A year since Hurricane Ida: Horror, heroism, anxiety awaiting the next catastrophic storm

It was a night to remember that everyone wants to forget.

On Sept. 1, 2021, Central Jersey awoke to a bright, calm late summer day after a nightmare that had lasted for hours.

A freakish convergence of meteorological forces – the remnants of Hurricane Ida and an advancing cold front – conspired to bring record-breaking rains, feeding flash floods that were worse than the catastrophic flooding from Hurricane Floyd in 1999.

The rain totals were Biblical. In just six hours, from about 6 p.m. Aug. 31 to midnight, 9.45 inches fell in Hillsborough, 9.20 inches in Flemington and 8.44 inches in New Brunswick, according to Rutgers NJ Weather Network. The heaviest downpours were concentrated in a narrow band from Hopewell through Hillsborough northeastward to Newark Liberty International Airport. That band also contains the watershed of the Millstone River and the Raritan River, the state’s longest river.

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Damaging tornadoes were reported in South Jersey and in Central Jersey, many residents huddled in their basements when the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning. In a few hours, many of those basements – dry even in the worst storms – were flooded.

The intensity of the rain overwhelmed stormwater systems. In just three hours, 5.20 inches of rain fell at Duke Farms in Hillsborough, just a few miles from Manville, the community hit hardest in the storm. In one hour alone, 3.33 inches fell.

The rain came with a sudden wicked vengeance as the rush hour was ending and darkness was approaching, setting the scene for heroism and death as motorists on Central Jersey roads found themselves trapped by rapidly rising flood waters.

Some were stranded on major highways like Route 22, and some were trapped on quiet back roads where only hours before, water had barely covered the rocks at the bottom of creeks. The rage of nature took many by deadly surprise.

If the floods were not bad enough, there were natural gas explosions which destroyed houses in Manville and Somerville and leveled Saffron Banquet Hall on South Main Street in Manville.

And Ida arrived just as the COVID-19 pandemic was starting to fade, adding to what seemed to be relentless misery.

President Joe Biden came to Central Jersey and saw firsthand the devastation as he walked the streets of Manville with Gov. Phil Murphy, Mayor Richard Onderko and other elected officials. Some residents cheered Biden; others jeered him.

And now most of the cheers have turned to jeers as the recovery is slow.

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"President Biden was here, Governor Murphy was here. They walked the street with me, and they said they were going to help. Twelve months later, I'm still waiting for help," the Manville mayor told a group of residents at a neighborhood meeting this week.

"What do I tell my residents?" Onderko said. "We deserve better from our federal government."

Horror and heroism

The Ida horror stories, too numerous to remember, defied belief.

Thirty-one-year-old Edison resident Dhanush Reddy was killed when he was swept into a 36-inch storm sewer in South Plainfield. Reddy's body was found the following morning in the next town in a wooded area off Centennial Avenue in Piscataway.

Mark Pavol, a 53-year-old Ringoes resident, drowned when he was swept away by floodwaters after trying to get out of his car on Old York Road in East Amwell because of the flooding of the Neshanic River.

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Barry Snyder, 68, of Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania, was found dead in Milford after his truck became submerged in floodwaters near Javes and Miller Park raods in Holland Township. The truck floated about 1.8 miles down the Hakihokake Creek before it came to a rest near Carpenter Street in Milford.

Daphne Francisca Lopez Del Bono, 30, a Santiago, Chile resident who lived in Ringoes, died when her vehicle became submerged in floodwaters at Amwell and North Willow roads in Hillsborough. The location is nowhere near a river.

Hongxia Li, of Bridgewater, and Ping Fang, of Somerville, drowned in the floodwaters of Peter's Brook at Somerset Corporate Boulevard near the Route 22 intersection. They tried to get out of their car after it was disabled by rising waters but were swept away. The two were found dead in the morning after floodwaters receded.

In all, 30 people were killed in New Jersey. There were six fatalities in both Somerset and Hunterdon counties, five in Union County and three in Middlesex County.

For every tragic death, there was a score of acts of unselfish heroism by both first responders and ordinary citizens. Many of these stories remain untold – neighbors helping neighbors with flooded basements, strangers coming to the aid of strangers threatened by floodwaters. But the stories we know are inspiring and restore faith that in the face of adversity, all differences are forgotten.

“With a year to look back on Hurricane Ida, immediately apparent is the importance of having a caring community and a positive relationship with the state and federal governments,” said Piscataway Mayor Brian C. Wahler. “Volunteer first responders whose own homes were threatened by the severe storm quickly sprang into action to rescue the most vulnerable of disaster victims. Governor Murphy and (Federal Emergency Management Agency) were quickly on the ground working in concert with local officials to help put the lives of these families back together.”

