Water Damage Restoration in Lodi, NJ
Five minutes from our shop, and the most detailed flood gauge in Bergen County sits in the middle of it. Extraction, drying, mold remediation and the rebuild, done by one crew from the first pump to the last coat.
The Saddle River gauge in this borough — LODN4 to the Weather Service, 01391500 to the US Geological Survey — publishes thirteen impact statements. That is more than any of the twelve gauges the Weather Service codes to Bergen County, where the median is three, and it is more than all but four gauges in a cached set of 221 across New Jersey and its river borders. The four above it are tidal coastal gauges measured against sea level, which is a different instrument doing a different job.
What makes this ladder unusual is not its length. It is that the Weather Service wrote it building by building. Most impact statements are road closures, and a road closure tells you when to stop driving. Four of Lodi's thirteen describe one building at four different heights, a fifth adds its basement, and two more do the same for a school. Read in order they are not a list of places — they are a measuring stick standing in a room.
Underneath the ladder is a claim file. FEMA has 1,028 National Flood Insurance Program claims on record for this borough, dates of loss from 1978 to 2024, of which 901 were closed with a payment on the building, on contents or on both — $28.5 million in all. That is the second-largest claim file of the 69 Bergen County communities that have one, behind Little Ferry and ahead of Rochelle Park. It is also not a count of buildings: an insured building that has flooded four times is in it four times, and a building with no flood policy is not in it at all.
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
The gauge names one building five times
Action at 5 feet, minor flooding at 5.5, moderate at 7, major at 8: those are this gauge's four categories, and they are the least interesting thing on it. Now read what it says happens, in its own words, at five readings spread across four and a half feet of river.
At 5.5 feet: "Saddle River begins to overflow into the back parking lot of the Boys and Girls club." At 6 feet: "Flooding on the Boys and Girls Club parking lot." At 7.5: "Water begins to go up the stairs of the Boys and Girls Club." At 8, which is the top of the scale and the start of major flooding: "Boys and Girls Club flooded." And at 10 feet, two feet above the top of the published scale: "Basement flooding in Boys and Girls Club."
One building, five readings, and between the first and the last the water moves from the far edge of a car park to the treads of a staircase to the rooms themselves. Nothing else in Bergen County's gauge network is written this way, and it is worth knowing about because it converts a forecast number into a height on a wall you can picture.
Two honest cautions about reading it that way. The first is that the statements are written from what observers reported at a given reading, not as a model of how a building fills, which is why basement flooding appears at the top of that sequence rather than at the bottom. The second is that none of it is a statement about your address — it is a statement about one named building and the ground around it, and the distance from that building to your door is not in the data.
The school does the same thing over a shorter span. At 8.5 feet: "Flooding at Washington Elementary School next to Main Street. Water begins to overflow into the parking lot at Felician College." Two and a half feet higher, at 11: "Main Street between Church Street and Union Street closed due to flooding. Water in the basement of Washington Elementary School." Between those two readings the water goes from the grounds to the cellar of the same school, and two and a half feet of river is the whole warning.
Four of this borough's gauge statements are about somewhere else
The gauge is in Lodi and it is named for Lodi. Four of its thirteen statements describe Rochelle Park, the township immediately north, which has no gauge of its own: its municipal building's car park at 6 and 6.5 feet, the roads by its swim club and that whole car park at 8, and at 10 feet the swim club's pool and courts. A fifth mentions Saddle Brook.
That is not a quirk of drafting. It is the shape of the problem. A river reading is a reading on a river, and the Saddle River runs through several municipalities before and after it passes this one, so the height that puts water in a Lodi cellar is the same height that is doing something to a building a mile upstream. Two practical consequences follow, and neither is obvious.
The first is that on the night it matters, the crews, the pumps and the drying equipment in this corner of the county are being asked for by several towns at once, because they are all reading the same number. The second is that if your street is not named anywhere in the thirteen, that is not reassurance — it is an absence of observation. The Weather Service writes these statements from what somebody reported; a street nobody reported is simply a street nobody reported.
| Measure | Lodi | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Flood claims on record, 1978 to 2024 | 1,028 | OpenFEMA NfipClaims v3, rated community 340047 |
| Rank among Bergen communities with claims | 2nd of 69 | Behind Little Ferry only; the Meadowlands Commission district holds 827 |
| Closed with a payment | 901 | Rows where FEMA recorded any payment at all |
| Total paid | About $28.5 million | Buildings $22.0m; contents $6.5m; compliance $7,450 |
| Worst year on record | 2011, with 191 claims | Behind it: 2007 on 153, 1999 on 126, 1984 on 112 |
| Largest single events | April 2007 nor'easter and Irene, 150 each | FEMA's own event names; an exact tie |
| Filed under no storm name | 239 | 121 as "Not a named storm", 118 as "Flooding" |
| Claims carrying a basement code | 654 of 1,028 | Left blank on the other 374 rows |
| Of those, on a finished basement | 356 (54.4%) | Against 4,386 of 9,166 coded, 47.9%, countywide |
| Properties bought, raised or floodproofed | None | FEMA's mitigated-properties file has no Lodi row at all |
| Community Rating System class | 10 | One of three in Bergen; class 10 earns no discount |
| Housing units | 10,108 | Census table B25034, 2020-2024 |
| Built before 1980 | 8,376 (82.9%) | Table lines 007-011 only; Bergen as a whole is 73.8% |
| Built in 1939 or earlier | 1,686 (16.7%) | Same table; 19.3% is the figure for Bergen |
The mitigation row was checked three ways rather than once, because a zero from a single query is weak evidence: by this borough's ZIP codes, by asking FEMA's file for the city name directly, and by reading every Bergen County row in it. All three return nothing. The basement rows use FEMA's published code list — 0 none, 1 finished basement or enclosure, 2 unfinished, 3 crawlspace, 4 subgrade crawlspace — and the 374 blanks are shown rather than dropped, because dropping them would push the finished-basement share to a number the file does not support.
