PSE&G continues to keep us in the dark

Is this why Hackensack's Fairmount section lost its lights?

On the third day after Super Storm Sandy hit North Jersey hard, much of Hackensack remains in the dark.

I called the police this morning to ask two things:

When is a large tree that brought down power lines around the corner and snapped three utility poles going to be removed?

Doesn't an unusually loud generator being used by the man in the house behind me violate anti-noise ordinances when it is run all night?

The officer said Public Service Electric
and Gas Co. has its own tree-removal crews in the event wires are involved.

A PSE&G employee wouldn't address the mess at Euclid and Prospect avenues specifically, but said power may be restored by Monday.

As for the noisy generator, the officer said it is a state of emergency.

Last night, on returning from dinner out in Palisades Park, we found few working traffic lights, closed roads and much of Hackensack's Main Street eerily dark.

We saw about 75 people with gas cans lined up at the Liberty station in Bogota, and one man who said he needed gasoline for his generator but didn't want to wait that long to get it.

In Hackensack, Costco Wholesale and the Coach House Diner were closed, but drivers continued to line up on Hackensack Avenue to enter a Dunkin' Donuts at University Place.

On trips to and from Englewood and Palisades Park on Wednesday, I saw not a single PSE&G crew repairing downed wires or clearing fallen trees.

No one I asked had seen a repair crew, either.

Did all of those crews I saw on Monday at Garden State Plaza, in what amounted to a public relations ploy by the public utility, race down to repair damage on the shore?

Sandy is proving to be a rerun of PSE&G's miserable performance after the freak snowstorm a year ago.

That pre-Halloween storm also proved to be the undoing of Francis "Frank" Scandale, then editor of The Record.

Let's hope the presidential election isn't déjà vu all over again -- with a Mitt Romney victory bringing us a rerun of the Bush years.

Last year, my power was out for 57 hours, and I was relatively lucky. This year, as of 7:30 this morning, we will have been without power for 60 hours.

UPDATE: This afternoon, on the way home from Target, I saw that the big fallen tree on Prospect Avenue, near Euclid Avenue, finally had been removed. But the downed power lines and snapped utility poles remained, and our electricity still is out.