Hurricane Sandy continues her wrath, even after her winds are long gone. Many in our area suffer power outages: Highland Park, New Brunswick, Piscataway, East Brunswick. Power was restored to some after a week, only to be “taken away” after the latest noreaster (storm of a bit of snow and wind that otherwise would just be a bothersome pain) showed up.
A few photos from the past week:
A unmarked vehicle guards the house on Abbott Street with the tree wrapped with lives wires.
Previously, the trucks would be regular PSE&G vans. But it seems for guarding live wires, they need the vans elsewhere, so now we get these unmarked cars instead. Do you think they will change that motto about ‘Worry Free’? Worry full seems more like a proper description for our area. For the last two days we had a water boil advisory as well and a threat of losing water completely; that one got lifted earlier today.
Here’s another photo of the tree on the top of the house on Abbott which seems to causing many problems in our area. Our library and high school are closed, and too many house have no power.
Lots of yellow police tape when you look down Abbott. The live wires are supposedly quite dangerous, so you don’t want to walk near them.
Other parts of our borough still have no power, like North Tenth. If you think we don’t have first responders like police and fire showing up, you are wrong – they have been very on site and helpful. Problem is they can’t fix live wires. Nor can tree people.
A tree fell on this house on North Ninth Avenue. When I walked by later, the tree was gone, and the roof was patched. They are fortunate that the tree hit no wires.
I hope our neighborhood doesn’t continue to look like this much longer. Greetings recently: “Got power?” “Did you lose power (again)?” “Need an outlet, a warm cup of tea or some wifi?” “Got a plug on your porch?”
Ways to help the too many victims of storm (locally in Central New Jersey):
I was going to finish this post earlier, but we lost power (again) for an hour. Seems the fixit guys are better at breaking the power than fixing it. Hope I don’t post more about a noreaster and power outages. I did photograph some photos of birds earlier this week – possibly for next week’s Nature Notes.
Hurricane Sandy brought numerous, numerous, numerous problems. I’ll start with one in Highland Park. This gigantic tree fell on this home by N. 6th and Abbott. It has live wires entangled, so the tree guys can’t yet cut down the tree. The owners are frantic. They have contacted PSE&G and politicians. They are afraid they will lose their home because of a hole in the roof.
our 60′ maple tree that fell into our house during the storm, taking down your power lines. It bashed in our eaves, porch roof, and more. Today we went in the house and tried flushing the upstairs toilet and turned on the shower. The water came pouring into our kitchen through a lighting fixture in the ceiling. So obviously we have a sewer pipe broken from where the tree hit the upstairs & first floor bathrooms. PSE&G has not removed the tree yet–it is massive and has a dozen wires entangled in it. PSE&G needs to bring in a crane to remove the tree and the wires before the house can even be tarped. We are assuming that if we get the big storms being predicted for Tues. night into Thurs., the house will be wrecked with water and mold. Right now, because of the holes in the eaves, we have squirrels scurrying above the bedroom ceiling, building a nest up there. This is all so horrifying and preventable, I don’t even know how to cope. Because PSE&G does not consider/care that we may lose our house, we don’t know who to turn to next. It just doesn’t seem right that our house and lives have to be a casualty. We’re looking at possibly months of renovation. We’re looking at ripping out/fixing the bathrooms and kitchen, but if the house doesn’t get tarped, it will be a possibly insurmountable disaster. We’re pretty much in shock and don’t know where to turn. Call PSE&G! They will not listen to us, and have been generally unresponsive in every possible way. The weird thing is, we have power, water, and heat. We’d be happy not to have those things if we could have the tree and wires removed and could start the overhaul of our house, where we’ve lived for 30+ years. I run my business out of my house and don’t know how I’m going to do that, either.
• • •
Many homes in Highland Park are still without power. Elsewhere in New Jersey, especially by the Shore, whole communities are without power. In communities like Bradley Beach or Belmar, the water went straight through the town, not just along the boardwalk area.
A relative in New York lost her car. Many others lost homes, businesses, schools.
