The Borough government website, www.merchantvillenj.gov will be placing information about planning for the upcoming hurricane and emergency information for residents.
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comments:
Anonymous
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Who actually looks to the Borough site for advise on preparing for a big storm? I pitty the fool!!!!!
I find it best for maintaining sensibility to ignore government talk about emergency preparation. Back in the early '90s when radios tuned to a single station became popular the Pennsylvania department of emergency preparedness or whatever its name gave out emergency radios to school principals. The promise was that the administrators would be first to find out the next disaster so they could take preparatory action.
What they did not say until the device was installed was that the principal would have to sit next to this speaker day and night year after year until an announcement was broadcast. And the noise, squeals, data transfer beepings, chatter --Oh my heaven, the continuous inconsequential chatter from one disaster official to the next-- made it impossible for the principal to conduct his normal business. It was similar to listening to the police/fire communication bands.
One hour of it led to turning off the switch. When space was needed on the desk to review report cards going out the next week, the radio was placed in a closet. When all units across the state were installed and the funding ended, the system disappeared into oblivion.
No, I do not bother with crouching under desks for air raid drills, participating in city evacuations, or listening to Vivian on The Weather Channel tell me I need to wear galoshes for a quarter-inch shower. I let them have their glory, of course, but I go on down to the beach to look for sand dollars and Pipers.
It is unbelievable how on the Merchantville NJ facebook page people are patting themselves on the back for all the information on the storm and how well protected we were by Merchantville. So blown out of proportion. Please. The media was enough - more than enough information. What did they think they were telling us that no one else was? Really? Ridiculous.
"The media was enough - more than enough information."
A TV commentator got it right the other day. He said that the political consequences from Katrina for failing to act quickly and strongly enough are what energize today's politicians and appointees to react to every out-of-the-ordinary event. I believe as he does that if officials continue with their hype people will begin to ignore them ... and that would be unfortunate.
As Hurricane Irene passed by the Jersey shore the highest sustained wind was in the 60s. Nothing happened, why?, because the beaches are better protected these days with bulkheads, sand dunes, periodic beach replenishment and, of course, better zoning and construction ordinances.
Today's mandatory evacuations and road closings are too much. Being able to watch a grande storm is a lifetime experience and it should not be denied. Better if the protective types should concentrate on reducing 45,000 highway fatalities each year.
When I was in my early 40s our family and our brother-in-law's were watching a full blown gale directly upon our beach house. Learning that brother-in-law Bob had never been sailing, I invited him to take out a Sunfish with me over the breakers and into the stormy Atlantic. We enjoyed that sail beyond anything in movies, disappearing between six-foot swells and then racing up the opposite side with the screaming wind yanking the sail almost to water level as we skimmed down into the next trough. It was not dangerous. The boat could not sink. Letting go of the tiller, the wind would steer us directly towards the beach. It was the perfect "extreme" experience!
Officials will not allow that joy now. Yesterday they were chasing away surfers.
The main problem with the excessive hype about the hurricaine was not the politicians, it was the media. The media became excessive so that their mind-numbing commercials would get watched over and over again.
The best advice for goverment to give in the situaion is exactly the advice they did give. The media blew it out of proportion.
Preparedness, really? No one compared this to Katrina, not even the media. What an insult to those who suffered the real consequences of that storm. Talk about playing into the hype. What a waste of our resources. Makes you wonder how much we really need our own for the small amount we take up on the map. Redundancy.
" What an insult to those who suffered the real consequences of that storm."
My niece sat under a tree after Karina flooded her house. She and her kids were picked up by the Red Cross and taken to a shelter. Government agencies stepped in with cash for a car and things, weekly payments, temporary housing and then a new house free twenty miles away with a prospect for a job.
She couldn't have gotten more with a gun but she didn't really want to go the distance. She enjoyed her welfare and would have preferred it to continue under the tree.
It should give you an idea of how "rotten apple" we have become when even relatives of recipients are critical of the government waste.
"Makes you wonder how much we really need our own for the small amount we take up on the map. Redundancy." You want big with no redundancy? Don't fritter your time awaiting Cherry Hill to suck us up; go to Vineland. The city is 69 square miles, the largest in the state, with nearly the same population as C.H. And you will love the non-redundant schools which function just about at your level -- the senior high school is rated 2 by Great Schools. So there, you'd be nearly at the top. Wikipedia says, Henry H. Goddard, an American psychologist, coined the term "Moron" while directing the Research Laboratory at the Training School for Backward and Feeble-minded Children in Vineland.
And merging you want? They got it. Landis Township merged with Vineland in 1952 three days after a referendum. Those folks didn't fool around with petitions, studies and all. Three days and they were gone, poof!
Surely you have heard of Landis? When towns merge they never get absorbed and lost the way China absorbs its neighbors. Landis (initially called Temperance Town) was founded by Charles Landis who bought 20,000 acres and gave it away in parcels of 2.5 acres to anyone with knowledge of grapes who would clear the land and create vineyards (hence the later name Vineland). Thomas Welsh moved to Landis for the deal but didn't make wine, no, he bottled the juice and called it Welsh's Grape Juice. Progresso came too but I don't know if they put grapes in their soup.
So, Anon, you should try living in cost-efficient, non-redundant Vineland. And they would love to have you for economies of scale.
But if 69 square miles is not a large enough municipality, try moving to Philadelphia County. A hundred and forty two square miles and 1.5 million people which was merged with Philadelphia City in the same year, 1952, under the new Home Rule Charter. No redundancy since. One police force. The other day I was talking to the entrepreneur of a store in Richmond (now Philly). She said for the fifth time in the last couple of years neighbors have been vandalizing her store vehicles because they take up spaces that residents want for themselves. This week 4 tires were slashed and two windshields smashed. She has the vandalism on video but when I asked her why she didn't file charges, she responded that it doesn't do any good, "the police don't care and don't do anything."
Across the city in Middle City (towards the Schuylkill) I was visiting a friend a couple of years ago when a Philadelphia policeman pounded on her front door --a hundred year old Eastlake-designed, hand-carved oaken masterpiece-- with his night stick, yelling to open up, that there were terrorists on the roof throwing missiles at the police. It turned out from 20 seconds of questioning of the cop that kids were on the roofs having a water balloon fight (play) and a cop calling up to the "terrorists" got hit by a bursting "missile", perhaps not accidentally -- who knows.
With dismay over her damaged door my friend asked the policeman why he would beat on her door with a nightstick. He answered --and this is a direct quote-- "It's what we do, lady." He said he was sorry the door got dented and he hoped she would not report him because he was just demoted from Sergeant due to emotional problems he was suffering from since returning from Iraq and he would come on his day off and fill the dents with wood filler. She thanked him but declined his offer. She told me later she did not report the incident because that is what Philadelphia residents have to deal with. "We're used to it".
What a lot of nonsense masquerading as legitimate argument!
I could equally regale you with stories of small town cops who are just horrible and corrupt or waste and outright theft in municipal administration of tiny towns.
And these stories would be just as useless in deciding whether to merge with Cherry Hill.
Hurricane Irene killed 48 people. Damage estimates from the storm top $1billion.
62,000 people in NJ are still without electricity.
http://tinyurl.com/44uhgws
The danger was not "hyped" in my opinion. The storm was very large and damage spread over several countries. Just because Merchantville suffered little damage does not mean the storm was "hyped."
Don"t agree. While the storm was a danger to other areas it was NOT to this area. Hype and too much argument justifying self bloating. It is disgusting. Get real.
Right, Alice! Irene just sneaked into their living rooms and shot them in the heads.
I find it annoying when headlines blame an event of nature for reckless behaviors of people. There will always be a character who can't hold himself back from venturing across a flood in a ground-hugging Toyota. Or she waits out a thunderstorm with two kids under an Elm tree. "Storm Claims Four Lives in Jersey Resort" "Desert Kills Five In 123-degree Heat" "Avalanche Buries Seven Venture Skiers"
There was the lion tamer who got mauled ... the wild animal photographer who tracked a bear until the bear ate him. Who was the Australian TV survivalist stung to death by jellyfish?
There was the old couple found dead in their home all boarded up against a heat wave so Texas passed a law that the electric company could not cut off power to old folks when the temperature was above such and such. When two weeks later Bing Crosby died of a heart attack on a golf course in Spain on a 75-degree sunny day, I proposed that a law should be passed prohibiting men over 75 from playing golf in 75-degree heat.
Often the news coverage is ridiculous. Is it the coverage that scares or is it:
"Hurricane Irene Scares 1.3 Million Nice People Twenty Die of Fright"
As long as I am on a tear over misplaced blame, let me add a measure of destain over the signs on Long Island's Southern State Parkway.
With the volume of traffic on that winding three- or four-lane highway it is possible to be brought to a standstill by congestion at any given moment of the day or night. What irks me is the probability that two, three, maybe six screaming motorcycles will race down the white dividing stripes at horrendous speeds between the standing cars startling each motorist with sudden ear-deafening noise and speed.
