Water Damage Restoration in Garfield, NJ
This city has no river gauge of its own. The one that governs it sits across the water in Clifton, and it names six Garfield streets by name. We extract, we dry, we remediate mold, and we rebuild what came out — the same crew the whole way.
Garfield sits on the Passaic River and has no gauge on it. The nearest instrument is downstream at Dundee Dam, on the Clifton bank — DDCN4 to the Weather Service, 01389890 to the US Geological Survey — and it is coded to Passaic County rather than to this one. That sounds like a technicality until you read what it publishes, because six of its ten flood-impact statements are about streets in this city.
A gauge in another county, in another city, across a river, is the document that tells Garfield what is coming. Nobody is going to send you that, and the local flood conversation here is mostly about the Passaic in general terms rather than about a ladder of readings with street names attached to each rung. The ladder exists. This page is what is on it.
Behind it is a claim file that is smaller than the neighbours' and shaped differently: 359 National Flood Insurance Program claims on record for this city, dates of loss 1978 to 2023, 308 of them closed with a payment, $5.73 million paid in all. That is 16th of the 69 Bergen County communities that have a claim file, and the average claim is a little over half the county's — a fact worth a section of its own, because it is the most practical thing in Garfield's data.
What we do
- Water extraction and structural drying — our own crews, not a dispatch network
- Mold remediation — remediation of what the water left behind
- Sewage and flood cleanup — water that came up through a sewer or across the ground
- Rebuild after the damage — the same company puts the building back
- All 21 New Jersey counties — the shop and the crews are in Garfield, Bergen County
- Paid by insurance or by you — we document the loss and the work; we do not handle the claim
Six of ten statements, and where they start
Every one of the six readings that names this city is at or above 6 feet, and three of them are above the 7-foot major flood stage. That is the first useful thing: the Dundee Dam gauge starts describing other places well below the level at which it starts describing Garfield, so a reading that is already producing flooding downstream can mean nothing here yet.
The ladder, from the bottom of the Garfield range up. At 6 feet the statement names Riverside Place and Somerset Street. At 6.5: "River Drive in Garfield becomes impassable. Cambridge Avenue in Garfield begins to flood, including residential properties. Pulaski Park in Paterson is submerged with water." At 7 feet it turns to houses, naming a run of homes between two streets on this side of the river. At 8: "Flooding stretches to Palisades Avenue in Garfield. Flooding stretches to 3rd Street in Paterson." At 9, the top of the published ladder, it names Outwater Lane near River Drive, along with roads in Paterson and an industrial area in Elmwood Park.
Two and a half feet of river separate the first Garfield street on that list from the last. Everything the city has to decide on a rising night happens inside that band, which is narrow, and the statements are written in the order the water gets there — which is exactly the order in which you would want to move things, if anybody had told you the list existed.
The statement at 8.5 feet is one sentence long
Between the Palisades Avenue reading and the Outwater Lane reading there is a rung with nothing else on it. The Weather Service's entire impact statement at 8.5 feet is this: "Midland Avenue in Garfield is flooded."
Our shop is on Midland Avenue. We are not going to dress that up, and we are specifically not going to tell you it means our building goes under at 8.5 feet, because the data does not say that and neither do we. It says the street floods. What it does mean is that the ladder on this page is not research we did about somebody else's town — it is the same document we read.
And that is the useful half, because it makes the limit of these statements obvious in a way an abstract caution never does. Midland Avenue runs most of the way across the city. The statement does not say which end of it, it does not say how deep, and it does not say anything at all about any particular address on it, including ours. A street name on a flood gauge is a report that somebody once saw water on that street at about that reading. It is a good reason to go and look at your own block's history. It is not a measurement of your property, and anybody who converts one into the other — including a contractor — has left the data behind.
The honest use of a statement like that is narrow and real: it gives you a number to watch and a rough order of events, so that the decision to move what is in the cellar gets made on a reading rather than on the look of the sky. If your street is in the six, you have that. If it is not, the absence means nobody reported it, which is not the same as safety.
| Measure | Garfield | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Flood claims on record, 1978 to 2023 | 359 | OpenFEMA NfipClaims v3, rated community 340037 |
| Rank among Bergen communities with claims | 16th of 69 | Counted on the same field, statewide |
| Closed with a payment | 308 | Rows carrying a non-zero payment on building or contents |
| Total paid | About $5.73 million | Of that, $5.20m on buildings and $0.53m on contents |
| Average paid per claim | $15,958 | Against $29,867 across Bergen County |
| Worst year on record | 2011, with 124 claims | A third of everything on record, in one year |
| Largest single event | Hurricane Irene, 111 claims | Then Floyd (52), Ida (46), the 2007 nor'easter (44) |
| Claims carrying a basement code | 306 of 359 | Left blank on the other 53 rows |
| Of those, on something below grade | 304 | 185 unfinished, 109 finished, 10 subgrade crawlspace |
| Properties bought, raised or floodproofed | None | No Garfield row in FEMA's mitigated-properties file |
| Community Rating System class | 10 | The class that earns no premium discount |
| Housing units | 11,846 | Census table B25034, 2020-2024 |
| Built before 1980 | 9,634 (81.3%) | Lines 007-011 only; 73.8% across the county |
| Built in 1939 or earlier | 3,544 (29.9%) | Same table again; the county records 19.3% pre-1940 |
The two averages are calculated the same way — every dollar FEMA records as paid on buildings, contents and increased cost of compliance, divided by every claim row, paid or not — so they are comparable. They are not a measure of what a flood costs to put right: an unpaid claim still divides into the total, roughly one row in seven here, and an uninsured building never appears at all. Nothing appears in the mitigation file for this city under any of three separate queries: its ZIP, its name, and the whole of Bergen County.
