New Jersey Baby Boomer

This past weekend we had incredible amounts of rain only two weeks after a blizzard that dumped over 2 feet of snow in many places local to us here in our part of Northern New Jersey.  We are up in elevation a bit, and had more than some, and those even higher had even more.

But back to the flooding…our flooding.  We were having a fairly quiet Saturday at home, but I was nervous, because there was a LOT of snow on the mountain across the street from us, and a LOT of rain falling.  My husband set up something to divert water down the side of our house should the torrent come toward us that I told him about…he hasn’t been home for the two other times we’ve had this experience.  As evening came, I noticed the first signs that we may be in trouble, water was no longer being held back in the low spot in the woods, but was beginning to stream across the property across the street, we ate dinner, and suddenly my husband said “water is coming in under the door”, out he dashed with my son  and they spent the next approximately 6 hours keeping drains cleared and diverting water.  I have other pictures for this post, but did show some night shots of water up against our house at http://weedsandseedswap.com. Amazingly, we were able to keep it at bay, but not without a lot of stress and exhaustion, and with the help of the town DPW that was overwhelmed with problems throughout the Township. Things have cleaned up nicely, I was able to throw bedding and towels up against the inside of the door to hold water out, and as of today, all is clean and dry inside, I have no concern about mold because I’ve worked hard to do the things to prevent it…a friend did a nice post about this that you may find helpful at this link.

Sunday after we had done all the cleaning we could, we went “flood hunting”, I didn’t take as many pictures as I would have liked to, but these ones were just down the hill from us in Bloomingdale, you see the river raging past houses, some houses were partly immersed as we passed, others just up to the edge of the home…even as I stood taking the pictures, the water that you see overlapping onto the parking lot spread more and more, we left quickly, not wanting to wait and see how much area it finally covered. Only a couple of blocks away roads were completely closed due to flooding.

Here are the pictures, and my hope that all of you that have received far more damage than we have will receive the help you need.

If you use these pictures for any reason, kindly give credit to newjerseybabyboomer.com, it would be appreciated!