On the medial strip, invariably, there hangs a sign reading, "Prevent Accidents Watch Out For Motorcycles"
Tell me, would it be too insensitive to suggest that motorcyclists should start a decrease in motorcycle accidents by watching out for themselves?
We used to tell misbehaving students that no one could control them ... but themselves. Ditto for canuoers on hurricane swollen rivers.!
"canuoers" according to Wikipedia has two possible sources. The first is thought to be the most probable, that is, King Okinickin of Medford first demonstrated his long, narrow vessel to the Swedes in 1676 on the waterfront of what we now call South Philadelphia and he congratulated the settlers on how well they had navigated the Schuylkill swollen above flood stage in a horrific storm. Neither drowned. He bestowed upon them the Honor of Canuoea and from that moment on those Swedes held the title "canuoers".
In my previous comment I had made an allusion to the Swedish canuoers who safely navigated a swollen river and had received the attention of the local official for their skill as opposed to taking unearned compensation from government officials for wanton negligence.
Wikipedia's second possible etiology for "canuoers" is that it was initially a typographical error, now adopted and commonly written by Merchantvillans.
The bird feeder and bath were installed in my side yard a decade ago. For the last seven I have kept each full year round (a heater in the water) and over that span of time the "regulars" who partake of that offering have increased from an initial dozen to today's average of fifty or so.
Well, yesterday morning I tried to count them and that is next to impossible because twenty feet from the feeder there is a holly perhaps 10 feet tall and very bushy. The sparrows flock in from the neighborhood, apparently hearing some lunch bell, and disappear into the holly and then fly out in squads of 6 to the feeder. The feeder footrest holds 4 so there is a bit of maneuvering, some alighting on the housing, others clinging to their brothers' backs, and a percentage dropping to the ground to catch fallen seeds. So with the constant flight traffic in all directions I can only guess there must have been 70 or more diners.
The point I am coming to, as it relates to government compensation for natural disasters, is that even though the average life of a sparrow might be four years --the first half dying from the first winter and a quarter more the second winter-- it is a wonder I am not ordered to cut down the holly tree because of its sharp, spined leaves pricking the underbellies, legs, wings and eyes of the little creatures every time they come and go.
FEMA could require that only hemlocks be planted within fifty feet of any public feeder, bath or domicile -- for safety and health.
That reminds me of the family of whitetailed deer that were peering through the 8-ft cyclone fence at the Mann Music Center two weeks ago. Did I tell ya that Bob Dylan and Leon Russell were singing, or attempting to, but neither had a voice? The deer thought it was a Jimmy Durante special. FEMA could require ear muffs.
No, OSHA is in charge of ear plugs. And that reminds me of when the rich in-laws were building high-rise apartment buildings on Roosevelt Blvd.
OSHA required barricades to be constructed on each balcony of all twenty floors of each building until the iron railings were completely installed -- so that construction workers would not fall off any of the balconies to their deaths. Cousin-in-law Stanley argued with the OSHA inspector that the rails were being installed at that very moment. The inspector insisted that barricades be constructed first. So, the carpenters installed temporary barricades and the iron workers climbed over the temporary barricades in order to install the balcony railings.
It is best not to start me on OSHA stories. There are too many for these pages.
Did I tell you about the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection taking four months to answer the question of whether a standard brick was within the size limit that could be used for fill material in a roadbed that had already been constructed? The question went to four sub-departments complete with photographs of a brick and affidavits of its dimensions. The final answer came from an engineer who said, "Cover it over and stop asking for a decision."
For those of you who are in the road fill business, the answer is that aggregate less than 8 inches is allowed for fill. A typical 8-inch brick is actually 7.5 inches.
The last two bloggers should now go on to cite the gratitude of natural disaster victims who have been helped by FEMA (when FEMA gets it right - certainly not the Katrina debacle) and the decline in serious job related injuries since the onset of OSHA.
As a citizen I am glad there is a FEMA to help my fellow citizens in the event of natural disasters. Who knows, I amy someday be the beneficiary of such assistance.
Everybody is down the shore today enjoying the weekend in rentals or in sumptuous beach houses made possible by, you guessed it, our Federal government. Of course, Cruiser thinks that is a great idea; American workers should pay even more taxes for greater things to come.
What all vacationers in Ocean City are saying right now is how could the government create this? I pay plenty for this second house.
Well, you do not remember the unnamed storm of 1962 that moved most the Ocean City's beachfront houses from their foundations onto Central Avenue. No bulkhead; no insurance.
Today there is both thanks to Uncle Sam. And he even pumps back the beach every decade for us to walk along. And don't worry about the obliteration of nature in the bays and estuaries due to millions of people --and in the ocean itself-- because our uncle has add-on programs to ATTEMPT to restore the balance of nature that Sam's first programs destroyed.
k.t.b.f.w., I will concur with you on the argument that the costs of beach replenishment, tax benefits of 2nd home ownership, flood insurance, etc. may be more than the benefits of such programs to the general populace. But, trust me, there are many, many in the "decrease spending" crowd who want these programs.
In any event, FEMA is not involved in any of these programs and FEMA is the discussion topic. By the absence of a rebuttal criticism of FEMA, I take it you are all right with FEMA.
cruiser: many in the "decrease spending" crowd who want these programs
Oh, so true. It is the old "cut the other guy's program". It is hard to cut your own programs. That is why special committees are formed to decide which military installations will be closed.
As to FEMA, well, it may offer the safety net you want, Cruiser, but that agency grew fat in the past and it will grow fat again ... and I am not sure any fat agency is worth the cost.
Here is an example for Camden County. How many farms still survive in Camden County? One? out on Springdale Road?
I counted eleven officials on the Camden County Board of Agriculture. The President of the Camden County Board lives in Elm, NJ. The V.P. lives in Hammonton. The Sec'ty lives in Clementon. They have an Agriculture Development Board for Camden County. Well, where have they been hiding for the past fifty years doing their farm-development work?
The State Agriculture Department has 111 pages of names of Dept. of Agric. officials and sister agencies such as one that handles the banking of the farm preservation program which, in my mind, has to be the most politically corrupt program in our state.
Don't believe me? Just run through the names of the owners whose land got into the program. It is a politicians' Who's Who. Getting in means the government pays you for your development rights -- you keep the farm. The concept was keep valuable farmland as farmland instead of it becoming developments. Noble concept.
In practice the program started by announcing, in Burlington County, that the rights would be bought from only farmland east of Route 206 and only if farms were clustered together. A group of farmers west of Route 206 decided they wanted to be in the program too. Answer was NO. But at that same time a politician bought a strip of fallow land along the NJ turnpike not more than 100 yards wide and within sight of the Florence Landfill. It was unsuitable for housing and not wide enough for commercial or industrial development. It was not large enough for farming in fact. The new owner/politician planted a few dozen peach trees and, poof, he got 3.5 million dollars for development rights.
Camden County proves that agriculture is a sacred cow even in counties that have neither agriculture nor cow. I wonder what the eleven Camden County agricultural officials will be doing tomorrow morning at "work". Let's go ask them.
Speaking of Hurricane Irene which the weather bureau does each time it runs one of those red banners across the bottom of your TV screen with the shrieking horn to announce another flood watch, speaking of Irene, I just checked the automatic, electronic, satellite-bouncing water gage at the Harrisville dam on the Oswego River for the best canoeing weekend to come.
There are two gages actually, one for water height and the other for water flow. This morning the little Pinelands river is at 3 feet high with 95 cubic feet of water per second moving past the meter. That is double the normal flow but still under the 5-foot flood stage. Even so, ya gotta be a pretty good canoer to dodge tree limbs and river turns at that velocity. (One doesn't see so many canoes these days. Kayaks are the rage.)
Hurricane Irene delivered 750 cubic feet of water flow per second down the Oswego --8 times greater than today's-- and the river was seven and a half feet high, 2.5 feet above flood stage on August 29.
Ya know, the school superintendent search committee will have its 2nd public meeting tonight in the quest for the kind of school leader we think is needed. But the information explosion is not in our school today. It is in little gadgets that talk to tiny metal spheres orbiting our planet a hundred miles in space. And in computers. Last year my son emailed me with the message that it had crossed his mind while flying across country at 35,000 feet that he had more computing power in his laptop sitting under his seat than all the computing power in the world fifteen years ago.
It all is amazing to me. And to think, when I was a kid I had a calf named Irene. She used to nuzzle me with her warm head against mine and lick my face with her large, wet sandpaper tongue that smelled of mother's milk ... not at all like a windy rainstorm.
?She used to nuzzle me with her warm head against mine and lick my face with her large, wet sandpaper tongue that smelled of mother's milk ... not at all like a windy rainstorm."
Chill out, Anonymous. If no one has anything of political substance to write on the blog, I'd much rather read well written comments about the height of the Oswego River, the amazing advances of computer power in a short 15-year period, and even sentimental memories about a calf named Irene ... in contrast to your own WTF remark, for example.
