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Irving Like, 93, Dies; Foe of Power Plant and Friend of Fire Island

Irving Like at a hearing in Jamesport, N.Y., in 1979. He played a leading role in the campaign to shutter the Shoreham nuclear power plant on Long Island.Credit...Bob Luckey/Newsday

Irving Like, an environmental lawyer whose unflinching crusade over a quarter century permanently shuttered the Shoreham nuclear power plant on Long Island, died on Oct. 3 at a hospital in West Islip, N.Y. He was 93.

His daughter, Sharon Like, said the cause was cardiac arrest.

Mr. Like, who was still practicing full time when he died, also helped preserve the Fire Island seashore; headed a lawyers’ group that won a $180 million settlement from chemical companies for Vietnam War veterans injured by the defoliant Agent Orange; and handled Suffolk County’s legal challenges to offshore oil drilling along the Long Island coast.

For 25 years, Mr. Like besieged the Long Island Lighting Company with legal challenges to its 820-megawatt Shoreham plant, 60 miles east of New York City, which ultimately cost some $6 billion, even though it never fully opened. Appealing to federal and state regulators, he raised issues of safety, construction techniques, electric rates, alternative power sources and the hurdles involved in evacuation from an island that dead-ends in eastern Suffolk.

To other adversaries, this might have seemed like a quixotic quest intended to delay the inevitable, but Mr. Like took it on as a professional and personal mission. As a result of local resistance, Shoreham was never permitted to operate at full power. And in 1992, Gov. Mario M. Cuomo pressed a button that triggered an underwater torch that severed a cooling system, permanently disabling the plant as the first step in a two-year decommissioning.

Starting in the mid-1960s, when he represented the Lloyd Harbor Study Group, a coalition of residents against the proposed plant, Mr. Like was the first lawyer to object to a project that would polarize Long Island politics for a generation, inflate the cost of electricity, scuttle plans for two other East End nuclear generators, in Jamesport, and eventually — after the accidents at Chernobyl in Ukraine and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania — doom Lilco and replace it with the Long Island Power Authority, a public entity.

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Mr. Like in 1978. He had originally considered pursuing a career as a pianist but was persuaded by a teacher to become a lawyer instead.Credit...Bob Luckey/Newsday

Mr. Like first plunged into environmental politics in 1962, for personal reasons, as a homeowner in Dunewood, on Fire Island. He and his brother-in-law, Maurice Barbash, a developer, successfully resisted plans by Robert Moses, who was then president of the Long Island State Park Commission, to build a highway across the barrier beach.

Mr. Like helped lobby for the establishment of the 20,000-acre Fire Island National Seashore, protected by the National Park Service. At his death, he was seeking to have it designated a World Heritage site.

Irving Like was born on Nov. 20, 1924, in Brooklyn to Esther (Brightman) and Benjamin Like, Jewish immigrants from Russia, and grew up in the Bronx. His father was a dress manufacturer, his mother a homemaker.

He graduated from James Monroe High School, in the Soundview section, and earned a bachelor’s degree from City College of New York. He trained in the Army as a Russian interpreter during World War II.

Earlier, Mr. Like studied under Manfred Malkin, a Russian-born concert pianist, and seriously considered pursuing a career as a pianist himself. But, given the rigors of the Depression, he was persuaded by a teacher to become a lawyer instead. He graduated from Columbia University Law School.

He married Margalit Delman and moved to Long Island in the early 1950s. His wife died this year. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by two sons, Robert and Steven Like; two grandchildren; and a sister, Lillian Barbash.

Mr. Like was admitted to the bar in 1950. As a lawyer, his son Robert recalled in a eulogy, he described himself as “a solution waiting for a problem.”

His solutions were innovative and aggressive; as early as 1971, he urged antinuclear environmentalists to turn atomic power plant licensing hearings into “multimedia confrontations” to pressure a utility company “to abandon its plans or at least improve them.”

His critics argued that his greatest accomplishments were delaying progress and raising costs. June Bruce, a Lilco spokeswoman, described him in 1977 as “more concerned with making a hearing a happening than an actual case which he expects to win.”

Mr. Like acknowledged that he was methodical. But, he told The New York Times that year: “The purpose is not delay per se, although delay can result. The object is to find out the facts.”

He was named to the original board of the Long Island Power Authority in 1987, but quit over policy disagreements.

Mr. Like probably did not think, when he first challenged the Shoreham plant in the 1960s, that the fight would take a quarter century — or that he would win. But that didn’t matter to him, as he suggested when he was asked not long ago whether, given the contemporary climate, getting the Fire Island seashore declared a World Heritage Site was a realistic goal.

“Some battles,” he was quoted as replying, “are worth the losing fight.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: Irving Like, 93, Lawyer Whose Crusade Closed Long Island Nuclear Plant, Dies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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