November 14, 2012 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • Page 5 Ridgewood Village residents urged to retain love and pride by John Koster Ridgewood Councilwoman Gwen Hauck urged dismayed residents to love each other and keep up their pride in the village after a number of them said they wished they had moved somewhere else. Citizens gathered at a special Ridgewood Council session in the middle of last week’s sundown snowfall to express their concerns after spending more than a week without electrical power and heat following Hurricane Sandy. “I feel your pain,” Hauck said on Nov. 7, “but don’t denigrate our town...This is a totally unprecedented experience we’re going through. Wes hould all love one another, and not succumb to anger.” Resident George Williams had said Hurricane Sandy had not been an especially bad storm, but felt the damage had met with a lackluster response. “The storm, even though we had awful consequences, was really not that bad,” Williams said. He mentioned storms he had survived in other states where households never lost electricity. Williams said he believed a presumed emphasis by PSE&G on providing electricity at low cost had cut into the utility’s budget where the capacity for damage control and damage resistance was concerned. One older man from Pershing Street said his lights had been out for eight days. “It’s uncomfortable to be this cold,” he said simply. “It seems like every storm, we’re destined to be in the dark,” said a man from East Glen Avenue. Most of the blame fell on Public Service Electric & Gas, which Ridgewood Emergency Management Director Jeremy Kleiman said had not complied with his urgent request for even a two-hour visit by a troubleshooter. Kleiman said Ridgewood has received 692 direct calls for help, had 285 trees down, including 14 that struck houses, and had one gas leak. He said that, in terms of damage, Hurricane Sandy was the worst so far. “My wife wants to leave after 30-odd years on Northern Parkway,” said George Millington. “It seems that every year we have a power failure.” “I’ve been without power, period,” said a man from Souh Irving Street. “I have a three-year-old daughter and a one-year-old son and I work from home.” “It’s getting very difficult to live under these circumstances,” said Ira Hammer from Northern Parkway, who briefly had power restored and then lost it again. “What happens down the road? Is PSE&G a credible organization? Not to me.” “This seems unprecedented, but it could happen again,” Deputy Mayor Albert Pucciarelli, an engineer in private life, admitted. “We’ve been living here for six years,” one resident said. “For five out of the six years, we’ve lost power.” “Every storm now, the street is down. I’m so glad there is a meeting today,” one resident said. “Otherwise, I would be running around the streets screaming!” With reference to the municipal services she said she moved to Ridgewood to enjoy, she said bluntly: “I feel like I’m living in an old decrepit building that needs to be knocked down.” “What are we paying for?” one man demanded. “The job isn’t getting done. We can’t afford to keep subsidizing this kind of incompetency. I don’t know how we can be so calm about it. We should be literally up in arms.” Councilman Thomas Riche said that residents who experienced repeated outages should contact the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities at 800-629-024. Riche said that the BPU would start an individual file and contact PSE&G with some authority. Kleiman said he thought Ridgewood’s own DPW employees and other employees had done “a fantastic job,” but he pointed out that they had not been trained to cope with live electrical wires and had standing orders not to cut or remove trees entangled with wires due to potential fatalities. Deputy Mayor Pucciarelli said one village professional had spent seven or eight hours with a chainsaw on his day off to remove a fallen tree and open access to one local road. Resident and environmental activist Gary Ciriilo suggested that municipal workers be issued “hot sticks” that buzz in the presence of live wires. The dozen residents who spoke from the audience of about 25 people, some of them Ridgewood department heads, urged that village officials inject some common sense into the process. (continued on page 14)