In memory of Hurricane Irene, why not listen to the 50's group, the Weavers singing "Goodnight Irene" at their 2008 concert at Carnegie Hall. Here's the link: http://tinyurl.com/4yv26e9
Diversity is the interesting aspect of the blog. With one tap on the title a reader can enjoy the waxing of someone's nostalgia or the hate of an Anon spitting obscenities. Certainly the blog is not for accurate information.
The magic is that with a second tap on the title a reader can make disappear whatever he doesn't want to read and think about. That is not so easily done in person-to-person conversation.
I have been on this blog since the start so let me offer a suggestion to our crude anonymous neighbor. You can pretty much size up what each comment will bring just by its title. From your response to "Mother's Milk" --which you should have guess would be nostalgic and pseudo-philosophical -- you would least like comments having wild titles such as "Visidwit" because they will be, how can I best express it, yes, as Alice once described KTBW's remarks -- long and pointless. On the other hand, you can bet that a comment title "Anonymous" will be cryptic, rude, inane, misspelled, vulgar and most often meaningless.
So pick the comments you want to open by their titles. And enjoy!
The claim of "...more computing power in his laptop sitting under his seat than all the computing power in the world fifteen years ago..." is patently absurd.
More power than 50 years ago is perhaps accurate, but even 40 years ago, the number of IBM, Burroughs and other mainframe and mini computers in use around the world far outstripped the power of any single laptop.
The most modern laptop has only a fraction of the power of just ONE of the Cray supercomputers that operated 15 years ago.
More powerful than a whole collection of personal computers (laptops, desktops, etc.) of 15 years ago is certainly true, but more computing power than in the world 15 years ago? No way.
You will need to talk to the man who made that claim. He started at Johns Hopkins University in the early-90s because they had the supercomputer you mention. He used it at the time to write a program for the Canadian government to analyze the impact of a nuclear missile on a target. You might remember Canada announcing the simulation capability. He has been programming computers ever since. Presently he is building a computer to fit into a 4-inch satellite to be launched into space for HAM-radio communications. So if he says his laptop today has more power than a 15-year-old supercomputer or any of the world-class computers he has written programs for over the years, I have no reason to doubt him ... primarily because I cannot get my head around the idea of today's personal computers being a million times more powerful than the 1 megabyte Amiga we excitedly purchased in 1981.
It looks like the rains are leaving us, if only for a few days. I place a bucket in the side yard before forecasted rain just to see how much actually comes down. The last two days of rain netted 2 more inches.
What is most interesting to me is the water in the Susquehanna River now at record levels in several towns along its banks. You can expect, and it has already started, the level of the Chesapeake Bay to rise as the Susquehanna delivers its burden. Tolchester, a town below Harve de Grace at the Susquehanna's mouth, has recorded the level of the Chesapeake almost two feet above normal and the current, get this, the current continues to flow southward towards the ocean whether the tide is going out or coming back in.
Sailors like to know such things. However, Merchantville folks might be more interested in the flooding. If you are thinking it might be enjoyable to take a ride into the country this Sunday on the 10th anniversary of the Twin Towers attack, consider a trip down to the estuaries along Maryland's Chesapeake. Where there are fixed docks you will see a strange and memorable sight. The water will be splashing over the docks, if you can see them at all, and the yachts will be towering above them, like ocean liners at port.
I used to ask myself why boats were always strewn around after great storms ... why don't they stay in their slips. Well, I learned they break loose because the extreme tides raise them far above their slips for the wind to easily blow them away.
Georgetown Yacht Basin on Rte 213 is only an hour and a half from here and it has both beautiful yachts and a fine restaurant on top of the hill. Take you kids to see the high water level caused by rain two hundred miles north in New York State. Take a map because schools don't teach geography these days.
Finally I got down to the "Old Oak Tree" in Salem. Had been hoping to see it for sixty years and never got around to it. Sort of like the Liberty Bell thing. Nobody who lives near it has seen it.
Well, today's impromptu trip had a four-hour window between today's Nine-Eleven ceremony and guests for dinner and, so, Fort Mott, the Finn Point National Cemetery, the Finn Point Lighthouse and the Salem Oak tree just fit that available time slot.
The Finn Point Cemetery was created to bury twenty three hundred Confederate soldiers who were prisoners among the 12,000 held on Delaware Island a half mile across the Delaware River. (We call it Pea Patch Island today and it is a sanctuary for herons, egrets and related marsh birds in addition to its Civil War prison fort.)
The Finn Point Cemetery is well kept, has 150+ buried Union soldiers too, and a quaint keeper's house for the rather large expanse of grass and monuments and a very good poem cast in four iron tablets in memoriam. The tribute to the Union soldiers is a Jefferson-like rotunda with names and states carved in limestone inside. The monument to the Confederate soldiers is a 20-ft granite obelisk with names in iron tablets. There are grave stones dated in the early 1900s which I suppose were soldiers who survived the Civil War and died afterwards. A visit is worth the 40-minute trip from here to just south of Pennsville.
Fort Mott (in the same State park) was an 1890s military boondoggle having five concrete batteries overlooking the Delaware River with 10-inch cannons, only one of which was test fired and it failed. Worth seeing, though, if just for the expanse of grassy parkland complete with picnic tables and very clean rest rooms. There is a ferry that runs over to Delaware Island but I cannot tell you when it last operated. One is supposed to call for reservations. There are big government bucks in the steel, floating dock which is immaculately painted.
The lighthouse down the road could double as a municipal water stand pipe similar to ours but skinnier. Painted dull black to make it even less interesting. I have sailed that stretch of the Delaware at night --which is very wide south of the Delaware Memorial Bridge-- and I never saw it lighted.
But the oak tree in Salem in a Friends Cemetery surrounded by brick walls and wrought iron gates-- YOU MUST STAND UNDER IT ONCE. For sixty years I had thought that Wm. Penn stood under it to sign a treaty with the Lenape Indians. I discovered today that I was so wrong. It was John Fenwick who met the Indians under that tree in, read closely, 1676 and signed the treaty granting South Jersey to us. That tree was mature with speading branches 435 years ago and it is still alive and healthy today. And you will be mesmerized by the Quaker burial stones too with ancient dates still readable under that tree and under a dozen of its offspring oaks, each a marvelous specimen you would treasure in your own front yard. The cemetary is on Fenwick Street (who else?)
Salem City was our first seaport and still is a duty-free port. You know that Salem Road was commissioned by King George to run from that seaport directly to our colony's capital, Burlington City. For those of you who want to merge with Cherry Hill, you will call the Salem Road, Kings Highway. But just out of Moorestown it gets back its name, Salem Road, for half a mile heading towards Borton's Landing which was the ferry point across the Rancocas to Willingboro where it keeps its original name (Salem Road) into Burlington. It is hard to imagine a 400 year old road much less a 450+ year old tree.
Salem itself is a sad story. Beautiful Federal Period brick buildings and Victorian homes in a desperately poor town.
The polite solution would be for k.t.b.f.w. to obtain an e-mail list of those who are interested in his adventures or start another blogspot site just for such posts.
Unfortunatley, no matter how much you want to congratulate Merchantville government for their excellent service with respect to the Hurricane Irene situation, you can not change the irrevocable fact that a Tree City USA did not even have the resources to clean up fallen trees. There are many citizens in Merchantville who will not forget that their taxpayer dollars did not go towards serious clean up efforts. It makes one wonder what resources would not have been available should Hurricane Irene brought Merchantville detrimental circumstances. Thank God it did not!
Collingswood's credit raiting has been reduced to "junk" status. Many small towns will eventually be seeking bankruptcy protection. Mergers will be forced upton towns by the courts, when that day comes. Fortunately for us, our government has only made small blunders thus far and we are way better off than many other boroughs. Fingers crossed.
Did you read about the redevelopment that Bordentown Twp approved which requires the township to secure $22,000,000 in bonds for infrastructural improvements? It is a "WOW!" risk 22 times greater than our empty bank building.
Bordentown Township reached a preliminary financial agreement with the developer of the long-awaited Bordentown Waterfront Community, a planned $300 million waterfront neighborhood consisting of 650 residential units, 31,000 square feet of retail space, a River Line stop and public facilities such as walkways, a park and fishing pier. The agreement requires the township to authorize up to $22 million in bonds for infrastructure improvements.
Under the terms of the agreement, the township would use bonds to cover the infrastructure costs, and the developer would pay service charges amounting to about $70 million over the course of the project, an arrangement known as a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes, or PILOT, program. The developer, Bordentown Waterfront Community, LLC, just pays taxes on the land. The PILOT payments would be used to pay off the bond and for various improvements in the township, and 5 percent would go to the county.
Sounds like a great deal for Bordentown. Innovative and gutsy. The type of action which makes America great. While I haven't seen the site, I have no doubt the project will be a big improvement over what is there now.
Best wishes to Bordentown for complete success in the project.
"...Makes America Great!" You bet - make the people already there pay the way for the new folks for the next umpteen years! American all the way. Or maybe that should be "Amerikan all the way, comrade."