Because gas is difficult to come by, gas has been stolen directly from cars. Also, homes that are without power have been burglarized.
South Park got cleared of live wires yesterday – it no longer looks like this. Unclear why this got attention while other parts of Highland Park did not.
Here is my street last Monday, as Hurricane Sandy had begun to blow its winds but still hadn’t damaged Highland Park, NJ. Note the tall maple tree on the left. Little did I know that this series would be the last time I would record that tree in an upright position. You can see photos of the maple tree on past blog posts.
You can see the skies are gray, and all is wet, but unless you listened to the news you would have no inkling this was the beginning of a devastating storm. And behind the car on the left you can see the full grace of the tree that would soon be no more.
I like taking photos of the foliage each fall. This one of the block before the storm will have to do. See, at this point we were hoping that the storm wouldn’t be a big deal after all. Well, you can’t be right all the time.
I wasn’t the only one outside at this point. You can see one of my neighbors crossing the street in the far left of this shot.
At the other end of my block, all looks peaceful, right? Currently, four days later, there are still down live wires in front of the house with the white fence. It is difficult to enter our block by car, because we have live wires at both ends. Hope they fix it soon. The PSE&G truck just sat there in front of the live wires today.
During the Storm
The night of the storm, Monday night from about 4 pm to 11 pm, was really, really scary. If you weren’t scared, then you were a master of denial, which can be quite helpful at times like these. I was watching this tree in my neighbor’s backyard (see the tree above in photo day after storm that is now broken off and leaning) sway back and forth, back and forth. I decided it was less scary to watch the swaying tree than to look at pictures of the devastated Jersey Shore on my computer. We still had power at that point, but we lost it a bit before 9 pm.
After Hurricane Sandy storm hit hard – the morning after – Hurricane Sandy Trees
I woke up the morning after the storm and went to explore. Uh, oh, the big tree a few doors down was no longer up. Luckily, it had hit only a lamppost and had injured no person nor any house.
Many were taking photos, including this young reporter who has just started her journalism career with her school newspaper. She is unsure whether she wants to focus on photography, drawing or writing for the newspaper. This photographing of the down tree is a good start.
Crews have finally begun to remove parts of the down tree – it is now cut into pieces, and one can pass through on one side of the road with a car.
We were lucky on our block about where the big tree fell. These homeowners were not so fortunate. This giant old tree hit wires and their house. I saw another house in Edison that had a corner of the house chopped off by a fallen tree.
Not to feel left out, North 8th had its own adventure with this giant tree. Looks like the tree barely missed the house (but I could be wrong about that).
Finally, here is why North Fifth still does not have power. The library, where many in our community would go when power goes down, is still closed. And my friends on North Fifth are cold, as are North Tenth, Dennison and a good part of the South side by South Adelaide. We had our power restored on Wednesday evening at about 6 pm – wow, was that a happy time for us.
Lessons Learned: Count Your Blessings
Thankful for my family. Thankful for no damage to our property. Thankful for fabulous, helpful, friendly neighbors. Thankful for smart phones existing and for car radios. And for heat in cars. And the fact that our stove burners worked even if our crockpots, rice cooker, warming tray, toaster, oven, dishwasher, washing machine, computers, lamps, coffee grinder and pencil sharpener did not (daughter asked, after we lost power: how will we sharpen pencils? I replied: we have some artsy pencil sharpeners upstairs that will work. We never did do any art work during the lack of power period).
The Jersey Shore communities are not so fortunate. More on this topic in a later post.
I plan to include this post in next week’s Nature Notes.
Congregation Sons of Israel in Asbury Park, now a church
Congregation Sons of Israel in Asbury Park, an Orthodox Jewish congregation, was founded in 1904. The congregation has since moved away from Asbury Park, but for several decades it was housed in this building in Asbury Park. A few weeks ago we rented a four wheel cycle (pedal car) from Brielle Cyclery on the Asbury Park boardwalk and cycled past the building, which now belongs to a church (First French Speaking Baptist Church).
