Water Damage Restoration in Bergen County, NJ

Twelve National Weather Service river gauges carry a Bergen County code, and they sit on five different waters: the Saddle River, Hohokus Brook, the Pascack, the Ramapo and the Hackensack. That is an unusually dense gauge network for a county this size, and it exists because these streams rise fast enough that a forecast measured in hours is worth something.

The Ramapo and the Saddle drain steep ground and get to your street quickly. Hohokus Brook at Ho-Ho-Kus goes from its action stage of 2.5 feet to major flooding at 7 feet, a span of four and a half feet, and the Saddle River at Upper Saddle River covers the whole distance from action to major in a foot and a half — 4 feet to 5.5 feet. A river with a foot and a half between nothing-much and major flooding is a river that does not give you an afternoon to decide.

The bottom of the county is a different animal. The Hackensack River gauge at Hackensack city publishes its flood stages in MLLW — mean lower low water, a tidal datum — at minor 7.8 feet, moderate 9.1 and major 10.6, over a drainage area of 131 square miles. A number in MLLW is measured from an average of low tides, not from the bed of the river, which is why a Hackensack reading cannot be compared with a Ramapo reading even though both are printed in feet. Down here the water can be brackish, it arrives with the tide as much as with the rain, and it can come back on the next cycle.

One naming trap worth carrying into any conversation about the Pascack. The National Weather Service labels the Park Ridge and Westwood gauges the “Pascack River”; the US Geological Survey names both of those same stations “Pascack Brook”. Same water, two official names, and search results split between them.

Ask when Bergen's record flood was and the honest answer is that it depends which river you are standing next to. On the Ramapo at Mahwah and on the Hackensack at River Vale, the highest reading in the whole instrumented record is 28 August 2011 — Hurricane Irene. On Hohokus Brook and on the Saddle River at Upper Saddle River, it is 16 September 1999, Hurricane Floyd, and Irene does not come close on either.

The Mahwah series is the long one: 114 annual peaks going back to 1903, and 2011 stands above all of them at 15.77 feet and 18,300 cubic feet per second. River Vale's series starts in 1942, and its top two entries are seven hundredths of a foot apart — 12.26 feet on 28 August 2011 and 12.19 feet in the nor'easter of 16 April 2007. Eighty-four years of record, and the two worst floods in it are separated by less than an inch of water.

That matters practically rather than academically. A neighbor who tells you the worst it has ever been was 2011 may be right about their street and wrong about yours by a whole storm. Two Bergen households can both be describing the correct record and be describing different years.

FEMA's Community Status Book lists 71 Bergen entries, which is one more than the county has municipalities. The extra is the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission, an NFIP community in its own right with its own Community Rating System class of 7 — a regional agency holding a floodplain credential the way a borough does, which is a genuinely unusual arrangement and a useful thing to know if your building sits inside the district.

Sixty-nine of the 71 take part in the program. The two that do not are Englewood Cliffs and Alpine, both recorded as sanctioned, both since September 1996 — two of only six sanctioned communities in the entire state. A sanctioned community is not a paperwork detail: federal flood insurance cannot be written on a property inside it, which means a homeowner there has no NFIP option to fall back on, whatever their carrier says about the rest of the policy.

At the other end, ten Bergen communities hold a Community Rating System class and seven of those earn an actual premium discount inside the mapped high-risk zone, because class 10 earns none. Ridgewood is the county's best at class 6 and a 20 percent discount; Rochelle Park and Oakland hold class 7 and 15 percent; Dumont holds class 9 and 5 percent. That discount is bought by the municipality's own floodplain work, not by the insurer, so if yours is not on the list the reason is at your municipal building.

All 71 entries sit on one effective flood map, dated 28 August 2019, so Bergen is mapped as a single county-wide product rather than town by town. As for cover: 4,203 of the 10,177 residential structures inside the mapped high-risk zone hold a policy, 41.3 percent, against 5,724 of 254,586 structures countywide — 2.25 percent. Most of Bergen's wet basements are in the other 97.75 percent.

Our shop and our crews are in Garfield, which is in this county, on its southern edge. We are not going to attach a number of minutes to that, here or anywhere — nobody here has measured it honestly and a figure we cannot stand behind is worth less to you than a straight answer on the phone. What being based inside the county does change is real but duller: the drying does not end on the first visit, somebody has to come back and re-check it, and coming back is easier from fifteen minutes away than from another county.

The second thing that is genuinely local is the water itself. On the upper Saddle, the Hohokus and the Ramapo, what comes in is fresh water moving fast, and the useful question is how long it sat and what it sat in. Down on the tidal Hackensack it can be brackish, it can have crossed ground before it reached the building, and whether that makes it grossly contaminated is a determination somebody has to make by inspecting the water rather than by reading the weather report. Ask for that determination in writing before anything is demolished, because it decides how much of the building leaves in a skip.

The third is scheduling around a river that is still rising. A basement on a flashy stream can be emptied and take water again that night if the crest has not passed, which is a reason to know your gauge's numbers and not only the forecast for your town. What this company holds — the registration, the insurance, how the crews are employed — is set out on our credentials page, and it is the same in every county.