Les LK emailed me this picture.
This is the post office in the middle of his town. His tax returns are in a flooded mailbox there.





How did you others do through the storm?

Tax day this year is the 17th, due to a holiday in the District of Columbia and the fact that April 15th fell on a Sunday...

Southern Maine got hammered yesterday. Central Maine Power has 121,000 customers(almost ice storm of 1998 like numbers)down at this point. Most along the coast where gusts of wind(some over hurricane force) battered the shoreline along with 3 to 6 inches of rain. Today my area is supposed to get 60mph gusts, 50 miles north of here is supposed to get 4 to 8 inches of snow The best part, I'm supposed to work outside today

hey, our office and shop used to be in that building behind the post office...the one attached to the smoke stack.

I thought my back-yard and garage lakes were bad...

Ian A.

I'm assuming that is in Jersey, what town?
We have a few rivers that spilled their banks up in North Jersey, but nothing that looks that bad.

Just finished my taxes. The IRS said Monday night that people in the Northeast have until April 19'th to get their returns in, if they were delayed by the April 16'th storm.

In my backyard about 200' away, is the Rahway River. The water from the river was about 10' away from the house yesterday afternoon because of flooding. No, I am not kidding. It was worse than when Hurricane Floyd came though eight years ago.

I believe LK is in New Brunswick.

I am a volunteer firefighter in the town just south of New Brunswick, from 15:00 Sunday until about 17:00 on Monday we ran about 85 calls. Most were flooded basements, two car fires at 4:00 AM (Suspicious???) The worst one I saw was a homeowner who said as we were walking up "I don't think you can help me", opened his Bilco doors and water was coming out, he had about 7' of water in the basement. The other bad ones had about 3'. I liked the ones who were in a panic over an inch or two. As we were walking into houses we were asking people how many feet of water they had, anything under a foot, call a plumber in the morning, as we shut down the furnace and water heater.

I believe you could've helped him JCooper. If you had enough sections of 4" hard suction hose, you probably could have pumped water out of people's basements with your deptartments fire truck.

Seriously, this is a terrible ordeal for all involved. I hope everyone affected can dry out asap, and recover.

Luke, I believe our FD does or did do exactly that.
-Will

I saw the picture of route 18 underwater on the cover of the Ledger before. Holy... that definitely didn't happen after Floyd!

I had about an inch in my basement. No real damage to anything, just some soaked cardboard boxes. I had a small water pump and a wet/dry vac, and the sump pump was working overtime. I didn't even think to call the fire dept for this. Only reason I even had water was that the power wnt down for 3 hours, and the sump pump couldn't work. Turns out my local substation flooded...

My department didn't do any pumping, another department in our district has four portable pumps, each one moves about 120 gpm, there were some houses where they set up two and it took two hours to pump them out. We were trying to figure out how to hook some hard suction up to our brush truck, that moves around 200gpm. If we could get enough hard suction, and get a prime going, and hooked up to our engine we would be moving 1500gpm, dry in no time!

Just be careful you don't shred the crap out of your truck when debris passes through the pump.

No worries there, hard suction hose comes with strainer/float devices to circumvent those type of anomalies from happening.

It isn't the pump you have to worry about, it is the basement. We had several basements collapse when being pumped because the water pressure in the ground was greater than the strength of the basement walls.
Alan--

Another department had that problem, one basement only had a few inches of water, but a four foot section collapsed due to the outside water pressure.

Boundbrook, & Manville were hit hard, NJ Transit is still out in Bound Brook. Both of these towns were hurt bad in '99 hurricane Floyd. There is an ongoing flood control project (Army Corp), but it is not finished due to lack of funding.

Wayne, Paterson, Little Falls are also hurting (Passaic River). Still some road closings in that area. I live in Ocean County (Brick) on a lagoon, & had no issues.

I feel for the people in the affected areas, as I saw the devastation from Floyd in '99.

John

Up here in North Jersey there were a couple of road closings, the one that affected me directly was Rt. 23 in Wayne in the vicinity of the Pompton River.

The Pompton River crosses Rt. 23 downstream of the ACOE project (link below) that was recently completed to alleviate flooding in Oakland.
http://www.nan.usace.army.mil/business/prjlinks/flooding/oakland/index.htm
A lot of people have said that the flooding problem that the project was supposed to fix, just transferred the problem to downstream of the new $21.6 million flood gates. ACOE released a press release saying that is not the case and the new dam functioned as it was designed to and that the flooding downstream would have happened anyway.
Which way to think is hard to decide.
All I think is that when you open a dam to let more water flow that there will be a backup downstream if the area is not ready for the added flow that was given by the flood gates opening.

I was just on this dam today, my company installed the cameras on it.

I was unlucky enough to by flying into Maine last monday, right in the middle of the storm... Flights got cancelled, the airlines screwed up the rebookings. What should have been two quick 40 minute hops and an arrival at my hotel before noon turned into a 22 hour ordeal on two different airlines and involving 4 different cities and an eventual 2AM arrival that I consider myself lucky to have gotten. Fun!