Cruiser: ...the project will be a big improvement over what is there now
Are you referring to Bordentown Township or the City of Bordentown?
I think the City of Bordentown is interesting with size, architecture and population very similar to Merchantville. The City is surrounded on three sides by Bordentown Township and on the western side by the juncture of the Delaware River and Crosswicks Creek, the border for Hamilton.
The advantage Bordentown has over Merchantville is the school system that is jointly controlled. Bordentown, Bordentown Township and Florence formed the Bordentown Regional School District, K to 12, with Hanover sending to them.
I do not know if the proposed 625 residential units are apartments. I would not be hot on the idea if they were, having seen what happened to "Main Street" in Voorhees with their scads of apartments and to the Marlkress section of Cherry Hill with their several hundred units.
A decade ago I talked to a couple who had put their retirement savings into a condo off of Marlkress Road. The woman said, They built these condos and the minute the last one sold they unveiled plans for the hundreds of apartments on the other side of this fence. We are stuck here. No one will buy these condos now.
I don't know where the Bordentown Twp redevelopment will be located. Much of the riverfront southeast of Bordentown is that swamp which held up construction of 295 for 25 years. Remember? The environmentalists stopped 295 where it crossed Rte 130 due to 4 rare birds living in the swamp? Finally, 3 decades later NJDOT got NJDEP to agree to allow 295 to be built on columns over the wetlands and that is why sailboats can no longer enter the marina at Crosswicks Creek and the Delaware.
Gotcha, I suppose not all sailboats can make it in. That bridge is ugly as hell don't you think? The view from Bordentown must have been spectacular years ago. One particular house, on the edge of the bluff, which used to belong to a Napolean- public statue outside- spectacular view previously, now a view of 295. I enjoy the convenience of 295, but would no doubt feel differently, if I was the one giving up the view.
YES, it was. There was no essential reason for I-295 to cross Rte 130 and travel along the Delaware blocking out the spectacular view that Bordentown enjoyed from a bluff 30 feet above. And what did the interstate add to compensate? -- it's own lookout over the river bend with its red and green buoys and, of course, an opportunity to take a photo of a powerplant up river on the Pennsylvania side. So four travelers a day get to see the panorama and Bordentown is forever blocked from its natural scenery ... the very reason Borden situated his home on the bluff a hundred fifty years ago while he created his transportation system linking Camden across from Philadelphia with Amboy across from Manhattan.
Cruiser loves everything big government so he must be very happy that I-295 was not run next to Rte 206, passing to the east of Bordentown, and then across the Crosswicks Creek to join I-195 where the dump used to be. No, government had to run its road with oil and rubber and road salt dripping into the watershed and its guard rails and sulfur lights and noise, the screaming noise of truck tires and exhaust pipes, constantly bombarding the picturesque Victorian village of our first American patriots including Thomas Paine who aroused our forefathers to victory.
"These are the times that try men's souls..." [Paine]
Did you know that "Col. Robert Stevens went to England to negotiate the purchase of a steam locomotive which was shipped to Philadelphia, placed on a sloop and sent up the Delaware to be assembled in Bordentown by Isaac Dripps. The locomotive became known as the 'John Bull'.
"For the first ride on the rails laid between White Hill and Bordentown, Isaac Dripps was the engineer, Benjamin Wiggins was the fireman and Col. Stevens was the conductor. Trenton's officials and notables came down for a free ride. Madame Murat, wife of Prince Murat of the Bonaparte household was the first woman to ride on the 'iron horse' that day."
I am sure we would all like to hear more (if there is anything more) regarding the statement that "there was no essential reason for I-295 to cross Rte 130 and travel along the Delaware"
If you followed the construction of I-295 from its beginning, Cruiser, you would know that the wetlands route along the Delaware from Florence to Trenton was chosen because private property purchases were at a minimum and were cheap. Hugging the railroad right of way and running elevated above the swamp, who could complain? No one but 4 endangered birds. We don't know what happened to them in the end.
And what could Bordentown do about a super highway passing by inches from its nose, tractor trailers clogging nostrils with hydrocarbons day and night? Nothing, because Bordentown was not the size of a Cherry Hill nor a fraction as powerful.
At the same time a thousand miles south when I-95 was being planned through the Carolinas, South Of The Border Inc. got that stretch of the road moved 19 miles off course so it would pass directly by the then-famous motel/resort facility with large cloverleaf exits to feed it. It was money/political clout that Bordentown could not even dream of.
Personally, I would rather have seen Bordentown's waterfront and the river wetlands spared than to have South Of The Border fed with our tax money. But I could not get you to agree to that.
Much of politics sounds like fiction to me too. Too bad it is not.
Some of it one can laugh at. Decades ago there was a bypass proposed from the end of Route 38 to the Burlington County College, skirting downtown Pemberton which was the main route eastward to Browns Mills.
Well, the surveyors got three quarters around their bypass arc only to find a rare plant in the swamp. The EPA went to court; the highway project stalled for months until one day someone reported that the endangered plant was gone. A few days later construction began again out to the college.
Try the road, Cruiser. You'll like it. Most likely you will have to find a library with old copies of the Burlington County Times to read the story. It was big news locally.
As for the I-295 rare-birds story, some of that I got from cousins who constructed a stretch of that interstate above Florence.
My favorite family story is not about highways but, rather, about a dike the company was constructing across a tidal bay in north Jersey. The story goes that the company was building the dike from both ends towards the center which they could approach within yards before the tide would reverse and wash the day's work out to sea. For several days they tried and tried and failed and failed until one evening my uncle was dropped off at home without his new car. He said, I needed something big and solid to fill the last of that gap and the Buick was the only thing available.
There is some concern being expressed around town recently that the proposed Fieldstone redevelopment project to go on the Town Centre East triangle will have parking on Chestnut Ave., Park Ave. and Centre St. I do not see how Centre St. parking can be an issue. Those few spaces have been given away to stores and apartments above so many times that telling the Fieldstone residents they will be able to park on Centre is the same as telling them they will have a full moon every night to light their way.
Park Avenue? That is a different story. Fieldstone proposes to widen Park Avenue to especially create 14 spaces. The 14 will replace the existing 4 spaces which no one in his right mind would park in overnight because the road is so narrow. Widening the road is a great idea. So is adding ten more spaces. And the trump card is the possibility that another ten spaces could be added to the other side of Park after it is widened. So we could end up with 24 usable spaces both day and night.
Chestnut Ave? My bet is that Chestnut along the triangle would be full every night whether or not there are enough spaces for every Fieldstone resident inside the triangle. Why? Two reasons. The first is because 2-car families have to park behind each other, bumper to bumper. I did a midnight walk a couple of weeks ago to sample parking on Chestnut Ave on both sides of Centre. I noticed along S. Chestnut between Alexander and St. Peter's Chestnut parking lot, that 2-car families having a single-width driveway (all of them) park the second car in the street rather than behind the first car in the driveway. So, projecting that behavior, I predict that the Fieldstone condo owners facing Chestnut Ave. will opt to put their second vehicles on Chestnut rather than stack park their 2 cars one behind the other in the triangle. Instead of saying, "Honey, would you move your car? I have to leave early this morning" he will peck her on the cheek and whisper, "Gotta go. See ya tonight late." He then runs out the front door instead of the back door.
The second reason comes from seeing west of Centre towards Alexander that N. Chestnut residents park on Chestnut across from their houses filling the street even though the Boro parking strip on the R/R right-of-way 30 feet from them remains empty. So if the Fieldstone residents living in the condos facing Cruiser behave in the same way, Chestnut Ave will fill first because it is more convenient to come and go from the front door.
What's the big deal with the Chestnut parking complaints anyway? Only 5 cars park there at night now, mostly down at that triplex near Gilmore.
Let me note that a primary recommendation that the TCE Selection Committee passed on to Council was to use the earning from the sale of the PNC parking lots to finance the acquisition of the Verizon parking lot for public parking.
59 comments:
Who actually looks to the Borough site for advise on preparing for a big storm? I pitty the fool!!!!!
I find it best for maintaining sensibility to ignore government talk about emergency preparation. Back in the early '90s when radios tuned to a single station became popular the Pennsylvania department of emergency preparedness or whatever its name gave out emergency radios to school principals. The promise was that the administrators would be first to find out the next disaster so they could take preparatory action.
What they did not say until the device was installed was that the principal would have to sit next to this speaker day and night year after year until an announcement was broadcast. And the noise, squeals, data transfer beepings, chatter --Oh my heaven, the continuous inconsequential chatter from one disaster official to the next-- made it impossible for the principal to conduct his normal business. It was similar to listening to the police/fire communication bands.
One hour of it led to turning off the switch. When space was needed on the desk to review report cards going out the next week, the radio was placed in a closet. When all units across the state were installed and the funding ended, the system disappeared into oblivion.
No, I do not bother with crouching under desks for air raid drills, participating in city evacuations, or listening to Vivian on The Weather Channel tell me I need to wear galoshes for a quarter-inch shower. I let them have their glory, of course, but I go on down to the beach to look for sand dollars and Pipers.
anyone know if public works is collecting down tree branches?
