Businesses Cope With Hurricane Impact

As families and children strolled through downtown Westfield on Monday looking for a bite to eat, the majority of them could not fill their stomachs. Hurricane Irene may not have been as strong as the meteorologists predicted, but she tore through downtown Westfield closing businesses for at least two days straight.

Some of the favorite eateries such as Panera, Coldstone and Rita’s were all closed for business. Jersey Mike’s and Nathan’s which are owned by Norman Greco were also closed, but Greco was there cleaning. Westfield Fire Chief Dan Kelly said on Monday that 90 percent of the north side was blacked out, including the entire central business district.

“The loss has devastated the downtown business district,” Greco said.

Greco, a life long resident of Westfield, said being closed for the past few days has saddened him greatly. Sunday, he checked on his store to make sure everything was okay, and today he arrived early in the morning, still without power. But, Saturday before Irene hit New Jersey, Greco was prepared. He turned everything off and lowered his walk-in freezer to below 20 degrees. But, because the power had been off for over a day, all of the food in the store had had to be thrown out.

“Everyone knows if I could be open today, I would,” he said. “I could have done a lot of business today.”

PSE&G told Greco the power could be out for another week and he realized if this took place business was doomed. So, he called a friend of his, Assemblyman Jon Bramnick (R-Westfield) voicing his concerns and the assemblyman said he would do his best to help. A couple hours later, he called him again and not long after around 2:30 p.m. the power miraculously came back. Greco, who has never experienced anything like this, said he hopes insurance covers the loss of the food and the store should hopefully be open tomorrow.

“We were jumping for joy,” Greco said when the power retuned. “I feel elated.”

A group of teenagers riding their bikes through town said their weekend was much more stressful than it usually is. One of the teens, Owen said he didn’t lose power, but he slept on the floor because of the fear that the tree in his backyard could fall into his room. While two of his friends, Claudia and Julia weren’t as lucky.     

“It was terrifying,” Claudia said.

Claudia said the hurricane awoke her family at 6:30 a.m. and it knocked out their power at 9 a.m. On Sunday, for five hours Claudia and her family were bailing buckets of water from their flooded basement. Like Claudia, Julia said her power is still out and her family was also bailing water out of her basement on Sunday. But, for Julia this wasn’t the biggest problem.

“I was just mad because I couldn’t watch T.V.,” she said.