A thousand claims, a class that buys nothing, and not one buyout
Three facts about this borough sit oddly together, and putting them side by side is the most useful thing this page can do with the paperwork.
Lodi holds a Community Rating System class of 10. Only 109 of New Jersey's 560 listed communities hold any class at all, so holding one is not nothing — but 10 is the bottom rung, and it is the one class that earns a property owner no premium discount whatever. Eighteen communities statewide hold it, three of them in this county: Lodi, Garfield and Englewood. What that class is bought with is set out on the Bergen County water page, and the short version is that it is earned by a municipality's own floodplain work rather than granted by an insurer.
Second, FEMA's mitigated-properties file — the record of every building the federal government has helped buy out, raise or floodproof — contains no Lodi property. Not a small number: none, under three separate ways of asking. Two Bergen municipalities account for most of the county's mitigation between them, and this borough, with the county's second-largest claim file, is not in the file at all.
Third, the finished-basement share. 356 of the 654 coded claims here are on a building with a finished basement — carpet, pad, insulated stud walls, base trim, sometimes a bathroom and a boiler in the corner — against 47.9 percent across the county on the same field. More than half of what has flooded in this borough was a room somebody had furnished.
Put together those three say something plain. Nothing structural has been done about Lodi's flooding, the borough's floodplain standing earns its owners nothing back, and the rooms taking the water are the expensive kind. Whatever gets decided in a wet cellar here gets decided without any of those three helping, which is a reason to make the rebuild decisions deliberately rather than quickly.
What a finished Lodi cellar costs you in time
Eight in ten homes in this borough predate 1980 and one in six predates 1940, and more than half of the coded claims are on a finished basement. That combination — old fabric, new-ish finishes over it — is the specific thing a crew walks into here, and it is slower than either one alone. What a soaking does to the basement window and the frame around it is a separate job with its own answers, and it is covered on our Lodi windows and glass page.
A finished basement hides the assembly that has to dry. Water wicks up behind the base trim into the bottom of the drywall and then into the stud bay, and the insulation in that bay holds it. From the room the wall can read dry to the hand and be saturated eight inches up behind the paint. The decision is not whether the room looks bad; it is how far up the wall the material has to come off so that what is left can actually be dried, and that call is made with a meter and with the trim already removed, not from the doorway.
The floor is the other half. Carpet and pad over a slab is a straightforward call, but engineered or laminate plank over an underlayment traps water between two layers that both resist drying, and a slab that has been wet under a sealed floor will keep releasing moisture into the room for weeks after the surface reads dry. Where the finish was installed over sleepers or a subfloor there is a cavity, and a cavity nobody opened is where a smell comes from in March.
Then there is what is behind the finished part. In pre-1980 stock the furnace, the water heater, the panel and often the laundry are in the unfinished half of the same cellar, on the floor, because that is where they have always been. Equipment that has been submerged is judged on its own and replaced rather than dried and switched back on. What the law requires before any of that material is torn out of a house this old — the paint rules, the presumption about flooring laid up to 1980 — is the same in every municipality and is written out in full one level up.
The part that is worth deciding here and nowhere else is what goes back in. The 2011 file says a room that flooded will probably be wet again, and the honest question at the rebuild is not how to make it look the way it did, but which finishes, mounted how high, and where the mechanical equipment lives afterwards. That is far cheaper to answer while the wall is still open, and it is the conversation to have at the estimate.
- A finished wall can read dry to the hand while the stud bay behind it is still wet.
- Plank flooring over a slab traps water between two layers that both resist drying.
- The mechanical equipment is usually in the same cellar, on the floor, and it is judged separately.
Common questions
The Saddle River at Lodi is forecast to reach a number of feet. What does that actually mean for my house?
It means whatever the Weather Service's statement for that reading says, and for this gauge those statements are unusually specific: thirteen of them, several naming a single building at successive heights. Look up the one for the forecast reading rather than the flood category, because "moderate flooding" is a label and "water begins to go up the stairs of the Boys and Girls Club" is a picture. Two limits go with that. The statements describe named buildings and roads, not your address, and the distance between the two is not in the data. And a street that appears nowhere in the thirteen has not been declared safe — it has only never been reported on. If your block has flooded before, that history is better evidence about your house than the absence of a sentence about it.
Sources
- FEMA, OpenFEMA NFIP Redacted Claims (v3), Lodi borough rows (rated community 340047) — retrieved
- FEMA, OpenFEMA data dictionary, NfipClaims cause-of-damage and basement code lists — retrieved
- NOAA National Water Prediction Service, Saddle River at Lodi (LODN4): flood categories and all thirteen impact statements — retrieved
- US Geological Survey, annual peak streamflow, Saddle River at Lodi (01391500), 102 peaks — retrieved
- FEMA, NFIP Community Status Book, Lodi's Community Rating System class and the 18 New Jersey class-10 entries — 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, Lodi borough — 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.