It is unbelievable how on the Merchantville NJ facebook page people are patting themselves on the back for all the information on the storm and how well protected we were by Merchantville. So blown out of proportion. Please. The media was enough - more than enough information. What did they think they were telling us that no one else was? Really? Ridiculous.
"The media was enough - more than enough information."
A TV commentator got it right the other day. He said that the political consequences from Katrina for failing to act quickly and strongly enough are what energize today's politicians and appointees to react to every out-of-the-ordinary event. I believe as he does that if officials continue with their hype people will begin to ignore them ... and that would be unfortunate.
As Hurricane Irene passed by the Jersey shore the highest sustained wind was in the 60s. Nothing happened, why?, because the beaches are better protected these days with bulkheads, sand dunes, periodic beach replenishment and, of course, better zoning and construction ordinances.
Today's mandatory evacuations and road closings are too much. Being able to watch a grande storm is a lifetime experience and it should not be denied. Better if the protective types should concentrate on reducing 45,000 highway fatalities each year.
When I was in my early 40s our family and our brother-in-law's were watching a full blown gale directly upon our beach house. Learning that brother-in-law Bob had never been sailing, I invited him to take out a Sunfish with me over the breakers and into the stormy Atlantic. We enjoyed that sail beyond anything in movies, disappearing between six-foot swells and then racing up the opposite side with the screaming wind yanking the sail almost to water level as we skimmed down into the next trough. It was not dangerous. The boat could not sink. Letting go of the tiller, the wind would steer us directly towards the beach. It was the perfect "extreme" experience!
Officials will not allow that joy now. Yesterday they were chasing away surfers.
The main problem with the excessive hype about the hurricaine was not the politicians, it was the media. The media became excessive so that their mind-numbing commercials would get watched over and over again.
The best advice for goverment to give in the situaion is exactly the advice they did give. The media blew it out of proportion.
I watched for a few moments. Thought I was watching a Channel 12 fund drive.
Preparedness, really? No one compared this to Katrina, not even the media. What an insult to those who suffered the real consequences of that storm. Talk about playing into the hype. What a waste of our resources. Makes you wonder how much we really need our own for the small amount we take up on the map. Redundancy.
"No one compared this to Katrina, not even the media."
Is there anything you read that you understand? Or do you understand but just need to twist otherd' thoughts around to make your own points?
You're giving "Anonymous" a bad reputation. Why not use the name "Thoughtless" ...or can't ya spell it?
(The code word for this entry is "visidwit". Can't think of a better description.)
" What an insult to those who suffered the real consequences of that storm."
My niece sat under a tree after Karina flooded her house. She and her kids were picked up by the Red Cross and taken to a shelter. Government agencies stepped in with cash for a car and things, weekly payments, temporary housing and then a new house free twenty miles away with a prospect for a job.
She couldn't have gotten more with a gun but she didn't really want to go the distance. She enjoyed her welfare and would have preferred it to continue under the tree.
It should give you an idea of how "rotten apple" we have become when even relatives of recipients are critical of the government waste.
"Makes you wonder how much we really need our own for the small amount we take up on the map. Redundancy."
You want big with no redundancy? Don't fritter your time awaiting Cherry Hill to suck us up; go to Vineland. The city is 69 square miles, the largest in the state, with nearly the same population as C.H. And you will love the non-redundant schools which function just about at your level -- the senior high school is rated 2 by Great Schools. So there, you'd be nearly at the top. Wikipedia says, Henry H. Goddard, an American psychologist, coined the term "Moron" while directing the Research Laboratory at the Training School for Backward and Feeble-minded Children in Vineland.
And merging you want? They got it. Landis Township merged with Vineland in 1952 three days after a referendum. Those folks didn't fool around with petitions, studies and all. Three days and they were gone, poof!
Surely you have heard of Landis? When towns merge they never get absorbed and lost the way China absorbs its neighbors. Landis (initially called Temperance Town) was founded by Charles Landis who bought 20,000 acres and gave it away in parcels of 2.5 acres to anyone with knowledge of grapes who would clear the land and create vineyards (hence the later name Vineland). Thomas Welsh moved to Landis for the deal but didn't make wine, no, he bottled the juice and called it Welsh's Grape Juice. Progresso came too but I don't know if they put grapes in their soup.
So, Anon, you should try living in cost-efficient, non-redundant Vineland. And they would love to have you for economies of scale.
But if 69 square miles is not a large enough municipality, try moving to Philadelphia County. A hundred and forty two square miles and 1.5 million people which was merged with Philadelphia City in the same year, 1952, under the new Home Rule Charter. No redundancy since. One police force. The other day I was talking to the entrepreneur of a store in Richmond (now Philly). She said for the fifth time in the last couple of years neighbors have been vandalizing her store vehicles because they take up spaces that residents want for themselves. This week 4 tires were slashed and two windshields smashed. She has the vandalism on video but when I asked her why she didn't file charges, she responded that it doesn't do any good, "the police don't care and don't do anything."
Across the city in Middle City (towards the Schuylkill) I was visiting a friend a couple of years ago when a Philadelphia policeman pounded on her front door --a hundred year old Eastlake-designed, hand-carved oaken masterpiece-- with his night stick, yelling to open up, that there were terrorists on the roof throwing missiles at the police. It turned out from 20 seconds of questioning of the cop that kids were on the roofs having a water balloon fight (play) and a cop calling up to the "terrorists" got hit by a bursting "missile", perhaps not accidentally -- who knows.
With dismay over her damaged door my friend asked the policeman why he would beat on her door with a nightstick. He answered --and this is a direct quote-- "It's what we do, lady." He said he was sorry the door got dented and he hoped she would not report him because he was just demoted from Sergeant due to emotional problems he was suffering from since returning from Iraq and he would come on his day off and fill the dents with wood filler. She thanked him but declined his offer. She told me later she did not report the incident because that is what Philadelphia residents have to deal with. "We're used to it".
What a lot of nonsense masquerading as legitimate argument!
I could equally regale you with stories of small town cops who are just horrible and corrupt or waste and outright theft in municipal administration of tiny towns.
And these stories would be just as useless in deciding whether to merge with Cherry Hill.
I suggest to you this website:
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/How_To_Actually_Change_Your_Mind
which is dedicated to rational thinking.
Hurricane Irene killed 48 people. Damage estimates from the storm top $1billion.
62,000 people in NJ are still without electricity.
http://tinyurl.com/44uhgws
The danger was not "hyped" in my opinion. The storm was very large and damage spread over several countries. Just because Merchantville suffered little damage does not mean the storm was "hyped."
Don"t agree. While the storm was a danger to other areas it was NOT to this area. Hype and too much argument justifying self bloating. It is disgusting. Get real.
Alice: Hurricane Irene killed 48 people
Right, Alice! Irene just sneaked into their living rooms and shot them in the heads.
I find it annoying when headlines blame an event of nature for reckless behaviors of people. There will always be a character who can't hold himself back from venturing across a flood in a ground-hugging Toyota. Or she waits out a thunderstorm with two kids under an Elm tree.
"Storm Claims Four Lives in Jersey Resort"
"Desert Kills Five In 123-degree Heat"
"Avalanche Buries Seven Venture Skiers"
There was the lion tamer who got mauled ... the wild animal photographer who tracked a bear until the bear ate him. Who was the Australian TV survivalist stung to death by jellyfish?
There was the old couple found dead in their home all boarded up against a heat wave so Texas passed a law that the electric company could not cut off power to old folks when the temperature was above such and such. When two weeks later Bing Crosby died of a heart attack on a golf course in Spain on a 75-degree sunny day, I proposed that a law should be passed prohibiting men over 75 from playing golf in 75-degree heat.
Often the news coverage is ridiculous. Is it the coverage that scares or is it:
"Hurricane Irene Scares 1.3 Million Nice People Twenty Die of Fright"
Alice, I looked up your link on Irene. Here's the first headline. You tell me why Irene should be blamed for this tragedy.
"Shane Seaver, 46, died yesterday after his canoe capsized after he and a friend, Raymond Clyman, 39, were sucked into the swollen Pequabuck River"
Are they two of your "Irene Kills 48" report? Were they canoeing to work?
As long as I am on a tear over misplaced blame, let me add a measure of destain over the signs on Long Island's Southern State Parkway.
With the volume of traffic on that winding three- or four-lane highway it is possible to be brought to a standstill by congestion at any given moment of the day or night. What irks me is the probability that two, three, maybe six screaming motorcycles will race down the white dividing stripes at horrendous speeds between the standing cars startling each motorist with sudden ear-deafening noise and speed.
On the medial strip, invariably, there hangs a sign reading,
"Prevent Accidents
Watch Out For Motorcycles"
Tell me, would it be too insensitive to suggest that motorcyclists should start a decrease in motorcycle accidents by watching out for themselves?
We used to tell misbehaving students that no one could control them ... but themselves. Ditto for canuoers on hurricane swollen rivers.!
