2023-05-26 03:28:13
NEW YORK — Intending to get to or from Staten Island on Thursday night? Prepare to wait.
Service on the Staten Island Ferry was limited to an hourly schedule after a sick call list left the ships without staff, according to authorities. The service outage began around 1 p.m. and was expected to last into the evening, the New York City Department of Transportation said.
NYC Ferry said it would offer a free overnight ferry service through Friday morning between Pier 11 in Manhattan and the St. George Ferry landing on Staten Island.
Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella said the outage is “unacceptable and will needlessly harm thousands of people.”
“By DOT’s own numbers, the twenty-minute rush hour service disruption may result in as many as 2,228 riders joining the approximately 600 riders in top-of-the-hour service, resulting in the staggering figure of 2828 passengers in a single trip”. Fosella said.
The DOT said the “vast majority” of the ferry’s personnel (captains, assistant captains and mates) scheduled for Thursday afternoon called in sick (the ship’s full crew includes a captain, assistant captain and three mates). The department added that they were looking at alternative travel options between Staten Island and Manhattan.
A city official said there were only enough staff to run the shuttles on an hourly service after everyone else called. Off-duty workers eligible for overtime did not answer or return DOT calls.
It wasn’t immediately clear what caused the spike in sick leave calls from workers, though Fossella told NBC New York that a “long-term labor dispute” between the city and workers that “has been going on for years” was at the center. center of it.
“All parties must return to the negotiating table immediately to resolve this once and for all. If this disruption can happen today, it can happen next week and then the week after,” he said in a statement. “Staten Island travelers are once again suffering from problems over which they have neither created nor control.”
Fossella said the previous shutdowns and outages have occurred during evening hours, but doing one during the evening rush hour over a holiday weekend and Fleet Week creates much bigger headaches. Fossella added that “there is no indication how long this will last.”
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