Sandy's tears are flooding Hackensack

River and Kansas streets in Hackensack were under water before noon today. The flood waters from the nearby Hackensack River prompted Costco Wholesale to close its warehouse store early. A Subaru driver who may have shopped at Costco stalled after mistakenly believing his all-wheel-drive car could float.

Water from the Hackensack River blocked the service entrance to Hackensack Toyota.

The rain and wind couldn't suppress the need to pick up a few things at Costco.

Residents of Clinton Place in Hackensack -- between Summit and Prospect avenues -- took down most but not all of their Halloween decorations. The block is known far and wide for the show it puts on for the trick-or-treat holiday at the end of October.

More than 100 utility company trucks and other equipment, including spare utility poles, fill parking lots at Garden State Plaza in Paramus, above and below.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

I jumped into the car and drove around Hackensack and Paramus before noon today to see what I could see as Hurricane Sandy approached New Jersey.

I visited the staging area for crews from Public Service Electric and Gas Co. at Garden State Plaza in Paramus, where all the stores were closed.

On the other side of the highway, near IKEA, several drivers didn't bother stopping for red lights.

All that PSE&G equipment is a hopeful sign, given how the utility blew the job of repairing damage from the freak snowstorm two days before Halloween in 2011.

A year ago, as the days wore on with tens of thousands of people still without power, the anger of customers grew and there were reports of people threatening PSE&G workers with bodily harm.

What was the response at The Record of Woodland Park?

The paper's own poor job of covering the storm led to the firing of Editor Francis "Frank" Scandale at the hands of Publisher Stephen A. Borg, who finally pulled his head out of his pampered asshole.

However, Interim Editor Doug Clancy was uncomfortable with readers' anger at PSE&G, and consistently buried it deep in stories about storm recovery.

Even when many thousands were without power for a week or more, Clancy made sure stories prominently featured PSEG's excuses for why it couldn't move faster. 

This from the newspaper that once boasted in its motto: "Friend of The People It Serves." 

See previous post on media hype

 

Hackensack again gets the cold shoulder

Image via Wikipedia

I guess Hackensack readers are just so much chopped liver. Anyone who lives here, The Record seems to say, doesn't deserve to know what's going on in their city, where the paper was founded in 1895 and where patriarch Malcolm A. "Mac" Borg frolicked as a kid in his enormous back yard.

Staff and program cuts at North Jersey schools are front-page news in the Woodland Park daily today, but you won't find a word about the Hackensack district -- one of the biggest -- continuing a news blackout on the city. Clueless head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and Hackensack reporter Monsy Alvarado seem to have forgotten Hackensack exists.

Of course, Glen Rock schools are included in the story, as is the Tenaflly district. Does that have anything to do with Editor Frank Scandale calling the former home or with his kids attending school there, or with Publisher Stephen A. Borg and his children, who live on a $3.65 million "estate" in the latter?

At the bottom of A-1 today is a terrific feature about Sen. Frank Lautenberg, who is battling cancer but who endured during the voting marathon that passed health-care reform. I especially like how the senator exposes the sickos who fought to defeat the measures. (Photo: Lautenberg before he shaved his head.)
 
Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin is exposed for the elitist he is by Ringwood Schools Superintendent Patrick Martin, whose Op-Ed piece on A-23 today shames us for turning our backs on the Ramapough Mountain Indians. You might recall the Doblin-endorsed editorial a few months ago, urging sick Upper Ringwood residents to accept a pitifully small settlement in the decades-long Ford Motor Co. dumping case.


Just remember it was Stephen Borg who replaced The Record's long-held motto on the front page -- "Friend of The People It Serves" -- with marketing hype -- "The Trusted Local Source." He's sadly mistaken if he thinks readers swallow that bullshit.