"canuoers"?? Where did that word come from?
"canuoers" according to Wikipedia has two possible sources. The first is thought to be the most probable, that is, King Okinickin of Medford first demonstrated his long, narrow vessel to the Swedes in 1676 on the waterfront of what we now call South Philadelphia and he congratulated the settlers on how well they had navigated the Schuylkill swollen above flood stage in a horrific storm. Neither drowned. He bestowed upon them the Honor of Canuoea and from that moment on those Swedes held the title "canuoers".
In my previous comment I had made an allusion to the Swedish canuoers who safely navigated a swollen river and had received the attention of the local official for their skill as opposed to taking unearned compensation from government officials for wanton negligence.
Wikipedia's second possible etiology for "canuoers" is that it was initially a typographical error, now adopted and commonly written by Merchantvillans.
The bird feeder and bath were installed in my side yard a decade ago. For the last seven I have kept each full year round (a heater in the water) and over that span of time the "regulars" who partake of that offering have increased from an initial dozen to today's average of fifty or so.
Well, yesterday morning I tried to count them and that is next to impossible because twenty feet from the feeder there is a holly perhaps 10 feet tall and very bushy. The sparrows flock in from the neighborhood, apparently hearing some lunch bell, and disappear into the holly and then fly out in squads of 6 to the feeder. The feeder footrest holds 4 so there is a bit of maneuvering, some alighting on the housing, others clinging to their brothers' backs, and a percentage dropping to the ground to catch fallen seeds. So with the constant flight traffic in all directions I can only guess there must have been 70 or more diners.
The point I am coming to, as it relates to government compensation for natural disasters, is that even though the average life of a sparrow might be four years --the first half dying from the first winter and a quarter more the second winter-- it is a wonder I am not ordered to cut down the holly tree because of its sharp, spined leaves pricking the underbellies, legs, wings and eyes of the little creatures every time they come and go.
FEMA could require that only hemlocks be planted within fifty feet of any public feeder, bath or domicile -- for safety and health.
That reminds me of the family of whitetailed deer that were peering through the 8-ft cyclone fence at the Mann Music Center two weeks ago. Did I tell ya that Bob Dylan and Leon Russell were singing, or attempting to, but neither had a voice? The deer thought it was a Jimmy Durante special. FEMA could require ear muffs.
No, OSHA is in charge of ear plugs. And that reminds me of when the rich in-laws were building high-rise apartment buildings on Roosevelt Blvd.
OSHA required barricades to be constructed on each balcony of all twenty floors of each building until the iron railings were completely installed -- so that construction workers would not fall off any of the balconies to their deaths. Cousin-in-law Stanley argued with the OSHA inspector that the rails were being installed at that very moment. The inspector insisted that barricades be constructed first. So, the carpenters installed temporary barricades and the iron workers climbed over the temporary barricades in order to install the balcony railings.
It is best not to start me on OSHA stories. There are too many for these pages.
Did I tell you about the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection taking four months to answer the question of whether a standard brick was within the size limit that could be used for fill material in a roadbed that had already been constructed? The question went to four sub-departments complete with photographs of a brick and affidavits of its dimensions. The final answer came from an engineer who said, "Cover it over and stop asking for a decision."
For those of you who are in the road fill business, the answer is that aggregate less than 8 inches is allowed for fill. A typical 8-inch brick is actually 7.5 inches.
The last two bloggers should now go on to cite the gratitude of natural disaster victims who have been helped by FEMA (when FEMA gets it right - certainly not the Katrina debacle) and the decline in serious job related injuries since the onset of OSHA.
As a citizen I am glad there is a FEMA to help my fellow citizens in the event of natural disasters. Who knows, I amy someday be the beneficiary of such assistance.
Everybody is down the shore today enjoying the weekend in rentals or in sumptuous beach houses made possible by, you guessed it, our Federal government. Of course, Cruiser thinks that is a great idea; American workers should pay even more taxes for greater things to come.
What all vacationers in Ocean City are saying right now is how could the government create this? I pay plenty for this second house.
Well, you do not remember the unnamed storm of 1962 that moved most the Ocean City's beachfront houses from their foundations onto Central Avenue. No bulkhead; no insurance.
Today there is both thanks to Uncle Sam. And he even pumps back the beach every decade for us to walk along. And don't worry about the obliteration of nature in the bays and estuaries due to millions of people --and in the ocean itself-- because our uncle has add-on programs to ATTEMPT to restore the balance of nature that Sam's first programs destroyed.
As Cruiser says, it's all for our good.
k.t.b.f.w., I will concur with you on the argument that the costs of beach replenishment, tax benefits of 2nd home ownership, flood insurance, etc. may be more than the benefits of such programs to the general populace. But, trust me, there are many, many in the "decrease spending" crowd who want these programs.
In any event, FEMA is not involved in any of these programs and FEMA is the discussion topic. By the absence of a rebuttal criticism of FEMA, I take it you are all right with FEMA.
cruiser: many in the "decrease spending" crowd who want these programs
Oh, so true. It is the old "cut the other guy's program". It is hard to cut your own programs. That is why special committees are formed to decide which military installations will be closed.
As to FEMA, well, it may offer the safety net you want, Cruiser, but that agency grew fat in the past and it will grow fat again ... and I am not sure any fat agency is worth the cost.
Here is an example for Camden County. How many farms still survive in Camden County? One? out on Springdale Road?
I counted eleven officials on the Camden County Board of Agriculture. The President of the Camden County Board lives in Elm, NJ. The V.P. lives in Hammonton. The Sec'ty lives in Clementon. They have an Agriculture Development Board for Camden County. Well, where have they been hiding for the past fifty years doing their farm-development work?
The State Agriculture Department has 111 pages of names of Dept. of Agric. officials and sister agencies such as one that handles the banking of the farm preservation program which, in my mind, has to be the most politically corrupt program in our state.
Don't believe me? Just run through the names of the owners whose land got into the program. It is a politicians' Who's Who.
Getting in means the government pays you for your development rights -- you keep the farm. The concept was keep valuable farmland as farmland instead of it becoming developments. Noble concept.
In practice the program started by announcing, in Burlington County, that the rights would be bought from only farmland east of Route 206 and only if farms were clustered together. A group of farmers west of Route 206 decided they wanted to be in the program too. Answer was NO. But at that same time a politician bought a strip of fallow land along the NJ turnpike not more than 100 yards wide and within sight of the Florence Landfill. It was unsuitable for housing and not wide enough for commercial or industrial development. It was not large enough for farming in fact. The new owner/politician planted a few dozen peach trees and, poof, he got 3.5 million dollars for development rights.
Camden County proves that agriculture is a sacred cow even in counties that have neither agriculture nor cow. I wonder what the eleven Camden County agricultural officials will be doing tomorrow morning at "work". Let's go ask them.
Speaking of Hurricane Irene which the weather bureau does each time it runs one of those red banners across the bottom of your TV screen with the shrieking horn to announce another flood watch, speaking of Irene, I just checked the automatic, electronic, satellite-bouncing water gage at the Harrisville dam on the Oswego River for the best canoeing weekend to come.
There are two gages actually, one for water height and the other for water flow. This morning the little Pinelands river is at 3 feet high with 95 cubic feet of water per second moving past the meter. That is double the normal flow but still under the 5-foot flood stage. Even so, ya gotta be a pretty good canoer to dodge tree limbs and river turns at that velocity. (One doesn't see so many canoes these days. Kayaks are the rage.)
Hurricane Irene delivered 750 cubic feet of water flow per second down the Oswego --8 times greater than today's-- and the river was seven and a half feet high, 2.5 feet above flood stage on August 29.
Ya know, the school superintendent search committee will have its 2nd public meeting tonight in the quest for the kind of school leader we think is needed. But the information explosion is not in our school today. It is in little gadgets that talk to tiny metal spheres orbiting our planet a hundred miles in space. And in computers. Last year my son emailed me with the message that it had crossed his mind while flying across country at 35,000 feet that he had more computing power in his laptop sitting under his seat than all the computing power in the world fifteen years ago.
It all is amazing to me. And to think, when I was a kid I had a calf named Irene. She used to nuzzle me with her warm head against mine and lick my face with her large, wet sandpaper tongue that smelled of mother's milk ... not at all like a windy rainstorm.
?She used to nuzzle me with her warm head against mine and lick my face with her large, wet sandpaper tongue that smelled of mother's milk ... not at all like a windy rainstorm."
WTF? This place is getting ridiculous!
Chill out, Anonymous. If no one has anything of political substance to write on the blog, I'd much rather read well written comments about the height of the Oswego River, the amazing advances of computer power in a short 15-year period, and even sentimental memories about a calf named Irene ... in contrast to your own WTF remark, for example.
In memory of Hurricane Irene, why not listen to the 50's group, the Weavers singing "Goodnight Irene" at their 2008 concert at Carnegie Hall. Here's the link: http://tinyurl.com/4yv26e9
"This place is getting ridiculous!"
