Author Topic: And snow it begins.............. (October 29, 2011 Storm)  (Read 8080 times)

Offline BLeafe

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And snow it begins.............. (October 29, 2011 Storm)
« on: October 29, 2011, 01:18:51 PM »
It began somewhere around 11:30am. This was taken at 11:38.

Just think - we're not even halfway through Fall yet.

« Last Edit: November 28, 2011, 11:56:26 AM by Editor »


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Offline Editor

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Re: And snow it begins..............
« Reply #1 on: October 30, 2011, 04:30:04 PM »
http://www.northjersey.com/news/132878628.html

HACKENSACK

In Hackensack around one-third of the town, including Fairmount Elementary School, remained without power at noon. Downed wires and fallen tree limbs obstructed many roads, though none were closed.

Traffic lights at four major intersections were not working: at Anderson Street and River Street, Anderson Street and Main Street, Passaic Street and Main Street, and Passaic Street and Union Street, according to police Capt. Thomas J. Padilla.

Offline BLeafe

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Re: And snow it begins..............
« Reply #2 on: October 30, 2011, 06:10:51 PM »
The light at Passaic and Union came back on this morning. My building just got power about a half-hour ago.

Last night, Main St had power, but River St and State St didn't. Weird.

Let's see some pictures from around town!

I'll try to get some up tomorrow.


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Offline Editor

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Re: And snow it begins..............
« Reply #3 on: October 31, 2011, 08:26:09 PM »

Offline BLeafe

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Re: And snow it begins..............
« Reply #4 on: October 31, 2011, 08:48:03 PM »
SATURDAY

1. (1:25pm) I guess it's not snowing hard enough for the guy on the left to use his umbrella.

2. (1:56pm) This is, by far, the droopiest I have ever seen these trees.

3. (2:21pm)

4. (5:12pm) The pole seems to be leaning more than usual and the sign seems to be providing direction for the wind.

5. (5:37pm) Double heart tracks

6. (7:41pm) A car driving by on Ward St lights up the snow.

7. (11:58pm) Main St has lights, but not River St or State St............how does that happen?


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Offline BLeafe

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Re: And snow it begins..............
« Reply #5 on: October 31, 2011, 08:52:41 PM »
SUNDAY


1. First Presbyterian Church steeple at 7:37am and 8:37am. Winds are north and northwest.

2. (8:37am) Looking south at all the white poles.

3. (10:35am) The flag in Anderson Park

4. (10:38am) Going east, Anderson St was blocked off at Union, though I don't know why. I saw this DPW truck go around the barricade and got a shot of its colorful contents as it approached Main St. Looks like a load of salad.

5. (10:38pm) Main St and State St have lights, but still no power on River St.

It's now a day later and River St STILL has no power. Actually, it's been a nice respite for a change not being blinded by the Nissan dealership's constantly mis-aimed security lights.

I hope everybody's lights but theirs come back on.


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Offline BLeafe

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Re: And snow it begins..............
« Reply #6 on: November 01, 2011, 06:00:13 PM »
1. Chopper 2 flew over town yesterday - lots to see, I guess.

2.  Anderson St between Union and Main has been closed for 3 days. On Sunday, it was because the light was out on Main. Yesterday and today, I'm told it was "maintenance" - flushing out the pipes, I think. All clear now.

3. Anderson Park's trees were pruned today. I imagine we'll see a lot more of that everywhere after the damage caused by Saturday's storm.


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Offline johnny g

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Re: And snow it begins..............
« Reply #7 on: November 07, 2011, 08:46:51 AM »
Great shots! Hurricane, earthquake and October snow...2011 will go down as a weird weather year for sure.

Offline Editor

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Re: And snow it begins.............. (October 29, 2011 Storm)
« Reply #8 on: November 28, 2011, 11:57:30 AM »
Storms left towns with mulch, firewood to spare
Last updated: Monday November 28, 2011, 7:38 AM
BY STEPHANIE AKIN
STAFF WRITER

Several North Jersey towns desperate to get rid of wood debris from Hurricane Irene and the Halloween nor'easter are offering residents free mulch, wood chips and even firewood.


DON SMITH/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Mulch stored in the Maywood pool parking lot. Maywood is among many towns asking residents to help themselves. Municipal officials said their benevolence is inspired by a glut of downed trees that has made it difficult and expensive to dispose of the wood.

"The market for mulch is nonexistent right now. People are being paid money to take it away," Hackensack City Manager Stephen Lo Iacono said. "We thought, we're not being paid any money anyway, why not give the benefit to our residents?"

Teaneck has mounds of wood chips available at the township garden club and DPW buildings. Maywood has been piling wood chips and free firewood in its swimming pool parking lot since the Halloween storm. And Hackensack just hired a contractor with a heavy-duty machine to convert tree trunks into several grades of garden mulch that residents will be able to haul away through the spring.

"I think it's a great idea," said Passaic County Agricultural Assistant Elaine Fogerty. "It's benevolent. It's a good way to reuse a natural resource, and it actually cuts down on the work the township has to do."

Many municipalities offer free wood chips when they do annual tree pruning in spring, Fogerty said. But it is generally harder to find this time of year, when gardeners use it to insulate plantings from winter freezes.

Giveaway's different

This giveaway is also different in terms of the quantity and quality of material available, several municipal officials said.

"In the spring, typically, we have light twigs. We have a chipper and we chip them up, and anything big we recycle," Lo Iacono said. "But we're not talking about the kind of volume we have now. This is incredible. I've never, ever seen anything like this before."

