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Life and death in Long Island cesspoolsPosted 04.25.2006 by Dave
The newspaper is good for learning the facts. But sometimes the facts aren't good enough to truly understand the story. In the case of a Long Island man who nearly died in a cesspool collapse, a bit of creative nonfiction is in order to understand what it's like to be clutched in the devil's stinking fist -- and to live to tell about it.
Picture this: on a rainy Sunday morning, 71-year-old Andrew Palladino walks out of his front door to get his newspaper. This is his morning routine: he walks down the sidewalk, picks up his paper, walks up the sidewalk, kisses a statue of the Virgin Mary perched by his front door, and settles down to read the local rag. On this morning, though, the rain is driving and the thunder is pounding, and the shortest distance between the newspaper and his front door is across the waterlogged lawn. He takes the shortcut and the earth drops out from under him. Suddenly his legs are heavy. His muscles are useless. He stumbles and pitches forward as the ground around him turns into liquid shit. And like brown water swirling down a debauched bowl, the fetid mud is descending into hell -- and it is taking him with it. Lifting his head from the shit, mud and god-knows-what splattered across his face, Palladino screams. The Virgin Mary silently looks on. His wife bursts out of the house, followed by his son. Forty-seven-year-old Daniel Palladino dives into the muck, grabbing his father's hands. Their eyes meet -- a father, his face smeared and his nose choked with rancid Palladino shit that has collected for years in the cesspool under the lawn; and a son, desperate to rescue his father from Dante's very vision of hell: fecal matter that strangles you, that consumes you, that pours into your mouth and pounds in your ears as it pulls you down into the further horrors below. The same thing happened to Michael LoBaso. Five years before, in the very same town -- one minute he was standing on his lawn with his children; eighteen hours later, eighteen feet below the surface, rescuers finally recovered his body. There's nothing funny about this. As Palladino and Pallidino locked hands, they knew this was life or death. You could say it's karma for sending their poop and their pee and 1.6 gallons of water every time they flushed into a pit buried under their front lawn, but what responsibility do Palladinos have to understand sewage treatment and the benefits of septic tanks? The Suffolk County government says cesspools are okay; why should the innocent suffer because an ignorant government embraces the technology of the eighteenth century? In this battle between the hand of hell versus the will of the living -- or, if you want to be less dramatic, of people versus poop hole -- the good guys won. Even as the cesspool continued to collapse, neighbors rushed over to stabilize the men, and firefighters arrived to pull them out. This story ends with smiling faces and laughing newscasters; but we must remember Michael LoBaso, who was not so lucky. Life rarely lives up to the horrors we see in the movies; but for these two men, horror became real in their struggle for their lives.
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