Diversity is the interesting aspect of the blog. With one tap on the title a reader can enjoy the waxing of someone's nostalgia or the hate of an Anon spitting obscenities. Certainly the blog is not for accurate information.
The magic is that with a second tap on the title a reader can make disappear whatever he doesn't want to read and think about. That is not so easily done in person-to-person conversation.
I have been on this blog since the start so let me offer a suggestion to our crude anonymous neighbor. You can pretty much size up what each comment will bring just by its title. From your response to "Mother's Milk" --which you should have guess would be nostalgic and pseudo-philosophical -- you would least like comments having wild titles such as "Visidwit" because they will be, how can I best express it, yes, as Alice once described KTBW's remarks -- long and pointless. On the other hand, you can bet that a comment title "Anonymous" will be cryptic, rude, inane, misspelled, vulgar and most often meaningless.
So pick the comments you want to open by their titles. And enjoy!
The claim of "...more computing power in his laptop sitting under his seat than all the computing power in the world fifteen years ago..." is patently absurd.
More power than 50 years ago is perhaps accurate, but even 40 years ago, the number of IBM, Burroughs and other mainframe and mini computers in use around the world far outstripped the power of any single laptop.
The most modern laptop has only a fraction of the power of just ONE of the Cray supercomputers that operated 15 years ago.
More powerful than a whole collection of personal computers (laptops, desktops, etc.) of 15 years ago is certainly true, but more computing power than in the world 15 years ago? No way.
You will need to talk to the man who made that claim. He started at Johns Hopkins University in the early-90s because they had the supercomputer you mention. He used it at the time to write a program for the Canadian government to analyze the impact of a nuclear missile on a target. You might remember Canada announcing the simulation capability. He has been programming computers ever since. Presently he is building a computer to fit into a 4-inch satellite to be launched into space for HAM-radio communications. So if he says his laptop today has more power than a 15-year-old supercomputer or any of the world-class computers he has written programs for over the years, I have no reason to doubt him ... primarily because I cannot get my head around the idea of today's personal computers being a million times more powerful than the 1 megabyte Amiga we excitedly purchased in 1981.
It looks like the rains are leaving us, if only for a few days. I place a bucket in the side yard before forecasted rain just to see how much actually comes down. The last two days of rain netted 2 more inches.
What is most interesting to me is the water in the Susquehanna River now at record levels in several towns along its banks. You can expect, and it has already started, the level of the Chesapeake Bay to rise as the Susquehanna delivers its burden. Tolchester, a town below Harve de Grace at the Susquehanna's mouth, has recorded the level of the Chesapeake almost two feet above normal and the current, get this, the current continues to flow southward towards the ocean whether the tide is going out or coming back in.
Sailors like to know such things. However, Merchantville folks might be more interested in the flooding. If you are thinking it might be enjoyable to take a ride into the country this Sunday on the 10th anniversary of the Twin Towers attack, consider a trip down to the estuaries along Maryland's Chesapeake. Where there are fixed docks you will see a strange and memorable sight. The water will be splashing over the docks, if you can see them at all, and the yachts will be towering above them, like ocean liners at port.
I used to ask myself why boats were always strewn around after great storms ... why don't they stay in their slips. Well, I learned they break loose because the extreme tides raise them far above their slips for the wind to easily blow them away.
Georgetown Yacht Basin on Rte 213 is only an hour and a half from here and it has both beautiful yachts and a fine restaurant on top of the hill. Take you kids to see the high water level caused by rain two hundred miles north in New York State. Take a map because schools don't teach geography these days.
Finally I got down to the "Old Oak Tree" in Salem. Had been hoping to see it for sixty years and never got around to it. Sort of like the Liberty Bell thing. Nobody who lives near it has seen it.
Well, today's impromptu trip had a four-hour window between today's Nine-Eleven ceremony and guests for dinner and, so, Fort Mott, the Finn Point National Cemetery, the Finn Point Lighthouse and the Salem Oak tree just fit that available time slot.
The Finn Point Cemetery was created to bury twenty three hundred Confederate soldiers who were prisoners among the 12,000 held on Delaware Island a half mile across the Delaware River. (We call it Pea Patch Island today and it is a sanctuary for herons, egrets and related marsh birds in addition to its Civil War prison fort.)
The Finn Point Cemetery is well kept, has 150+ buried Union soldiers too, and a quaint keeper's house for the rather large expanse of grass and monuments and a very good poem cast in four iron tablets in memoriam. The tribute to the Union soldiers is a Jefferson-like rotunda with names and states carved in limestone inside. The monument to the Confederate soldiers is a 20-ft granite obelisk with names in iron tablets. There are grave stones dated in the early 1900s which I suppose were soldiers who survived the Civil War and died afterwards. A visit is worth the 40-minute trip from here to just south of Pennsville.
Fort Mott (in the same State park) was an 1890s military boondoggle having five concrete batteries overlooking the Delaware River with 10-inch cannons, only one of which was test fired and it failed. Worth seeing, though, if just for the expanse of grassy parkland complete with picnic tables and very clean rest rooms. There is a ferry that runs over to Delaware Island but I cannot tell you when it last operated. One is supposed to call for reservations. There are big government bucks in the steel, floating dock which is immaculately painted.
The lighthouse down the road could double as a municipal water stand pipe similar to ours but skinnier. Painted dull black to make it even less interesting. I have sailed that stretch of the Delaware at night --which is very wide south of the Delaware Memorial Bridge-- and I never saw it lighted.
But the oak tree in Salem in a Friends Cemetery surrounded by brick walls and wrought iron gates-- YOU MUST STAND UNDER IT ONCE. For sixty years I had thought that Wm. Penn stood under it to sign a treaty with the Lenape Indians. I discovered today that I was so wrong. It was John Fenwick who met the Indians under that tree in, read closely, 1676 and signed the treaty granting South Jersey to us. That tree was mature with speading branches 435 years ago and it is still alive and healthy today. And you will be mesmerized by the Quaker burial stones too with ancient dates still readable under that tree and under a dozen of its offspring oaks, each a marvelous specimen you would treasure in your own front yard. The cemetary is on Fenwick Street (who else?)
Salem City was our first seaport and still is a duty-free port. You know that Salem Road was commissioned by King George to run from that seaport directly to our colony's capital, Burlington City. For those of you who want to merge with Cherry Hill, you will call the Salem Road, Kings Highway. But just out of Moorestown it gets back its name, Salem Road, for half a mile heading towards Borton's Landing which was the ferry point across the Rancocas to Willingboro where it keeps its original name (Salem Road) into Burlington. It is hard to imagine a 400 year old road much less a 450+ year old tree.
Salem itself is a sad story. Beautiful Federal Period brick buildings and Victorian homes in a desperately poor town.
In all a Sunday trip worth taking.
k.t.b.f.w - right on topic.
Think about it, Cruiser -- how much can one say about Hurricane Irene now?
Anonymous says "WTF" -- how did that brighten your day or add anything to the discussion?
As for me, I'd much prefer to hear k.t.b.f.w. give us some interesting historical information.
I now note two posters off topic.
The polite solution would be for k.t.b.f.w. to obtain an e-mail list of those who are interested in his adventures or start another blogspot site just for such posts.
I agree, his long winded posts are annoying. He sounds like a blow hard that likes to hear himself talk to make himself feel interesting.
Start you own blog and yammer on all you want.
Salem here I come
If the title of this blog said "sun shining brightly", it would inevitably lead to merger talk.
Well, getting back on topic, congrats to borough government for excellent service with respect to the Hurricane Irene situation.
Unfortunatley, no matter how much you want to congratulate Merchantville government for their excellent service with respect to the Hurricane Irene situation, you can not change the irrevocable fact that a Tree City USA did not even have the resources to clean up fallen trees. There are many citizens in Merchantville who will not forget that their taxpayer dollars did not go towards serious clean up efforts. It makes one wonder what resources would not have been available should Hurricane Irene brought Merchantville detrimental circumstances. Thank God it did not!
What about the tree that blocked Westminster for several days that the borough didn't clear, because it didn't have the resourcea?
Collingswood's credit raiting has been reduced to "junk" status. Many small towns will eventually be seeking bankruptcy protection. Mergers will be forced upton towns by the courts, when that day comes. Fortunately for us, our government has only made small blunders thus far and we are way better off than many other boroughs. Fingers crossed.
Did you read about the redevelopment that Bordentown Twp approved which requires the township to secure $22,000,000 in bonds for infrastructural improvements? It is a "WOW!" risk 22 times greater than our empty bank building.
Bordentown Township reached a preliminary financial agreement with the developer of the long-awaited Bordentown Waterfront Community, a planned $300 million waterfront neighborhood consisting of 650 residential units, 31,000 square feet of retail space, a River Line stop and public facilities such as walkways, a park and fishing pier. The agreement requires the township to authorize up to $22 million in bonds for infrastructure improvements.
