Northeast deals with cleanup of muck, mud
Ida’s major flooding overwhelmed urban drainage systems
CRANFORD, N.J. — Flood-stricken families and business owners across the Northeast were hauling waterlogged belongings to the curb Saturday and scraping away noxious mud as cleanup from the deadly remnants of Hurricane Ida moves into high gear.
The White House said President Joe Biden will survey storm damage in New York City and New Jersey on Tuesday.
The mud-caked sidewalks of Cranford, New Jersey, were lined with the detritus of the suburban dream: household items and furnishings that once made a cozy home reduced to rubbish by the sudden storm waters that swamped homes, cars and businesses and killed at least 50 people in six eastern states.
This community along the normally placid Rahway River experienced major flooding when Ida arrived in the Northeast with furious rainfall that in places topped 8 inches Wednesday and Thursday.
The main foes during the massive cleanup: muck, mud and sewage.
“The sewer backed up into our basement and now we have to get it deepcleaned,” said Dave Coughlin, one of many residents on his street near the river busily engaged in dragging ruined possessions to the curb.
He and his wife, Christina, were taking their two young children to stay somewhere else temporarily while the cleanup progressed.
“I don’t want them breathing this stuff in or smelling the bleach,” he said.
Ida blew ashore in Louisiana on Sunday tied as the fifth-strongest storm to ever hit the U.S. mainland, then moved north with rain that overwhelmed urban drainage systems.
A record 3 inches poured down in a single hour in New York City, where by Thursday afternoon, nearly 7 ½ inches had fallen, according to the National Weather Service. Eleven people died when they were unable to escape rising water in their low-lying apartments.
In some cases, people tried to flee too late and became trapped by floodwaters gushing so quickly, and with such force, that they could not open their doors to escape. Others might not have fathomed that flash flooding could also transform roadways into raging, impassable streams.
On Saturday, the city opened service centers in each of the five boroughs to connect people with housing, food and mental health counseling. Seventy-seven people displaced by the storm were being housed in hotels, Office of Emergency Management spokeswoman Christina Farrell said.
In Connecticut, funeral arrangements were set for State Police Sgt. Brian Mohl, who was swept away with his vehicle while on duty early Thursday in Woodbury. A wake for Mohl is scheduled for Wednesday in Hartford, where the funeral will be held Thursday.
Mohl, a 26-year veteran of the department, died Thursday after calling for help in Woodbury around 3:30 a.m. saying his vehicle was trapped in rising flood waters from the remnants of Hurricane Ida near the Pomperaug River in Woodbury.
Dive teams found his empty vehicle in the river just after daybreak. Mohl was found an hour later floating farther down the river.
He was pronounced dead during the helicopter flight to Yale-New Haven Hospital.
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said Saturday that Mohl died as a result of “blunt trauma of the torso” and ruled the death an accident.
Floodwaters and a falling tree also took lives in Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey, where at least 26 people perished, the most of any state. Most drowned after their vehicles were caught in flash floods.
Two doors down from the Coughlins on Saturday, a contractor hauled can after can of debris to a large industrial trash container in the driveway. Water trickled down the gutter on both sides of the street, fed by basement sump pumps trying to get floodwater out of homes.
The range of possessions wrecked by the storm and surrendered as trash was heartbreaking: a dining room candle; children’s toys including a sandbox; sodden rugs and carpeting; a patio heater; couch cushions; and a child’s art easel with a rudimentary painting still clipped to it.
“It happened so suddenly,” Christina Coughlin said. “This was so unexpected. We definitely would have prepared more had we known it was going to be this bad.”
Some evacuees from hard-hit New Jersey towns were split on whether they would continued to live here. Some, expressing satisfaction with decent landlords, trusted them to clean up and repair the dwellings. Others, however, had finally had enough and vowed to move.