Ah, the joys of summertime in New Jersey! The sun, the flowers, the beaches! But what about the damn leaf blowers? Can we not rid ourselves of this scourge and reclaim the outdoors? What good is a beautiful deck if these monstrous screamers send you fleeing inside behind closed windows every weekend? “I have a beautiful wrap-around porch, and I’ve set it up with chairs with cushions – you could live out there,” says Lisa Mochello, a therapist whose home sits in a leafy section of Highland Park. “I can sit there and listen to the birds, or read a book, or even work out there.” But most days, she says, the demons invade.
Landscaping crews pile out of their trucks, sometimes on both sides of her, and rev up their two-stroke engines, a technology that dates to 1881 and is so filthy it creates as much pollution in a single hour as a modern car does driving 1,100 miles, according to the California Air Resources Board. “When one company leaves, another arrives,” Mochello says, “It’s constant. The noise is so bad.
I can’t even believe it’s legal.” Maybe not for long in New Jersey. Sen.
Bob Smith, the Democratic chairman of the Environment Committee, is pushing a bill that would ban these contraptions , with some exceptions, and provide financial help to ease the transition to electric blowers, which are much cleaner and quieter. His committee approved his bill in June, and he intends to make a fresh push for final approval this fall. “Homeowners love this,.