Eight-year-old Eddie Morales was overjoyed Tuesday afternoon, frolicking in the 22-plus inches of snow that blanketed his hometown of Weehawken over the previous two days.
“I love this,” Morales said, as he threw piles of the white stuff high into the air. “I love playing in the snow. I wish it snowed every day, because it means no school. We’ll probably have no school all week.”
Guess again.
Weehawken officials removed the snow from the streets and away from important buildings quickly enough that Weehawken schools re-opened on Wednesday after being closed for just one day. Of course, the majority of the record-setting snow fell on Monday, which was the Presidents’ Day national holiday.
The Weehawken school district was one of only two Hudson County districts that had regular classes on Wednesday, with West New York being the other.
Part of the reason for Weehawken’s diligence in combating the Blizzard of 2003 came from the experience the township received in dealing with the 28-inch snowfall in January of 1996.
“That’s what our guys kept saying, over and over,” Weehawken Department of Public Works Director Vincent Giusto said. “The guys kept saying ‘1996, 1996,’ over and over. It’s all I heard. We basically had the same players in place that we had in ’96. We knew what to do because of ’96. That one caught us off guard and we didn’t know what to do. This time, we were ready. We were all ready for this one.”
According to Giusto, every township agency, including the vital DPW, was in full force when the first snowflakes started to fall Sunday afternoon.
“We had crews out there right around the clock,” Giusto said. “We just kept moving.”
Immediately, Weehawken Mayor Richard Turner determined that the DPW office should be transformed into the headquarters of operation, sort of Weehawken’s version of Blizzard Control.
“We moved the headquarters to DPW and the town basically ran out of that office,” Turner said. “It made sense because Town Hall was closed Monday [for the holiday] and this way, we had all the necessary people in one place. We made it the center of operations and we were able to augment with all the other township agencies from there.”
Unfortunately, in the early hours of the storm, the township was devastated with the news that Councilman and Deputy Mayor Lou Ferullo died of a massive heart attack while shoveling the snow.
But with the snow falling at a rate of nearly two inches per hour, there was no time to mourn. Even with their heavy hearts, people like Turner and Giusto kept on the job, trying to get rid of as much snow as possible and as soon as possible.
“We had vehicles from all the different agencies out there clearing snow,” Turner said. “We rented three plows from an outside contractor, but we had vehicles from the Fire Inspector, the Housing Authority, the Board of Education, plus Parks and DPW vehicles out on the streets plowing snow. We had 14 plows out at all times, which was the most I’ve ever had since I got here in 1982 [as township manager]. With all the crews we had, the streets were always kept open.”
Other municipal employees, like Township Manager Jim Marchetti and Public Safety Director Jeff Welz, were pressed into service as emergency plow operators.
“There wasn’t a single street in the town that wasn’t plowed and salted,” Giusto said. “The operation ran like a well-oiled machine. We had 14 of our men (from the DPW) out there and they stayed right with it, all through the night.”
However, Giusto and Turner were tireless workers as well, with both men staying on the job for 42 straight hours.
“I guess the other guys saw that I can do it,” Giusto said, “so then they could do it. Everyone worked together.”
“The key was to make sure that the emergency vehicles could always get through,” Turner said. “We made sure we cleared out the fire houses and the Volunteer First Aid Ambulance Squad. We also had to make sure we kept the dead ends open. We have very narrow dead ends in the town. With a blizzard of this magnitude, we just had to keep going.”
Once the snow stopped Monday night, the emphasis went from simply keeping the streets clear to trying to remove as much of the white stuff as possible.
“Honestly, the people had nowhere else to put it all,” Turner said. “I know that the residents tried hard not to put it in the street, but there was just too much snow. The residents were really good about it. We had great cooperation.”
Turner estimated the cost of the snow removal, in terms of outside contracting, salt and overtime employee salaries, at $120,000. The money budgeted for snow removal was “already gone before this storm,” Turner said. “We already had four or five little storms that did us in before this one,” he said.
Turner said that the town will apply for emergency funding from the state, which declared New Jersey in a state of emergency even before a single snowflake fell.