Twenty-year-old UPS driver Nick Dirla, a Bridgewater resident, delivered eight people to safety after they became trapped in the rapidly rising flash flood on Route 22. Just four months on the job, he had just a few more packages to deliver and was heading to his base on Chimney Rock Road and Route 28 in Bridgewater when Route 22 had become a torrent.

He thought he was safe in his truck, but he got stuck near Mountain Avenue in Bound Brook. "There was no place to go," he said. "All the exits were flooded.” But his truck became a lifeboat for the eight people suddenly engulfed by the flood on one of Central Jersey's busiest highways.

Jeff Munsey, the supervisor of Building and Grounds for the Delaware Township School District and a father of triplets, was on his way to check out the district's K-8 school, less than 3 miles from his home in Rosemont. He made it as far as the historic Green Sergeant's Covered Bridge when his Dodge Grand Caravan was swept off the road and into a ditch. He managed to get out of the vehicle, but he couldn't fight the current. He hung onto a tree to avoid being swept away.

"I accepted that I was going to die,” he said. “You always wonder how you are going to die. At that moment, I thought I was going to drown, and it would happen any minute. I prayed to God for it to be as painless as possible and to take care of my wife and boys."

He was hugging a telephone pole when his hero arrived. R.K. Cyktor, 35, a landscaper who lives down the street from Munsey, was out in the storm with his front-end loader assessing the situation. As a volunteer first responder, he received an alert for someone in the floodwaters by New Jersey's only covered bridge where he saw Munsey clinging to the pole.

"He wasn't going to last much longer," Cyktor recalled.” We couldn't wait for any backup to come. I had to improvise."

Cyktor pulled up to the pole. The two communicated with hand signals and Cyktor motioned for Munsey to climb into the front-end loader's bucket. Once in, Cyktor reversed the truck and drove to a spot where Munsey could climb out safely and get into the cab.

"He lifted me up and saved my life," Munsey said. "I don't know how much longer I could have held on."

In South Plainfield, Deputy Fire Chief Lawrence DelNegro and police officer Brian Zielinski rescued a mother and her two children after their car became submerged in a waterlogged ditch off Durham Avenue.

There was a foot of water on Durham Avenue. The mother apparently tried to turn around, but the vehicle floated into a ditch which normally doesn't have water, but that night the water was about 4 or 5 feet deep. DelNegro and Zielinski were able to rescue the two children and the mother in chest-deep water.

"It was really a community that came together," Zielinski said. "There were even bystanders helping other bystanders. It was just one of those situations where you had to jump in and do something. We had a job to do and just did it."

The scale of life-saving rescues in Somerset County reached superhero proportions.

Members of the Somerset County rescue and dive team maneuvered around the county's blocked and water-swollen roadways to rescue 70 people and 16 pets.

Green Brook volunteer firefighters rescued more than a dozen drivers in flood waters on Route 22.

Ten New Jersey state troopers used two helicopters to rescue people throughout Somerset County. Troopers airlifted four people stranded at the Wendy's on Easton Avenue in Franklin. Trooper Christopher Finley was lowered onto the roof of the STS warehouse on East Main Street in Bridgewater next to the TD Bank Ballpark where a person was stranded. A rescue basket hoisted the person onto the helicopter and safety. Trooper Roy Rohel was lowered from the helicopter to walk six people through flood waters on Route 206 in Somerville to a rescue boat safety crew. He then rescued a 78-year-old man whose car was being swept away after trying to cross flooded railroad tracks in Bound Brook.

A Hillsborough police officer helped a Montgomery police officer rescue his wife who was trapped on the roof of her submerged vehicle."The hurricane brought unparalleled flooding and destruction to our area" said Jason Dameo, president of the 200 Club of Somerset County, which honored the rescuers. "Without these men and women, there undoubtedly would have been a greater loss of life."

What's next

Lives can never be replaced, and memories can never be erased. But the property damage from the storm was stunning and with the hurricane season now getting into high gear, the anxiety increases that the next area of swirling disturbed weather in the Atlantic or Caribbean could result in another disaster in Central Jersey.

In total, Ida, a Category 4 hurricane when it hit Louisiana, was the fourth costliest Atlantic hurricane in the United States, causing $75.25 billion in damage.

In New Jersey, according to the state, Ida caused about $2.02 billion in damage. State figures say that in Somerset county, 13,228 insurance claims were made for $164.9 million in losses. In Middlesex County, 14,084 claims were filed for $155.3 million in damages.

