(Updated: 12:30 p.m.) It’s all in a day’s work, to hear Cross Sound Ferry First Mate Billy Stanley talk about what happened Friday afternoon in Orient Point.
The Mary Ellen had just docked at the ferry terminal dock and Stanley was in the wheelhouse shutting everything down.
“I heard the Coast Guard call the Orient Point ferry,” recalled Stanley during a break at the Orient dock yesterday afternoon. “I looked over and saw the terminal manager Andy [Binkowski] flying through the field in his pickup over there towards the point,” Stanley said, gesturing toward the very tip of the North Fork jutting out on the distant horizon.
“As soon as I saw that I knew something was up,” said Stanley, 26, of New London. “I looked through the binoculars and saw there was people in the water, probably about a quarter-mile off the beach.”
Volunteer firefighter sees child swept off by current, races to help
Hassan Hamza of West Babylon was out at the point with his girlfriend. Four kids were playing on the rocks. He watched as one of them stepped off the rocks and was immediately swept away by the current.
Hamza said he stripped off his clothes as he ran towards the water, yelling back to his girlfriend to call 911.
“I’ve been diving that point for 30 years,” he said. “When I went into the water I knew there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell I was going to make it back to land.”
Hamza, 64, a volunteer firefighter with the West Babylon Fire Department since 1988, acted on instinct. “The only reason I went out was to keep the kid calm and keep his head above water,” he said in a phone interview today.
“I caught up to him and just tried to keep him calm, floating on my back, keeping him afloat and paddling with the current,” Hamza recalled. “It was kind of like a washing machine out there, with the chop in all directions,” he said. “He was asking me questions like, ‘Are we going to die?’ and I just kept talking with him to keep his spirits up. I told him when he goes back to school he’s going to have to write a report about what he did on his summer vacation and he’d have the best one in the class.”
Hamza estimates he was in the water with the boy, 10-year-old Asher Stern of Brooklyn, for about 10 minutes by the time the boy’s father, Joshua, 43, reached them. “He was overjoyed to see his son,” Hamza said. Stern got on one side of the boy and Hamza stayed on the other, treading water and waiting for the help they prayed would soon arrive.
Back on the the Mary Ellen at the ferry dock, the first mate, an 11-year employee of Cross Sound Ferry, sprang into action. He ran to the captain’s room and told him what was going on and got clearance to take the rescue boat out.
“I ran downstairs and just grabbed the first person I saw, which was the young man in the snack bar,” Stanley said. Kalol Wloblawska, 28, of Orient, works at the Cross Sound Deli snack bar. He was on a lunch break.
The pair ran up to the sundeck to the rescue boat.
“How it works is really a top-notch set-up,” Stanley said. “You can have the rescue boat in the water in 30 seconds. You get in it, there’s two latches you release and you’re on your way.”
It took the men about three minutes to reach the people in the water. By then, Hamza said, he had been in the water with the child for about 20 minutes.
‘They were definitely happy to see us’
“They were tired but in good spirits,” Stanley recalled. “They were definitely happy to see us.”
Two other rescue boats arrived on the scene right after the CSF rescue boat.
“Going through here all the time, you see how fast the current runs there,” Stanley said.
Stanley said the ferry crews do drills to prepare for emergencies and rescues. “We do man-overboard drills on the boat every single week,” he said.
“On the way out there, I wondered if we would get there in time,” he said.
Crews are trained in CPR, too. Fortunately, Stanley didn’t need those skills on Friday afternoon. Stanley and Wloblawska plucked the people from the water and brought them safely to shore.
“They were very appreciative,” he said.
Editor’s note: This story has been amended since publication to include the account of volunteer firefighter Hassan Hamza, who dove into the choppy waters off Orient Point to try to save the child’s life.