Why the average claim here is half the county's
Sixteen thousand dollars against the county's thirty is a wide gap, and it is the kind of number that gets read as good news. It is worth being careful about what it is actually saying.
Two things are in it. The first is what got wet. 304 of the 306 coded claims in this city are on a building with a basement, an enclosure or a subgrade crawlspace — very nearly all of them — but only 109 of those are on a FINISHED basement. The rest is unfinished cellar: slab, block, mechanical equipment, storage. A soaked unfinished cellar produces a real bill and a much smaller one than a soaked finished room, because there is no drywall, no insulation in the bay, no flooring assembly and no trim to take off and put back.
The second is contents. Of the $5.73 million paid here, $533,000 — a little over nine percent — went on contents, which is a strikingly low share. That fits a city of two-family houses whose below-grade space is a utility room rather than a den, and it also fits the harder reading: a policy that covers the building but not what is in it pays nothing on what is in it, and a lot of what is in a Garfield cellar is somebody's tools or somebody's washer.
So the honest translation of the average is not "floods here are mild". It is that the typical Garfield flood claim is an unfinished cellar with mechanical equipment in it, and the shape of that job is different from the finished-basement job a mile away. It is faster, it turns much more on the equipment than on the finishes, and the single decision that costs the most is whether a submerged furnace, water heater, panel or air handler goes back into service. It does not. Putting a wet unit back is the one shortcut that turns a flood into a second event weeks later.
Three houses in ten here were built before 1940
29.9 percent of this city's 11,846 housing units date from 1939 or earlier, against 19.3 percent across Bergen County. That is the number that changes what a tear-out costs in time rather than in money, and in a city where almost every claim is a below-grade one it applies to almost every job.
A cellar of that age is not a modern basement. In the oldest stock the foundation walls are stone or rubble, with block above them and a slab poured later than the walls it sits inside. Those walls hold water in their joints and voids rather than shedding it, so they carry moisture long after the air in the room reads dry, and a meter reading taken at chest height says very little about what is happening at the footing. The wall-to-slab seam is where water sits, and it is where it comes back from.
The stair is the other thing. In a 1920s two-family the cellar stair is narrow, often has a turn in it, and is the only route for contents coming out, for panels coming out and for equipment going back in. That is worth saying at the estimate rather than discovering on day two, because it is the difference between a two-day removal and a four-day one and it is invisible from the top of the steps.
What the law requires before any material comes out of a house this old — the two paint regimes, the presumption about flooring laid up to 1980, where the emergency exception stops — does not vary between municipalities and is set out on the statewide water damage page rather than restated here. What is worth deciding in this city and nowhere else is what goes back into a cellar the 2011 file says will probably be wet again: where the mechanical equipment sits afterwards, and how far up the wall anything absorbent is allowed to start. That is a rebuild question, it is far cheaper answered while the wall is open, and it is the one to raise when we come and look.
- A rubble or stone cellar wall holds water in its joints long after the room reads dry.
- Almost every coded claim in this city is below grade, and most of that space is unfinished.
- A submerged furnace, water heater or panel is judged on its own and is not dried and switched back on.
Common questions
Why is the flood gauge for Garfield in Clifton, and does that make it less useful here?
It is at Dundee Dam because that is where the dam and the measuring station are — gauges sit where the river can be measured, not where the municipal boundaries are, and this one is coded to Passaic County even though six of its ten impact statements describe streets in Garfield. It is not less useful for being on the other bank; the water it is measuring is the same water. The one thing to be careful about is that its lower readings describe places downstream and across the river, so a reading below 6 feet can be doing something somewhere else and nothing here. Read the statement for the forecast reading rather than the flood category, and read the whole ladder once in daylight before you ever need it.
Sources
- FEMA, OpenFEMA NFIP Redacted Claims (v3), Garfield city rows (rated community 340037) — retrieved
- FEMA, OpenFEMA data dictionary, NfipClaims cause-of-damage and basement code lists — retrieved
- NOAA National Water Prediction Service, Passaic River at Clifton (Dundee Dam) (DDCN4): flood categories and all ten impact statements — retrieved
- FEMA, NFIP Community Status Book, Garfield's Community Rating System class and effective map — retrieved
- FEMA, Hazard Mitigation Assistance Mitigated Properties (v4), queried by ZIP, by city name and across Bergen County — retrieved
- US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2020-2024 5-year, table B25034, Garfield city — retrieved
Water in the building?
Tell us what happened and what you can see. Pick “Water Damage” and we will come back to you about extraction, drying and what the rebuild involves.