Under the terms of the agreement, the township would use bonds to cover the infrastructure costs, and the developer would pay service charges amounting to about $70 million over the course of the project, an arrangement known as a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes, or PILOT, program. The developer, Bordentown Waterfront Community, LLC, just pays taxes on the land. The PILOT payments would be used to pay off the bond and for various improvements in the township, and 5 percent would go to the county.
Sounds like a great deal for Bordentown. Innovative and gutsy. The type of action which makes America great. While I haven't seen the site, I have no doubt the project will be a big improvement over what is there now.
Best wishes to Bordentown for complete success in the project.
Gutsy if it works! Otherwise they should be prepared for junk bond status.
Riverfront Bordentown has a great view of 295 by the way.
"...Makes America Great!" You bet - make the people already there pay the way for the new folks for the next umpteen years! American all the way. Or maybe that should be "Amerikan all the way, comrade."
Cruiser: ...the project will be a big improvement over what is there now
Are you referring to Bordentown Township or the City of Bordentown?
I think the City of Bordentown is interesting with size, architecture and population very similar to Merchantville. The City is surrounded on three sides by Bordentown Township and on the western side by the juncture of the Delaware River and Crosswicks Creek, the border for Hamilton.
The advantage Bordentown has over Merchantville is the school system that is jointly controlled. Bordentown, Bordentown Township and Florence formed the Bordentown Regional School District, K to 12, with Hanover sending to them.
I do not know if the proposed 625 residential units are apartments. I would not be hot on the idea if they were, having seen what happened to "Main Street" in Voorhees with their scads of apartments and to the Marlkress section of Cherry Hill with their several hundred units.
A decade ago I talked to a couple who had put their retirement savings into a condo off of Marlkress Road. The woman said, They built these condos and the minute the last one sold they unveiled plans for the hundreds of apartments on the other side of this fence. We are stuck here. No one will buy these condos now.
I don't know where the Bordentown Twp redevelopment will be located. Much of the riverfront southeast of Bordentown is that swamp which held up construction of 295 for 25 years. Remember? The environmentalists stopped 295 where it crossed Rte 130 due to 4 rare birds living in the swamp? Finally, 3 decades later NJDOT got NJDEP to agree to allow 295 to be built on columns over the wetlands and that is why sailboats can no longer enter the marina at Crosswicks Creek and the Delaware.
Sailboats can still dock at that marina. We docked there last year!
ktbfw is wrong, as usual!
I should have written that my mast cannot fit under the bridge.
Gotcha, I suppose not all sailboats can make it in. That bridge is ugly as hell don't you think? The view from Bordentown must have been spectacular years ago. One particular house, on the edge of the bluff, which used to belong to a Napolean- public statue outside- spectacular view previously, now a view of 295. I enjoy the convenience of 295, but would no doubt feel differently, if I was the one giving up the view.
"view from Bordentown must have been spectacular"
YES, it was. There was no essential reason for I-295 to cross Rte 130 and travel along the Delaware blocking out the spectacular view that Bordentown enjoyed from a bluff 30 feet above. And what did the interstate add to compensate? -- it's own lookout over the river bend with its red and green buoys and, of course, an opportunity to take a photo of a powerplant up river on the Pennsylvania side. So four travelers a day get to see the panorama and Bordentown is forever blocked from its natural scenery ... the very reason Borden situated his home on the bluff a hundred fifty years ago while he created his transportation system linking Camden across from Philadelphia with Amboy across from Manhattan.
Cruiser loves everything big government so he must be very happy that I-295 was not run next to Rte 206, passing to the east of Bordentown, and then across the Crosswicks Creek to join I-195 where the dump used to be. No, government had to run its road with oil and rubber and road salt dripping into the watershed and its guard rails and sulfur lights and noise, the screaming noise of truck tires and exhaust pipes, constantly bombarding the picturesque Victorian village of our first American patriots including Thomas Paine who aroused our forefathers to victory.
"These are the times that try men's souls..." [Paine]
Did you know that "Col. Robert Stevens went to England to negotiate the purchase of a steam locomotive which was shipped to Philadelphia, placed on a sloop and sent up the Delaware to be assembled in Bordentown by Isaac Dripps. The locomotive became known as the 'John Bull'.
"For the first ride on the rails laid between White Hill and Bordentown, Isaac Dripps was the engineer, Benjamin Wiggins was the fireman and Col. Stevens was the conductor. Trenton's officials and notables came down for a free ride. Madame Murat, wife of Prince Murat of the Bonaparte household was the first woman to ride on the 'iron horse' that day."
I am sure we would all like to hear more (if there is anything more) regarding the statement that "there was no essential reason for I-295 to cross Rte 130 and travel along the Delaware"
This simply sounds like more ktbfw puffery.
If you followed the construction of I-295 from its beginning, Cruiser, you would know that the wetlands route along the Delaware from Florence to Trenton was chosen because private property purchases were at a minimum and were cheap. Hugging the railroad right of way and running elevated above the swamp, who could complain? No one but 4 endangered birds. We don't know what happened to them in the end.
And what could Bordentown do about a super highway passing by inches from its nose, tractor trailers clogging nostrils with hydrocarbons day and night? Nothing, because Bordentown was not the size of a Cherry Hill nor a fraction as powerful.
At the same time a thousand miles south when I-95 was being planned through the Carolinas, South Of The Border Inc. got that stretch of the road moved 19 miles off course so it would pass directly by the then-famous motel/resort facility with large cloverleaf exits to feed it. It was money/political clout that Bordentown could not even dream of.
Personally, I would rather have seen Bordentown's waterfront and the river wetlands spared than to have South Of The Border fed with our tax money. But I could not get you to agree to that.
Sounds like pure fiction to me.
Is there an independent, verifiable report on the innuendo you have provided?
Much of politics sounds like fiction to me too. Too bad it is not.
Some of it one can laugh at. Decades ago there was a bypass proposed from the end of Route 38 to the Burlington County College, skirting downtown Pemberton which was the main route eastward to Browns Mills.
Well, the surveyors got three quarters around their bypass arc only to find a rare plant in the swamp. The EPA went to court; the highway project stalled for months until one day someone reported that the endangered plant was gone. A few days later construction began again out to the college.
Try the road, Cruiser. You'll like it. Most likely you will have to find a library with old copies of the Burlington County Times to read the story. It was big news locally.
As for the I-295 rare-birds story, some of that I got from cousins who constructed a stretch of that interstate above Florence.
My favorite family story is not about highways but, rather, about a dike the company was constructing across a tidal bay in north Jersey. The story goes that the company was building the dike from both ends towards the center which they could approach within yards before the tide would reverse and wash the day's work out to sea. For several days they tried and tried and failed and failed until one evening my uncle was dropped off at home without his new car. He said, I needed something big and solid to fill the last of that gap and the Buick was the only thing available.
There is some concern being expressed around town recently that the proposed Fieldstone redevelopment project to go on the Town Centre East triangle will have parking on Chestnut Ave., Park Ave. and Centre St. I do not see how Centre St. parking can be an issue. Those few spaces have been given away to stores and apartments above so many times that telling the Fieldstone residents they will be able to park on Centre is the same as telling them they will have a full moon every night to light their way.
Park Avenue? That is a different story. Fieldstone proposes to widen Park Avenue to especially create 14 spaces. The 14 will replace the existing 4 spaces which no one in his right mind would park in overnight because the road is so narrow. Widening the road is a great idea. So is adding ten more spaces. And the trump card is the possibility that another ten spaces could be added to the other side of Park after it is widened. So we could end up with 24 usable spaces both day and night.
Chestnut Ave? My bet is that Chestnut along the triangle would be full every night whether or not there are enough spaces for every Fieldstone resident inside the triangle. Why? Two reasons. The first is because 2-car families have to park behind each other, bumper to bumper. I did a midnight walk a couple of weeks ago to sample parking on Chestnut Ave on both sides of Centre. I noticed along S. Chestnut between Alexander and St. Peter's Chestnut parking lot, that 2-car families having a single-width driveway (all of them) park the second car in the street rather than behind the first car in the driveway. So, projecting that behavior, I predict that the Fieldstone condo owners facing Chestnut Ave. will opt to put their second vehicles on Chestnut rather than stack park their 2 cars one behind the other in the triangle. Instead of saying, "Honey, would you move your car? I have to leave early this morning" he will peck her on the cheek and whisper, "Gotta go. See ya tonight late." He then runs out the front door instead of the back door.
The second reason comes from seeing west of Centre towards Alexander that N. Chestnut residents park on Chestnut across from their houses filling the street even though the Boro parking strip on the R/R right-of-way 30 feet from them remains empty. So if the Fieldstone residents living in the condos facing Cruiser behave in the same way, Chestnut Ave will fill first because it is more convenient to come and go from the front door.
What's the big deal with the Chestnut parking complaints anyway? Only 5 cars park there at night now, mostly down at that triplex near Gilmore.
Let me note that a primary recommendation that the TCE Selection Committee passed on to Council was to use the earning from the sale of the PNC parking lots to finance the acquisition of the Verizon parking lot for public parking.
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