The Incident, Staten Island Style

In Staten Island, where temperatures reached 104 degrees yesterday, a group of toughs took out their frustrations on the local populace:

Tempers boiled over yesterday along with the mercury — it hit 104 degrees in the borough on the third day of summer’s first heat wave — as a rowdy crowd pushed a peace officer into a public pool in Mariners Harbor and then attacked a baseball player on a field nearby.

The trouble started at about 5:30 p.m., as about 50 young people descended on the Grandview Playground mini-pool, located at Grandview Avenue and Continental Place, not far from the Mariners Harbor Houses. The youths were in street clothes and were too old for the mini-pool, said Warner Johnston, a Parks Department spokesman.

A Parks Enforcement Patrol officer confronted the rambunctious bunch, only to find herself being pushed into the pool, police said.

Apart from getting wet, the officer was uninjured, Johnston noted.

About 15 minutes later, the same group disrupted a men’s sandlot baseball game between the Tigers and Danny Boy’s Tavern that was getting under way on a field nearby.

The right fielder was doused with a pot full of water thrown by a teen-ager, who then hit the player with the empty pot, according to witnesses. The player was banged up but didn’t go to a hospital, they said.

The game was promptly canceled.

A massive water fight then ensued at the intersection of Continental Place and Brabant Avenue, with folks filling buckets, pots, pans and their hands from an illegally opened fire hydrant.

Cops quickly swarmed the area to disperse the group and firefighters were called in to shut off the hydrant.