East Hampton Village beach permit sales day moved to January 29

In Montauk all public school classes move to remote learning today otherwise most east end school districts have implemented a two hour delayed start.

Meanwhile, Nicholas Grasso reports in NEWSDAY that tomorrow marks 40 years since the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff, killing high school teacher Christa McAuliffe and the six astronauts aboard. McAuliffe had been selected for a trip on the Challenger from a pool of more than 11,000 teachers who had applied for NASA's inaugural Teacher in Space Project. Grade school students on Long Island and nationwide took special interest in the flight, since McAuliffe was planning to give lessons from space…and witnessed the explosion as it happened.

While the makeup of the crew appeared extraordinary, NASA missions themselves felt quite ordinary by the mid '80s. With the Space Shuttle program's record of success, it seemed safe to welcome aboard McAuliffe, selected from the more than 11,000 teachers who vied for her seat.

"The shuttle was being billed as a routine then," Joshua Stoff, the curator of the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, told Newsday. "They were talking about sending kids into space." While children looked up to the astronauts aboard the Challenger, many Long Islanders felt proud of the machine itself, having built several of its essential components, according to Stoff. Long Island’s deep aviation history — from airfields developed after the turn of the century, to the manufacturing of World War II bombers and even the creation of the lunar module that landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon — thrived inside Fairchild Republic and Grumman manufacturing facilities in Farmingdale and Bethpage, according to Stoff.

But NASA had never launched a space shuttle with the temperature as cold as it was at liftoff on Jan. 28, 1986 — 36 degrees, about 15 degrees colder than any previous launch, according to the official commission report. Investigators determined the bitter cold weakened the O-ring seals in the ship's right solid rocket booster, causing the shuttle to rupture. The disaster grounded the Space Shuttle program for more than 2½ years.

"It was almost like the Titanic, ‘the ship is unsinkable, full speed ahead’ kind of thing," Stoff said. "[NASA was] just complacent and didn’t pay attention to a lot of engineers who said it was not safe to launch that day."

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On Sunday afternoon as a foot of snow was accumulating across the south fork two houses caught fire on Noyac Avenue in the Pine Neck neighborhood of Noyac knocking out power for 28 houses in the vicinity amid the ongoing winter storm.

Cailin Riley reports on 27east.com that the fire damaged a pole in the area, per PSEG spokesperson Elizabeth Flagler; PSEG crews had to deenergize the area to make it safe for the firefighters to enter and crews to begin repairs. The pole will be replaced, and PSEG workers were on site attempting to complete repairs as quickly as possible. Power was fully restored to the area by 2:41 a.m. on Sunday, January 26.

The Sag Harbor Volunteer Fire Department was called to the fire at 187 Noyac Avenue at 3:13 p.m., where a fire had started in the garage of one of the cottages clustered in that area. No one was injured, but several residents who were home at the time were displaced, at the peak of the winter storm that had descended on the area and dropped nearly 12 inches of snow. The Red Cross was involved in the effort to help those displaced residents, Sag Harbor Fire Chief Mike Guyer said.

The fire occurred in a cluster of cottages situated on a long driveway off Noyac Avenue that leads down to the bay.

The Sag Harbor Fire Department called in the RIT team from East Hampton and also requested mutual aid from the North Sea Fire Department, which sent an engine. The Bridgehampton Fire Department headed to the Sag Harbor firehouse to be on...