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By DAVID J. RALIS and MELISSA DONOVAN; Times Leader Staff
Writers
Thursday, June 04, 1998     Page: 4A

WILKES-BARRE- City and Luzerne County officials offered their assistance
Wednesday to tornado ravaged Wyoming County.
   
Nearly 35 public employees, at least 15 vehicles and lots of equipment will
head there today to help with the cleanup and to provide counseling to victims
of Tuesday’s powerful storm.
    The city of Wilkes-Barre plans to send 27 Parks and Public Works employees
to Lake Carey today and Friday, Mayor Tom McGroarty said in a press release.
   
McGroarty said he met Wednesday with Wyoming County Commissioner Bill Reed,
a former Wilkes-Barre councilman, to discuss the type of help needed.
   
The city workers are scheduled to leave for Lake Carey at 6 a.m. with 10
dump trucks, several other trucks, a wood chipper, a backhoe, 10 chain saws
and a pole saw.
   
“The residents of Wilkes-Barre know what it is like to lose everything in a
natural disaster and we were grateful for any help we received in our time of
need,” McGroarty said, referring to the 1972 flood.
   
County Commissioner Tom Makowski said Luzerne County also wants to help
“our neighbors to the north.”
   
Makowski and fellow Commissioners Frank Crossin and Joseph “Red” Jones sent
a letter offering the Wyoming County commissioners the assistance of Luzerne
County’s EMA and Human Services Department.
   
As of Wednesday afternoon, Human Services Executive Director Joe
Loftus-Vergari said the county:
   
Sent eight employees from the Mental Health/Mental Retardation program and
the Bureau for the Aging to provide needs assessment for storm victims and
“24-hour crisis coverage.” Both agencies are jointly operated with Wyoming
County.
   
In addition, a dozen people were sent from private counseling services with
county contracts.
   
Provided four vans to take people to a crisis center established in
Tunkhannock High School and anywhere else they need to go.
   
Offered to place elderly Wyoming County residents left temporarily homeless
in the Valley Crest nursing home.
   
For now, though, help from the county EMA isn’t needed, said Acting EMA
Director Albert Bardar.
   
It marks nearly the first breather Bardar, the agency’s former deputy
director, has received since the commissioners made him the troubled agency’s
temporary boss.
   
Bardar replaced EMA Director Jim Siracuse, who was arrested May 15 along
with Emergency Management Specialist John Salvo and Administrative Assistant
Mark Pavilitz. The three face felony charges for feeding $48,000 worth of
agency contracts last year to their own company, PSS Technologies.
   
Siracuse, Salvo and Pavilitiz were suspended from their jobs without pay
pending the outcome of the case.
   
Since then, the four-person agency has responded to 14 incidents, ranging
from a fuel truck spill to the removal of pipe-bomb components from a
Wilkes-Barre building. Bardar credited a core of 20 volunteers with helping
the agency respond to those crises.
   
“We really dodged the bullet,” Bardar said of Tuesday’s killer storm. “We
were fully manned and ready to go. But we wound up in a wedge between the
storms.”
   
Only the northern and southern tips of the county