As the anniversary of Superstorm Sandy arrives there will be many stories looking back

So many of those stories will deal with the human element. How homes and towns are still fighting to recover, how people have have their lives turned upside down and are nowhere near back to normal.

But did you know for one major area Sandy turned out to be a great thing? It's true, something most of us never think about, the watershed for the Meadowlands. According to Bill Sheehan, of the environmental group Hackensack Riverkeeper, the storm helped the Meadowlands which in turn helps protect us for a possible next big storm:

It also swept away accumulations of dead marsh grasses and the kind of human debris that has made the Meadowlands notorious: tires, old oil drums and soda cans tossed from passing cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. In the months after the storm, Sheehan, who captains boat trips out on the Hackensack and its environs, noticed new growth of native cordgrass in places like Saw Mill Creek, where it had never been before.

"Thousands of square feet of former barren mudflats are showing signs of life," he said. Sheehan says even major storms are nothing new for a tidal marsh, and can have a "purging effect" on the landscape.

There is more, so much more to this article on how exactly the water table in the Meadowlands helps keep so many things in nature copacetic round these here parts. We'd encourage you to read the full article and give some thought to the whole region and how things work, not just cities and towns.

Crowne Plaza hotel in Secaucus--Apparently dumping sewage laced water into the Hackensack River

Here's a story of a fine corporate community citizen; According to the New Jersey Attorney General, the Crowne Plaze hotel in Secaucus was dumping raw sewage from the hotel into the Hackensack River via a special pipe system the hotel staff had set up. Hackensack Riverkeeper Bill Sheehan, one of the heroes of this story (the other being the citizen who stopped Sheehan ont he street and told him of the nefarious piping), found out that the Crowne Plaza employed a underground tunnel system in which raw sewage leaking from hotel pipes was flushed into the river.

According to New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram:

"...hotel staff rigged a pump in a grate-covered pit beside the hotel to run the sewage-laced wastewater through a hose and across a grassy area to the riverbank."

Assholes.

Of course the Crowne Plaza is simply shocked by the news. They claim they had no idea the pipes carrying the sewage from their place to the river existed. They issued the boilerplate 'no way--we simply can't believe this since we're such upstanding community citizens' load of legalese crap. They even had the guts to trot out the "but but *sniff* if we're forced to pay the huge fines that could come down we're not sure if we could continue to employ the 200 Hudson County residents we do now" teary-eyed self pity.

Again, assholes.

Go get 'em Anne Milgram and thank you Bill Sheehan, you both are doing the public proud on this one.