GCP FD volunteers deliver holiday meals

Richard Tedesco

Members of the Garden City Park Fire Department spent the days leading up to this past Christmas on a special mission – to bring to food to residents of three South Shore communities still recovering from Hurricane Sandy.

“We started cooking Friday at 2 o’clock and we didn’t stop until Sunday at 4 o’clock,” said Rob Mirabile, assistant chief of the Garden City Park Fire Department. “We’d never done anything like this. It was great to see everybody get together.”

The firefighters were answering the call of the Nassau County Office of Emergency Management and with Island Harvest Food Bank providing the food, the Garden City Park department prepared 1,200 meals.  

The volunteer chefs began cooking 36 turkeys, 10 hams, 300 pounds of potatoes, and 150 cans of vegetables in their two firehouses on Friday afternoon and delivered the food to the Island Park, Oceanside and Wantagh firehouses on Sunday night, on the eve of Christmas Eve.

More than more than 30 members – about 25 percent of the department’s membership – helped to cook and package the food, Mirabile said. 

The turkeys were delivered frozen, so in the first phase of the food preparation there full of water and thawing turkeys were set up throughout both firehouses. 

Mirabile and fellow Assistant Chief Tim Nacewicz put the plan together in response to a request from Nassau County Office of Emergency Management on Dec. 19.  

“It just seemed like the right thing to do” Nacewicz said.

Mirable said some members went particularly beyond the call of duty.

An example, he said, was former chief Bob Magas, who cooked 24 turkeys by himself.

The turkeys had to carved after they were cooked so, Mirabile said, “a lot of guys got a lesson in carving turkeys.”

“It was a lot to work. But it was well worth the effort we put in,” he said.

Mirabile said an emotional Garden City Park Fire Department Chief William Rudnick, who’s completing his term as chief of the department, said, “It’s a great way to go out, seeing our volunteers join together to perform such a generous task, it makes me very proud to have served them as chief.”

The arrival of the prepared meals drew expressions of gratitude from people in all three communities, according to Mirabile, who said one man in Wantagh cried at the sight of the food. The Garden City Park volunteers also brought candy canes and toys to the firehouses in the three towns.

“We brought a couple of fire trucks and Santa on a sleigh that we had built,” he said. “The neighborhood kids could see Santa and get toys.”

The Garden City Park volunteers had already lent assistance to South Shore fire departments after the storm, covering Long Beach, Freeport and Lido on a few occasions, Mirabile said. He said the Long Beach department  shipped one of its ambulances up to Garden City Park Fire Department, which repaired mechanical damage, sanitized them and replaced their fluids over four days.

“It kind of exemplified what the Nassau County fire service is like. Firemen in every department do it because they want to help people,” Mirabile said.

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