Hackensack had so many downed trees in the October storm that city officials had to store them in two city parks, both of which are now full of branches, Lo Iacono said.

Typically the city hauls downed trees in bins to a private recycling company, but at the $738-per-container cost, the city would have to pay close to $40,000 to get rid of all the trees, Lo Iacono said.

So the city arranged to rent the same kind of heavy-duty mulching machine, called a tub grinder, used by professional garden suppliers. The company has estimated that it will cost about $24,000 for the four-day job, and the city will save about $5,000 in spring, the amount of money it usually spends on mulch for city parks and plantings, Lo Iacono said.

So many municipalities statewide had the same idea that the city will have to wait two weeks before the equipment is available, Lo Iacono said.

Maywood also hired a company with an industrial chipper to grind down the hundreds of branches that lined the borough's 21 miles of streets. Any large trunks were chopped into firewood for residents to take, as the borough does every time its DPW workers take down a tree, Borough Manager Thomas Richards said.

Residents appreciate the gesture, he said.

"People who have wood-burning stoves, boy do they know about it," Richards said.

While the borough plans to remove the mulch piles this week, it still has at least 39 trees to chop down, so more wood and mulch will be available soon, Richards said.

Officials in other towns said they have so much wood-chip material, they're having trouble giving it away.

"I will say the township has an abundance of wood chips," said Dean Kazinci, Teaneck's acting township manager. "Residents can take as much as they want."

Kazinci said residents would eventually take care of the two large piles of chips that accumulated after Irene and the Halloween storm.

Insufficient demand

Officials in other municipalities said they weren't sure there would be enough demand for all the wood.

Kevin Kerrigan, foreman of the New Milford Department of Public Works, said town officials are still taking estimates from companies that could grind up the large pile of branches stockpiled at the municipal swim club. But residents' interest in taking the excess mulch will probably play little role in the decision, he said.

"When you have ten truckloads [of wood chips] and someone comes with a wheelbarrow, it just doesn't make that much of a difference," he said.

E-mail: akin@northjersey.com

Offline Editor

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Re: And snow it begins.............. (October 29, 2011 Storm)
« Reply #9 on: January 29, 2012, 10:52:32 PM »
October storm still haunts North Jersey towns
Last updated: Sunday January 29, 2012, 10:01 AM
BY JOHN A. GAVIN
STAFF WRITER
The Record

Three months after October’s rare snowstorm, a handful of North Jersey towns are still sorting through a myriad of unanticipated costs and expenses encountered by the unexpected wintry blast that crippled roadways with downed tree limbs and left thousands of residents without power.

After adding up the hours of overtime needed to pay public works employees who removed the debris and police who directed traffic, some towns still are confronting the costs of removing huge piles of tree branches, stumps and brushwood weighted down during the snowstorm.

In Wayne, officials recently voted to pay a tree removal company $18,000 to chip up and cart away a 20-foot-tall, 100-by-100-foot-wide pile of wood that accumulated after the storm, rather than taking its public works employees away from their regular duties to do the work.

"We just don’t physically have the manpower or the equipment to chip so much at one time," Mayor Christopher Vergano said, pointing out that the town has only two chippers and that employees had worked full-time since the storm to clear the debris.

Like Hasbrouck Heights, Bogota and Maywood, Wayne’s decision to hire a private contractor was about dollars and cents, a choice made because reimbursements paid by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for employee overtime only cover the time incurred during the storm, officials said.

With emergency appropriations in municipal budgets depleted because of three previous major storms during the year, many were already strapped for cash.

"We had to declare an emergency" for state funding, said Jean M. Pelligra, Maywood’s acting administrator, about costs incurred during the storm.

Maywood recently paid $4,600 for the removal of 667 cubic yards of debris, she said.

Hasbrouck Heights earlier this month chose to pay a contractor $17,500 to remove a huge pile of tree branches and limbs that had accumulated at its Department of Public Works site, concluding that paying its own employees to do the same job would be more costly.

"We didn’t have an ability to chip a pile that big," said Michael Kronyak, the borough administrator, who calculated that with 3,640 cubic yards of debris at $12 per cubic yard, it would have cost $43,680 to get the job done with its own equipment.

Some weathered storm

Not all towns, however, are strapped for equipment.

In West Milford, which spans 86 square miles and has plentiful woodland, the township is outfitted with 15 chain saws and numerous grinders and loaders to handle massive tree falls.

Shortly after more than 200 trees tumbled down on roads and power lines, work crews were on the scene, officials said.

"It was a combination … cut them up quick and load onto loaders," said Jerry Storms, the public works superintendent, who said the town has already put in a claim of $70,280 for reimbursement from FEMA.

With tight budgets and uncertainty about winter storms in the months ahead, many towns are in line to receive reimbursement from the October storm.

Bergenfield has filed $114,000 in claims, said Edward Kneisler, the public works superintendent.

In Bogota, where emergency workers were "pretty much prepared for the storm," the borough has submitted a $6,000 claim, Councilman Tito Jackson said.

Both will use private vendors to remove standing debris, officials said.

Hackensack, which found itself strapped for cash during the storm, will not transport the limbs but use them to save on mulch.

With a $6,000 annual expense to purchase mulch to use in its parks and playgrounds, the city rented a large tub grinder that churns wood debris into small chips.

"It was a huge piece of equipment that was quite expensive," said Stephen Lo Iacono, the city manager. "It ended up being more cost-effective to do that rather than transport containers full of these limbs. … We saved ourselves money by going through an expense, yet saving on transportation costs and saving [on] the mulch that the city will be able to use."

Email: gavin@northjersey.com

 

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