The average property loss to owner-occupied homes in Somerset and Hunterdon counties was $6,001, based on applications for FEMA assistance, and $6,114 in Middlesex.

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In Somerset County, 1,224 tenants of rental properties filed for FEMA assistance. That number rises to 2,198 in Hunterdon, 2,350 in Union and 3,054 in Middlesex. In Somerville, more than 150 people lost their homes in Brookside Gardens, a garden apartment complex along the usually placid Peter's Brook. In Piscataway, 69 families were displaced from the Birchview Gardens Apartments.

Businesses were also hard-hit. In Somerset County, according to FEMA, 252 businesses applied for Small Business Loans to help with $144.9 million in damages. In Union County, 383 businesses had $83.6 million in damage, 183 Middlesex County businesses had $23.7 million in damages and in Hunterdon County, 33 businesses reported $7 million in damage.

Throughout Central Jersey, the unexpected force of the flash flooding caused millions of dollars of damage to roads.

In Bridgewater, the Middle Brook trunk sewer line ruptured and a retaining wall on Vosseller Avenue eroded. Portions of roads throughout the township, some in areas that had never seen flooding, were washed away.

“In the hours following the storm we had to begin repair and recovery operations immediately – and then sustain those operations through the following days, weeks and months," said Bridgewater Mayor Matthew Moench. "We had roads and portions of roads that were just destroyed in some cases, and unsafely compromised in others."

In Somerville, the borough's Department of Public Works garage on Fifth Street was inundated and equipment damaged.

The borough is still considering plans for rebuilding and upgrading the portions of Brookside Gardens destroyed in the flood.

Are we ready for the next Ida?

Most scientists say another Ida is inevitable, given the impact of climate change and the continuing development boom in Central Jersey.

“The larger lesson though is that because of climate change, Hurricane Ida will not be a rarity,” Wahler, the Piscataway mayor, said. “Communities all along the Eastern Seaboard need to prepare now for more intense weather. That means making upgrades to storm sewer infrastructure to handle excessive water flow and providing effective emergency shelters like the Piscataway Community Center.”

Manville is still fighting for the type of flood control measures that protected Bound Brook, devastated by Floyd floods, from Ida. But the Army Corps of Engineers has rejected a flood control project for Manville, tucked in the elbow between the Raritan and Millstone rivers, because it would not be cost-effective.

Others see a different route to preventing future disasters.

Environmentalists and municipal officials have launched a campaign calling on Gov. Murphy and the state Department of Environmental Protection to fast-track long promised and delayed critical stormwater and flood hazard rules. The new rules are needed because the present regulations, last updated more than two decades ago, have become outmoded because of changes in climate, flooding and rainfall patterns. The rules would affect future development in the state.

During a visit to Lambertville, DEP Commissioner Sean LaTouette acknowledged the changes. “Are we seeing flooding in areas where we haven’t seen it before?" he said. "The answer is a resounding yes. Ida was a remnant of a tropical depression. A really bad thunderstorm wiped out communities. This is the new reality.”

The DEP announced in May it would adopt rules in June to update flood maps and stormwater regulations, but that has not happened as opposition has arisen from a number of business groups, including the state Chamber of Commerce and the New Jersey Business and Industry Association.

In a letter to Gov. Murphy, the groups said they did not agree "that an imminent peril exists to public health and safety" to necessitate an emergency DEP rule updating the standards for flood elevations, mapping and stormwater calculations. They said the rules would have "dire economic consequences on potentially thousands of projects."

But that argument doesn't hold water with the advocates pushing the state to act.

“Flooding is affecting our families and businesses all too often, and we can’t wait any longer to make necessary changes to protect our communities," said Ed Potosnak, executive director of The New Jersey League of Conservation Voters. “This is exactly why we need the NJ Protecting Against Climate Threats (NJPACT) regulations, to stop the building industry from putting profits before public safety.”

“Whether the shore or inland, one thing all New Jersey shares is the destructive effects of more frequent and more violent storms,” said Bill Kibler, director of policy for Raritan Headwaters. “This is already an emergency, and the governor can’t wait for the next life-threatening crisis to take action. We must have new rules to protect us from climate change and we must have them now!”

Contributing: Staff writer Alexander Lewis

Email: mdeak@mycentraljersey.com

Mike Deak is a reporter for mycentraljersey.com. To get unlimited access to his articles on Somerset and Hunterdon counties, please subscribe or activate your digital account.

This article originally appeared on MyCentralJersey.com: Hurricane Ida: Central NJ still recovering year after storm