platforms so they could take their trains, but the down escalator was running up and very fast. And the other up escalator was also running up.

A few younger people tried running down one of the up escalators, but the crowds of people were so great coming up that the younger people could not do so. It was quite a melee for a while, with nobody able to get back down and more and more people finding themselves sucked on up.

Norma Greenfield, a longtime ticket booth agent down on the platform, said that at first she was completely baffled about what was going on.

“Everybody was going up,” she said. “But nobody was coming down. Pretty soon there was nobody on the platform. I thought, ‘Why did everybody just stop taking the subway?’”

Several motormen, driving subways into Southampton during this period also expressed surprise. People were getting off. Nobody was getting on.

After a while, a huge crowd of very confused people were jamming the streets on Jobs Lane down in Monument Square on the sidewalk. As a result, the police were called.

By the time the police arrived, people were very angry and still more were being spit out of the up escalator. Hamptons Subway Headquarters was informed, and they quickly dispatched workmen to fix the problem. They found a switch reversed on the down escalator, and the speed on “fast.” They fixed it. And then things returned to normal.

SUBWAY TUNNEL DIG TO FOXWOODS SLOWS

This dig, creating the second-longest tunnel in the world (after the “Chunnel” under the English Channel) is moving very cautiously now. Deep under the middle of Long Island Sound, the drillers are finding some sort of thick, black, gooey liquid seeping in from the walls. It is being vacuumed up and analyzed by a lab nearby. We expect to have answers soon.

TWO GAMBLERS, HEADED FOR FOXWOODS, ARRESTED

Tom Wadsworth and Pete Billingswood, both of Southampton, were arrested on the Sag Harbor platform on Friday after making a scene about not being able to get to Foxwoods by subway. They had apparently been told that the subway tunnel under construction from Sag Harbor to that casino had been completed when, in fact, it had not. They were carrying more than $11,000 in cash when arrested. Both paid their bail in cash and headed home the next morning by taxi.

BELLMORE LAB BURNS TO THE GROUND

Update: The Bellmore lab located in Westbury, where samples of the black ooze that has been seeping into the new tunnel to Connecticut have been taken for analysis, burned to the ground very early this morning. It was a troublesome fire. The Westbury Fire Department would get the fire under control, but then it would flare up again. “It seemed like somebody was pouring gasoline on it while we were putting it out,” Fire Chief John Patterson said. “It’s under control again, but it’s now a total loss.”

COMMISSIONER ASPINALL’S MESSAGE

I’d like to comment, while vacationing here in Hawaii, about the claims that the black liquid they are finding in the tunnel we are digging under Long Island Sound is possibly oil. Nothing could be further from the truth. Some of the workmen who have encountered it say it smells more like molasses than anything else.

In any case, the delays caused by this stuff seeping in are troublesome but not serious. So far, in the last 12 days, they are just six days behind schedule. And as fast as the stuff seeps into the tunnels, the faster we pump it back out into the open sea where it simply floats away to points unknown. Not our problem.