J’burg a disaster area
Downpours wreak havoc on business district
BY SETH MANDEL
Staff Writer

Raging flood waters ravaged Jamesburg’s business district and forced nearly 60 residents from their homes Sunday night, and it remains unknown how long it will take the borough to rebuild and return to normal.

The borough and other parts of southern Middlesex County were hit with 8 to 10 inches of rain that fell in torrential downpours in less than three hours Sunday.

“Everything is a disaster down here,” said Otto Kostbar, president of the Jamesburg Borough Council.

“Water just started pouring into town from all the high areas, down Forsgate Drive, down Docks Corner Road. All the low-lying areas of town were flooded,” he said, adding that some places downtown were saturated with as much as 4 feet of water.

Within 15 minutes of the flooding, officials and emergency crews were using boats to transport residents from their cars, which were quickly becoming submarines, to dry land, wherever it could be found.

“It was just an unbelievable sight,” Kostbar said. “You had to see it to believe it.”

Residents evacuated from Jamesburg and flooded neighborhoods in surrounding towns spent Sunday night at John F. Kennedy School, where the American Red Cross set up a regional shelter.

A total of 339 residents were evacuated in the flooded areas in and around Jamesburg.

All roads in and out of the borough were closed Sunday night, except the access granted to emergency personnel from all over the county, which included firefighters, police officers and first aid workers from Monroe, Edison, Woodbridge, North Brunswick and Plainsboro.

“We had people come in from all over to help us out,” Kostbar said. “It was a terrific response and I can’t thank our police and fire and emergency services here in town enough. They really worked around the clock.”

One of the police officers who worked around the clock was Pat Smith, despite a dangerous incident that occurred while he was patrolling Forsgate Drive. Smith was standing in front of a county truck when a runaway pool cover caught in the streaming water wrapped itself around Smith’s body, pulled him underwater and began to drag him down Forsgate.

Smith managed to grab onto the back of the truck, stop his momentum and disentangle himself.

Smith, soaked and without a working radio or gun, proceeded to work through the night.

When the rain stopped a few hours later, the water was “like a river” on Forsgate and nearby Willow Street, Kostbar said.

Gatzmer Avenue was flooded, as was Stockton Avenue.

Likewise, borough police headquarters, firehouse, borough hall — all flooded.

And when the waters receded, the heart of Jamesburg’s business district barely resembled its former self.

Dibrizzi’s pizza and ice cream shop, at the corner of Forsgate and Railroad Avenue, was in frightening condition.

“Everything inside was destroyed,” said Christine Gandy, president of the Jamesburg Chamber of Commerce. “They were obviously hit the hardest. Every kind of equipment there, they just can’t use it anymore. They are just frustrated and they have no idea when they’re going to reopen, if they’re ever going to reopen, honestly.”

Dibrizzi’s history in the town makes it a landmark; its consistency, character and multi-generational ownership make its proprietors part of the Jamesburg family. Sunday night made it a personal victim of a tragedy.

“They’ve been a staple of town forever,” Gandy said. “And it’s been a family-owned business, and it’s been passed down from generation to generation. Hopefully, either they’ll change their mind and rebuild or they just might sell. They were just razed in the path.”

Among the other businesses victimized was Heritage Tattoo, a body-art parlor whose instruments must be sanitized and clean. The building was covered in mud, inside and out, by the flood.

“From what an individual at borough hall had told me, they may not rebuild either,” Gandy said.

Wright Travel, an agency in downtown Jamesburg, was also hit hard, as was a local motorcycle shop and several other businesses.

Gandy said some of the business owners did not have flood insurance, and, even if they could afford to pick up the pieces, are intimidated by the possibility of something of this magnitude happening again, without warning or preparation.

“It’s a small community and you have a small business — if you lose a month of time, that could just put you out of business,” Gandy added.

The owners of some businesses, like Senior’s Barber Shop, have resolved to move forward and rebuild, while others were not put in such dire straits by the flood.

A real estate office, right across the street from Dibrizzi’s, was nearly untouched.

“It was a hit or miss, who got hurt,” Gandy said.

One restaurant lost a day’s worth of food when their delivery truck became stranded in the storm.

Kostbar said the dissolution of the water revealed a 10-by-12-foot sinkhole in the center of town that was about 8 feet deep. For the time being, Gandy expected the sinkhole would make it more difficult for business owners trying to move on.

“That obviously is going to hurt businesses, because [customers] are not going to go right through town right now until that gets taken care of,” she said Tuesday.

But Jamesburg will confront this situation as it always does: as a community, Gandy said.

“This is something where everyone’s going to pull together and help each other out,” she said. “Dibrizzi’s has been a staple of town and everybody knows the family. I’m sure if they need anything, the rest of the businesses in the town are going to help them out.”

Most residents who used the Red Cross shelter were allowed back into their homes Monday, and many of them came home to basements full of water, overflowed water heaters, and furnace and structural concerns.

Councilwoman Barbara Carpenter, who is executive assistant at the Monroe Village, said the residents of the first floor of the assisted living facility were relocated to the second floor, and the brand new health care center had 4 inches of water, necessitating even more relocation. There were no reported injuries.

“It’s just basically the cleanup now,” Carpenter said.

And that is a blessing, she said, considering how much rain fell in such a short time, causing floods the facility has never faced in its 17 years in operation.

Rory Zach, emergency management coordinator for Middlesex County, put the storm in perspective.

“We were told by the National Weather Service that we received, at the southern portion of the county, 8 to 10 inches of rain in less than three hours,” he said. “That’s a lot of water, and there was no place for it to go.”

Unlike in September, when Tropical Storm Jeanne flooded Helmetta after a storm drain in the borough collapsed, there was no obvious cause contributing to the enormity, or the viciousness, of this flood.

“There was a lot of guessing going on and finger-pointing going on that it was this, it was that, it was the dams,” Zach said. “Eight to 10 inches of rain in less than three hours, unless you have flood channels like they have out in Los Angeles and Arizona, and places like that to sustain these flash floods once a week, I don’t think you have drainage systems anywhere that are going to handle that kind of water.”

Natural barriers such as hills and berms around the flooded neighborhoods only make the area more susceptible to flooding during heavy rainfall because they add impermeability, Zach noted.

The area’s elevation is another factor, as its grading is significantly lower than that of the surrounding towns.

“Just going out there yesterday with some state reps, you’re kind of standing in front of some of these people’s homes and you’re looking at the railroad tracks that run past the homes at eye-level,” Zach said. “So that tells me that that’s pretty low where you’re standing.”

Part of the mitigation on the part of the county’s emergency management personnel is to answer, or attempt to answer, the question that is currently on everybody’s mind: What can be done to prevent this from happening again?

The answer is not so simple.

Zach said that drainage systems like the flood channels in California and Arizona are not especially cost-feasible, and the area may lack the necessary open space to accommodate them.

“You have to weigh the cost,” he said. “That’s what it all boils down to.”

He advised that residents of the area get flood insurance, if they can, which would lessen the financial devastation if this ever happened again.

But residents may find it difficult to consider the possibility of a repeat performance by Mother Nature.

Carpenter said the shock of the flood is still settling in.

“There was too much rain falling in too little time,” she said. “It’s just unbelievable.”