IRENE Leaves Behind Massive Flooding; Claims 23 Lives

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From Coastline to Mountains, Water Fast and Lethal

In southern New Jersey, a 20-year-old woman called her boyfriend early Sunday to tell him that she was trapped in her car with water that was up to her neck. Then she called the police. Her body was found about eight hours later, still inside her car, which had been swept away during a flash flood on Route 40 in Salem County.

Farther north in the state, a postal inspector waded through a flooded road as he tried to get to the building in Kearny where he worked. He apparently stepped into an unseen drainage ditch and was sucked into 10 to 12 feet of flowing water, the Kearny police said. His body was found 100 yards from the entrance to the building.

Small towns across the Catskills, including Windham, Margaretville, Tannersville, Prattsville and many others suffered devastating floods with many downtowns underwater.

“We’ve been crushed up here,” said Shaun S. Groden, the administrator for Greene County, which includes some of the flooded towns. “We have major flash floods. We have bridges that have been blown out. We have people stranded, people who have gone up to the second floor of their homes.”

In New York City, Tropical Storm Irene’s winds did not come close to meeting expectations, which meant that there was no sea of shattered glass from Manhattan’s forest of high-rise buildings and no waves of water cascading across low-lying neighborhoods.

But the storm’s legacy — touching towns including Fairfield, Conn., and Fairfield, N.J., and rural hamlets in the mountains of upstate New York and as far north as Vermont — is likely to be an extraordinary onslaught of flooding that is still playing out as some rivers continue to rise in an already waterlogged region.

In Vermont, Gov. Peter Shumlin said the state had “a full-blown flooding catastrophe on our hands,” and the state police were urging residents in some particularly hard-hit communities to climb as high as they could in their homes.

While New York City was largely spared, another major urban area, Philadelphia, was not. The Schuylkill River, which runs through the city, reached 13.56 feet on Sunday, the level of moderate flooding. The record, 17 feet, was set in 1869. Floodwaters steadily crept up the main thoroughfare of the Manayunk neighborhood along the Schuylkill. “This is the highest we have ever seen it,” said one resident, Christiane Wuerzinger, 48, who has lived in the area for seven years. “My daughter said, ‘How will we get to CVS? Will we have to take a boat?’ It’s like Venice.”

In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie said that the state escaped major damage along the coast from the storm, but residents in low-lying areas near rivers and streams faced ominous threats in the coming days from serious inland flooding conditions, particularly along three major rivers, the Delaware, Ramapo and Passaic. The Ramapo, in particular, was expected to reach record levels.

“This storm is transitioning into a flooding event,” Mr. Christie said. “Some rivers have not crested yet.” And, as is often the case, long after the drama of wind-lashed shorelines has passed, residents far from the coast will be dealing with the effects of catastrophic flooding from the storm.

In Hoboken, N.J., people took to the streets to photograph their widely submerged city, including one group paddling a makeshift plywood raft past the brick row houses on Jefferson Street.

For some the flooding proved deadly.

Celena Sylvestri, 20, of Quinton, N.J., was driving to her boyfriend’s house early on Sunday on Route 40 in Salem County when she was caught in floodwaters. The car, with her body inside, was found about 50 feet into the woods off the road, the police said.

The drowning victim in Kearny, who apparently was also trying to escape from a submerged car, was identified as Ronald Dawkins, 47, a Postal Service supervisor.

For some people, flooding was a risk they had come to expect.

In Lindenhurst, Long Island, South Ninth Street is a short block bounded by a canal that leads to the Great South Bay on the south side.

Herb Otten, 73, a retired airline mechanic, said he had lived there for 33 years but was stunned by just how much flooding the storm caused.

“I never saw anything like this in my life,” Mr. Otten said. “White-capped water driving down the block starting from 6:30 to 7 a.m. this morning.”

For others, the flooding came as a total shock.

Mr. Groden, the Greene County, N.Y., administrator, said the National Guard was needed to rescue 21 people who had moved to the second floor of a hotel in Prattsville. After conditions were found to be too windy for a helicopter, the Guard used Humvees and other military vehicles.

“This was a flood of historic volume,” he said. “No one remembers anything like it before.”

Even in New York City, flooding led to moments of tension.

Mousa Tadrose, 44, who lives in a ground-floor apartment on Saybrook Street on Staten Island with his wife and two young sons, is a new immigrant from Egypt.

When he looked out his front door at about 7 a.m., it was raining and there was about a foot of water in the street. Within an hour, the water was up to his stomach.

“I suddenly saw a lot, a lot, a lot — the water is increasing, increasing, increasing,” Mr. Tadrose recalled. “So I go out to my neighbor’s near to me and I carry my two kids and my wife is walking through the water.”

From a neighbor’s house, they notified authorities and were evacuated by raft, Mr. Tadrose said.

For many people living in flood-prone areas, the worst is still to come, officials said.

Larry Ragonese, a spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, said virtually all of the state’s rivers and streams were expected to reach record or near-record levels because of the combination of the storm and an unusually rainy August. Particularly worrisome spots, Mr. Ragonese said, included the Passaic Basin in areas including Pompton Lakes, Lincoln Park, Little Falls, Wayne and Paterson; the Delaware River at New Hope, Pa., Trenton and Lambertville; and the Raritan River Basin around Bound Brook.

“This is one of those cases where the storm is over,” he said, “but there’s still a lot more water coming.”


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Sources: MSNBC, NY Times, Google Maps