The building now has two large crosses in the front: one has to look carefully to see signs that it was built as a synagogue. Details to notice are the stained glass windows.
What do you see in those windows? I see a Torah, menorah, ner tamid, a book, a dove, and possibly someone praying in a prayer shawl on the right.
Also, if you look carefully at the carvings in the front you will see the Hebrew date of 5709 and the corresponding Gregorian date of 1949, the year the building was built for Congregation Sons of Israel.
Three Squash, watercolor on paper by Leora Wenger, 2009
Welcome to the Kosher Cooking Carnival, the Tishrei (Jewish month, the first one, the one with many holidays like Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, Sukkot and more) edition. Thank you, Batya, for managing this blog carnival.
What’s for Dinner?
Chunky Tomato Soup with Rice by Frugal and Kosher is beloved by her son – I bet other kids and adults will enjoy this recipe as well.
Rivki Silver participated in a Rosh Hashana blog party and made a super salad. Hannah Katsman of Cooking Manager was also part of the blog party – she presented one of my favorite of her recipes, the marinated beet salad.
Whether you call this banana bread or banana cake, it is a favorite dessert in our family. When I buy too many bananas and at least two brown ones are sitting on a shelf, it is time to make the banana cake.
Ingredients
2 (or 3) ripe bananas
1 cup sugar (I used white sugar, but you can try brown)
1/2 cup applesauce
1/4 canola oil
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. baking powder
2 cups flour
2 eggs
optional: cinnamon and/or chocolate chips
Mix eggs, banana and sugar until creamy. Add oil, baking soda, baking powder and salt. Mix in the flour last. Add to a baking pan, and bake for 45 minutes to one hour at 350°.
It’s probably a good idea to store this cake in the refrigerator.
Mount Greylock in the Berkshires has a lot of goldenrod on top of the mountain. And many happy butterflies are enjoying themselves.
We also visited The Mount in the Berkshires, where Edith Wharton lived for a while with her husband (before she divorced him) and his dogs. There is a pet cemetery near the garden that has lots of tidy flowers, many of which are butterfly-friendly, like this butterfly bush. The Whartons allowed their dogs to sit at their fancy dining table along with distinguished guests (is that natural? as this is Nature Notes).
We saw this red mushroom besides the trail that we climbed to the top of Mount Greylock.
When you reach the top of Mount Greylock in the Berkshire Mountains, you are rewarded with lovely views. It looks a bit like a puzzle, the Mount Greylock views below and across (one can see more mountains in the distance).
If you climb this tower on the top of Mount Greylock, you see even more views. My husband and two sons climbed to the top. My daughter and I wandered around below, looking down at the landscape.
There is an inscription in honor of soldiers at the base of the Mount Greylock tower. You can also find two quotes from Henry David Thoreau at the top of Mount Greylock. Supposedly, he too as some point in the 19th century climbed this mountain.
I don’t know who the man in the yellow shirt is, but he added a nice contrast to the scene of the lake or pond below the mountain.
Need refreshment? There is a little cafe in the Bascomb Lodge at the top of Mount Greylock.
At the entrance to the Bascomb Lodge is a butterfly garden. I’ll save my butterfly shots for another post. There are also butterfly-friendly flowers all over the top of Mount Greylock.
On the way down the mountain, we took the Overview Trail. I was hoping for several scenic views on the trail, but we were only rewarded with this one scenic vista looking west.
We just came back from a trip to the Berkshire Mountains in western Massachusetts. One day we climbed Mount Greylock (the highest mountain in the Berkshires). Toward the top we came across this cabin and pond. The trail is part of the Appalachian Trail that spans the mountains of eastern United States. We only hiked a tiny portion of the trail. In fact, we didn’t even climb the entire mountain. We parked at the top of the CCC Dynamite Trail, walked on Sperry Road to the Deer Trail, then took the Hopper Trail to the A.T. or Appalachian Trail. On the way back we took the Overlook Trail to the Hopper Trail. The Overlook Trail really only has one good scenic vista, so my daughter didn’t think it was worth the extra half mile.
