As the exodus of Orthodox Jewish families from the New York area’s more established Jewish communities continues, branches of Hatzolah have been opening up in new areas, with the eastern portion of Bergen County one of the latest communities to get its own volunteer ambulance corps. Bergen Hatzalah became operational at midnight on September 3rd, launching alongside Hatzalah of West Orange and Livingston in nearby Essex County.  Its core coverage area includes Englewood, Englewood Cliffs, Fort Lee, Hackensack and Tenafly, with approximately 32 volunteers going out on calls.

Cellphones across New York and New Jersey pulsed with urgent warnings of catastrophic flooding as the fury of Hurricane Ida’s remnants, carrying torrential rains, approached upper New Jersey and New York City on Wednesday. The first alerts of severe weather blared across millions of phones at 8:41 p.m. that night when the National Weather Service warned of dangerous flash flooding from the looming storm. Officials would issue three more alerts, late into the night, urging people to immediately head for higher ground and to stay out of rising floodwaters. A barrage of other alerts from a litany of apps lit up phone screens throughout the night — prompting some to wonder if people were just too inundated with information to take the threat seriously.

Deadly flooding delivered to the Northeast by the torrential rains of what remained of Hurricane Ida has brought a new urgency and a fresh look to how roads, sewers, bridges and other infrastructure must be improved to prevent such a catastrophe from happening again. The world is changing and “our whole mindset, the playbook that we use,” must change too, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said Thursday as he toured Mullica Hills, New Jersey, where a 150-mph (241 kph) tornado splintered homes. “We have got to leap forward and get out ahead of this.” The devastation exposed flaws in preparation plans even after New Jersey and New York spent billions of dollars to prevent a reoccurrence of Superstorm Sandy’s destruction in 2012, with much spent to protect coastal communities.

President Joe Biden will visit all three 9/11 memorial sites to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks and pay his respects to the nearly 3,000 people killed that day. Biden will visit ground zero in New York City, the Pentagon and the memorial outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where United Flight 93 was forced down, the White House said Saturday. He will be accompanied by first lady Jill Biden. Vice President Kamala Harris will travel to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, for a separate event before joining the president at the Pentagon, the White House said. Harris will travel with her spouse, Doug Emhoff. Biden’s itinerary is similar to the one President Barack Obama followed in 2011 on the 10th anniversary of the attacks.

(By Sandy Eller) Hundreds of Jewish families in two central New Jersey neighborhoods are breathing a little easier, now that a local branch of Hatzalah has opened in their adjacent communities. Hatzalah of West Orange and Livingston launched at midnight on September 3rd, the culmination of a conversation that began nearly 10 years ago and picked up speed when COVID hit last year.  An independent volunteer ambulance service providing 24/7 emergency medical response to residents of West Orange, Livingston and surrounding Essex County communities, Hatzalah of West Orange and Livingston currently has approximately 25 members which includes a mix of veterans and newly trained volunteers.

Twenty years later, Jack Grandcolas still remembers waking up at 7:03 that morning. He looked at the clock, then out the window where an image in the sky caught his eye — a fleeting vision that looked like an angel ascending. He didn’t know it yet, but that was the moment his life changed. Across the country, it was 10:03 a.m. and United Flight 93 had just crashed into a Pennsylvania field. His wife, Lauren, was not supposed to be on that flight. So when he turned on the television and saw the chilling scenes of Sept. 11, 2001, unfolding, he was not worried for her. Then he saw the blinking light on the answering machine. Lauren had left two messages that morning, as he slept with the phone ringer off in the bedroom.

An infant suffered serious burns in a fire on Friday night, YWN has learned. The fire broke out in a home on Johanna Lane at around 10:30PM. The Monsey Fire Department was dispatched as well as Rockland Hatzolah. A 9 month old child was rushed to Westchester Trauma Center with serious burns. The child’s mother also suffered some burns on her arm. Sources tell YWN that the fire may have started from a Shabbos candle. Tehillim is needed for Asher Anshil ben Shifra Dina Gittel. (YWN World Headquarters – NYC)

Ankle-deep water had already covered the basement floor of the Valle family home on Wednesday before the unthinkable happened: Ida’s floodwaters broke through a wall and trapped half of the family downstairs. The collapse of the basement wall, caught by a security camera inside, could have been deadly to a Janice Valle and one of her sons. In a matter of seconds, the wall of water had filled the entire basement and trapped both of them in different parts of the basement. The son seen in the shocking camera footage made it to the basements steps safely and escaped the flooding without injury. He and the rest of his family had already been trying to empty the basement of the minor flooding before the situation became unimaginable.

Police went door to door in search of more possible victims and drew up lists of the missing as the death toll rose to 49 on Friday in the catastrophic flooding set off across the Northeast by the remnants of Hurricane Ida. The disaster underscored with heartbreaking clarity how vulnerable the U.S. is to the extreme weather that climate change is bringing. In its wake, officials weighed far-reaching new measures to save lives in future storms. More than three days after the hurricane blew ashore in Louisiana, Ida’s rainy remains hit the Northeast with stunning fury on Wednesday and Thursday, submerging cars, swamping subway stations and basement apartments and drowning scores of people in five states.

The U.S. government’s road safety agency has added another fatality involving a Tesla to the list of crashes it is probing due to the use of partially automated driving systems. A special crash investigation team was dispatched to a July 26 crash on the Long Island Expressway in New York in which a man was killed by a Tesla Model Y SUV, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said on Friday. The death brings to 10 the number of fatal crashes to which the agency has sent a team, nine of which involved Teslas. A total of 12 people were killed. The only fatal crash in which a Tesla wasn’t involved was in March of 2018, when an autonomous Uber test vehicle ran down a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona.