Anyone see this?
Fire Marshal told them they had 24 hours to evacuate everything from the building: horses, equipment, the grooms’ apartments. Allegedly the sprinkler system was not working and the property owners had been receiving notice to fix it since October. The interviewees said they had no idea.
I can’t even imagine the nightmare that is for everyone!
Holy cow, that’s awful. I wonder what the owner’s story is here - those systems are super expensive to repair and maintain, I wonder if there was a cash flow issue? No excuses though, if it needed to be repaired then it needed to be repaired.
That said, we’ve been waiting on a pull station at my work for 2 months, there are huge supply chain issues with this equipment as well.
I hope someone offered up their home as a temporary stay for the grooms and their families. It’s the least they could do for the thankless work barn staff does day in and day out.
I also worry more about the grooms. It is chaotic to find horses housing on short notice; it is MUCH harder to move humans.
That is interesting. I wonder if the equestrian center is under some atypical building codes?
I can’t say that I’ve ever been in a barn with a sprinkler system, fire alarm system and carbon monoxide detectors.
It sounds like they have the grooms living in in-barn apartments. That would change the code it falls under.
I wonder how quickly this will be resolved. Will they be able to return in a few days if it is promptly fixed? Will it take a month? Longer?
With it being such a densely populated area, I wonder if they have more stringent building and fire codes.
We’ve had a few posters from Nassau county over the years and they seem to deal with a lot of regulation.
I took a quick peek at their website out of curiosity. I wonder if the current trainers in place are leasing the property, in which case, the property owners would be responsible for fixing code violations and possibly are not as interested/invested in getting the property up to code in the timeframe given.
Sounded like the current trainers are leasing. I suspect the owners will now put the property up for sale and that will be the end of the horse business there.
I know nothing about the place or the area, just my suspicion from reading the article.
I think everyone is being evicted because of the apartments above the barn. That’s probably a huge game changer especially if none of the alarms or sprinkler systems work. Per the news clip, the fire marshall said they have issued many notices/warnings to get the equipment fixed, From the outside it looked like a pretty nice barn. Wonder if the horse owners realized the fire systems weren’t functioning? talk about a false sense of security.
I use to have horses there over a decade ago, and I have friends there who were evicted yesterday. The owner is a sleazy guy who ignored all the citations. He bought the property 7 ish years ago after the former owner group (which were horsemen) It has become so terribly rundown.
When I was growing up it was a tb farm owned by the Entemanns (as in the big baked goods company). Then Maureen Brennan had it as a premier Jumper barn and built the indoor. Then it was sold to a consortium of men who fox hunted (ant least the one who ran it) and had standard Breds (they didn’t live there) but it was a full service boarding facility. As in hand you your horse and take it from you full service. It was such a lovely place still in 2010. Had all the Gold Coast charm. The main barn was the old stables with room for carriages etc. It was a courtyard and just had so much character.
Trainers did not lease the facility. Some paid for dry stalls others’ customers were on full service paid to the owner/management.
It is a very sad event for LI which i say “is where horsemanship goes to die.” Growing up there it was very horsey with lots of property that are mostly McMansions now.
Thanks for sharing your first hand experience. But what a sad tale, though not terribly uncommon.
I hope the place doesn’t become more McMansions.
I had no idea the Entenmann’s were once in horses! I was just discussing what a fixture those baked goods were in the tristate area.
I wonder if the barn is heated? I assume the groom’s apartments have a heating source. (Hence the need for fire prevention technology.)
The barn wasn’t heated but the lounge, office and apartments have heat.
I assumed the sprinkler piping in the barn itself is a dry pipe system.
As a boarder, been evicted twice. Once had to go to the fairgounds to claim horse and tack as that property and everything in or on it was siezed and padlocked. Trainers leasing stalls with a lawyer clients got together and quickly got an injunction to allow removal of all client horses and equipment to a neutral site where owners could ID and reclaim. We had no idea, property owner turned out to be a swindler, tax cheat and ran lord knows what other fraud schemes.
Other time was drama free and trainer always had a Plan B in mind as she never trusted the property owner…who suddenly sold the place right out from under her. The new owners evicted us when they closed and took possession of the property. Trainer spent all night hauling everybody to Plan B barn, called us in the AM to advise horses were in new location.
Imagine this LI eviction was no accident but a calculated attempt to get rid of the horses and maximize the land worth to developers. Not fixing anything is a pretty common way for sleazy landlords to rid themselves of tenants, leased barn space is no different with property values so high.
I would assume the opposite. There are many for facilities for people in that area than horses.
I’m not familiar with Long Island, so I will certainly defer to anyone with more experience on the demographics. And certainly it is no easy feat to find a place to move multiple horses within 24 hours. But, in a pinch, layover facilities exist, you put the tack trunk and the saddles in the trailer or take them home and lock them up, push comes to shove horses can live in a field for a couple of days. If you are a person, possibly with a family, it is more complicated to arrange a storage locker and move all your stuff in 24 hours, much less sign a lease and move in… particularly if you were also involved in the logistics to move all the horses.
I hope everyone finds a new home they are happy in.
Long Island is a very urban area so finding a field to stash a horse in or a layover facility is not necessarily easy nor cheap.
You can much more easily and cheaply get a storage facility ($40/month in that area) and a cheap motel room ($40/night in that area).
Basic board in that area is about $1200/month (from the one website of the several I visited that would give rates on the site) so daily that is $40/day, assuming that is the daily rate and you can find a place that will do daily rate. I don’t even know of layover facilities in my area but I can find boarding for about $300/month if I just want a field, but just a field is not really an option in Long Island due to how urban of an area it is.
I have never lived in the area but have transported horses to that area and grass and fields are rare. Almost all horses have stalls, hay year round and go out in dirt paddocks. The few horses that do not have been lesson horses and they live in a dirt paddock with a run in.
Most of the towns here in Maine have combinantion of call firefighters and volunteers with a few full-time professionals. The BO where we boarded for years had the fire dept in every year or two for an inspection. They could understand and review the barn layout and what was involved in evacuating horses, starting with halters hung at every stall door, They also suggested changes to the location of fire extinguishers and better placement of smoke alarms near hay storage.
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