Hurricane Sandy Highland Park in Review

Hurricane Sandy and power outages have come and gone. I have photos to share, so you are stuck with yet another Sandy post. And I’m sure across the states of New York and New Jersey plenty of people have individual stories to tell. One of the people who was out of power for a lot longer than we were was Laura – you can read her reaction to the storm and power outage on her post. Maybe I should do a future post about how people helped people during the storm period.

If you find municipal politics interesting, watch last night’s borough council meeting:

The borough council meeting video is long, but Mayor Gary Minkoff provides a good review of the storm and the aftermath of the storm. It’s a good way to learn about Hurricane Sandy Highland Park version. Some of my favorite people appear in the video (Allan Williams of the Environmental Commission and Ruth Bickhardt).

In general, you can watch Highland Park meetings online and get Nixle updates on Highland Park.

Here is the downed tree on North Seventh covered in snow from the nor’easter. Parts of the tree still remain in the street right now – there were some Highland Park Department of Works worker cutting it up further today. You can see the original tree on this pre-Sandy storm post as well as the after the storm view. As it didn’t damage a house or wires (thankfully), it has taken a bit longer for it to be removed.

The house on Abbott finally got attention last week, but unfortunately, it was after the nor’easter, so more damage than the tree falling was done to the house. We were very happy to see these workers who came all the way from Florida. They told us they had never seen snow fall from the sky before.

See all those trucks on North Sixth?

There were at least six big trucks.

Here they are finally lifting that big old tree off the house.

I feel for the owners – it is a pretty damaged house. There’s more damage on the inside that you can’t see in this photo (because of the live wires on the fallen tree, they couldn’t apply tarps to protect the house from the nor’easter). But they do have insurance, and FEMA people were in our neighborhood assessing the damage.

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In summary, is this a catastrophe? Not to us in Highland Park – it was a hardship to those who went without power the longest, and it will continue to be hard for those with damaged homes. As Ruth Bickhardt says in the video, she never remembers anything like this (and she’s been around for a long time). But for those elsewhere who completely lost their homes, the nightmare will continue. And then there are those who lost their lives. Meanwhile, my friends and relatives in Israel are posting about missiles falling down in the southern part of Israel. A cartoon by Shay Charka that sums up the relationship between the hurricane and missiles (you can learn a lot more by reading the blog Daled Amos):