NJ death toll at 25 & rising

The New Jersey death toll from Hurricane Ida rose overnight to 25 — and will “sadly likely” increase again with at least six people still missing, Gov. Phil Murphy said Friday, as more buildings were razed by fires and explosions and the state faced the threat of renewed flooding.

Among the missing is a firstyear Seton Hall University student, Nidhi Rana, who was possibly last seen with a friend, Ayush Rana, in her hometown of Passaic, the university said in a statement.

“We’re still not out of the woods,” Murphy warned on the “Today” show as he discussed the heartbreaking devastation.

“We still have a lot of damage that we’re dealing with, [and] we still have floodwaters that are significantly higher than normal,” he said of the “historic” storm.

“We’ll get back on our feet — but it may be a long road,” he warned of the devastation suffered across the Garden State.

Murphy noted that the three tornadoes that touched down in the state “did not take any lives” as “everybody went down into the basement and they lived.”

Instead, “all of these deaths are related in either directly or indirectly to flooding in water, either in cars or homes,” Murphy said.

“It’s an absolute tragedy, bless their souls,” he said.

As search-and-recovery efforts continued across the Garden State on Friday, the National Weather Service issued an urban and small-stream flood advisory for sections of central and northern New Jersey.

The devastation continued with a flooded restaurant in Manville completely wiped out in an early-hours explosion — with at least two houses also blazing in the town, NJ.com reported.

“I literally heard the boom and my whole house shook two towns over !!!!!! ” one person wrote on social media of the 2 a.m. explosion that razed the Saffron Banquet Hall.

Firefighters were struggling to deal with the blazes because of extensive flooding that overran

the town.