Water Damage Restoration in Monmouth County, NJ
Four kinds of flood, four sets of gauges, and 20,039 flood claims on the county's file. Our own crews for extraction, structural drying, mold remediation and the rebuild.
Ask where the water comes from in Monmouth and there are four honest answers, and the National Weather Service instruments each of them separately: the open Atlantic at Sandy Hook, Raritan Bay at Keansburg, the tidal rivers behind the barrier beach — the Shrewsbury and the Shark — and the inland rivers, the Manasquan and the Swimming River, which flood from rain like any other Jersey stream.
The claim file agrees. Of 20,039 flood claims under this county's code, 8,631 name tidal water overflow and 8,279 name accumulated rainfall or snowmelt, with only 1,647 naming a stream or river. Those first two are nearly level. Half of this county's flood losses are the sea and half are the sky, and a building near the water can be hit by either in a year.
For the parts of this that do not change with geography — the drying sequence, the mold question, and which documents you should be holding when a job closes — read the statewide water damage page. Everything below is Monmouth.
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 first hours, and what not to throw out — Photograph before anything moves, keep what the insurer has not seen, and the receipts for anything bought to stop the damage spreading.
- Roofing in Monmouth County — If the water came through the roof, the roof is a different line — and in three shore towns the month decides when that work can happen.
The record on this coast is an estimate, and the reason matters
The tide gauge at Sandy Hook has one of the two longest published crest lists in New Jersey — 70 of them, second only to Atlantic City's 71. Minor flooding is 6.7 feet above mean lower low water, moderate 7.7, major 8.7. The record sits at 14.4 feet on 29 October 2012, and the National Weather Service publishes it with a caveat most people never see: it is an estimated value, because the gauge failed at 13.23 feet about an hour before the actual high water, and the crest was reconstructed from a USGS high-water mark roughly 1,500 feet away.
That is worth knowing for a reason that has nothing to do with history. Instruments stop at the top of their range, in exactly the conditions you most want a number from. A flood measured after the fact — by a mark on a wall, a line of silt, a neighbour's photograph — is how the worst events get recorded, and it is also how your own loss gets recorded if nobody takes a photograph before the clean-out starts.
Under the record sit the storms people have stopped naming. Sandy Hook reached 10.08 feet twice: during Hurricane Donna on 12 September 1960, and in the northeaster of 11 December 1992. Irene made 9.76 feet in August 2011, and 7 November 1953 made 9.69. None of those was the storm of the century. All of them were over the major flood threshold.
Bay side and back bay: where the water actually enters
Raritan Bay at Keansburg floods at 7 feet, moderately at 8 and severely at 9, and the published text at 9 feet names the towns it reaches: Aberdeen, Keyport, Union Beach, Keansburg and Middletown Township. Its record is 16.73 feet in October 2012 — and its second-highest crest is 10.83 feet on 25 November 1950, which is older than most of the housing behind it.
Behind the beach the numbers are smaller and the consequences are not. The Shrewsbury River at Sea Bright floods at 5.2 feet, and at 6.0 the gauge's own text puts water at the corner of Ocean Avenue and River Street. Its crest list runs 11.73 feet in October 2012, 9.43 in the December 1992 northeaster, 8.42 in Irene and 7.73 on 6 March 1962. The Shark River at Belmar is the same shape: 13.22 feet at the top, and a moderate-flood statement that names ten municipalities in a row, from Deal and Allenhurst through Asbury Park and Ocean Grove to Bradley Beach, Avon, Belmar and Spring Lake.
Those two three-quarter-century-old dates — 1950 at Keansburg, 1962 at Sea Bright — are the useful ones. A back-bay street does not need a hurricane. It needs an onshore wind sitting on top of an astronomical high tide, which happens far more often than a named storm does, and it is why the second-place entries on these gauges are a better planning tool than the first-place ones.
Inland, and two records that were neither Sandy nor Irene
West of the Parkway the county floods like any other: rain, a crest, and a river that goes down again. The Manasquan River at Squankum carries 94 annual peaks in the USGS record, back to 1932, and its highest is 13.06 feet at 9,100 cubic feet per second on 28 August 2011. Downstream at Allenwood (USGS 01408029, not to be confused with 01408030 next to it) that same crest produced 20.38 feet and 12,600 cubic feet per second, the top of a 56-year book. At the lower threshold, 8.5 feet at Squankum, the published impact is Allaire State Park's trails and parking lots under water — which is the same river, two hours earlier.
Two Monmouth gauges hold records set by storms nobody has heard of. The Shark River near Neptune City peaked at 7.94 feet and 2,340 cubic feet per second on 26 December 1969, still the largest of its 59 annual peaks through 2025. Big Brook near Marlboro peaked at 20.16 feet and 1,370 cubic feet per second on 20 September 1989, the largest of 46 peaks since 1980. Neither was a hurricane and neither has a name.
The Swimming River gauge near Red Bank publishes what happens rather than what it measured: at 8 feet, residential property in Lincroft floods, water reaches Grant Court in Tinton Falls, and the water treatment plant beside the reservoir takes water on. We do not quote a record for that gauge, because its highest stage and its highest flow belong to two different events fifty years apart, and any sentence claiming one record for it would be picking a side.
The one county here where most flooded owners are actually insured
Monmouth is the exception to a rule that holds nearly everywhere else in the state. There are 14,530 residential flood policies in force against 196,460 residential structures — 7.40 percent, several times the rate inland — and inside the mapped high-risk zone it is 70.4 percent, 10,288 policies against 14,605 structures. Even outside the mapped zone, 2.33 percent of structures carry flood cover, which is more than four times what Middlesex manages outside its own mapped zone, at 0.58 percent.
Two other numbers follow from that. Sixteen of the county's 53 municipalities hold a Community Rating System class, and unusually, every one of the sixteen earns a real discount — Belmar and Manasquan at class 5 for 25 percent off policies inside the zone, nine towns at class 7 for 15 percent, and none of them parked at the class-10 rating that earns nothing. And of the $937.5 million FEMA has paid on Monmouth claims, $39.6 million is Increased Cost of Compliance: the payment that exists when a building is declared substantially damaged, or is determined to be a repetitive-loss property, and has to be brought up to the flood standard rather than simply repaired. The same figure in Somerset County is under $350,000.
For a homeowner the practical read is this. In this county, more than in most, the paperwork trail on a water loss is likely to be read by somebody — an adjuster, a floodplain administrator, a lender. That is an argument for photographs and a documented drying record on day one, not week three. What we can do about it is document our own work properly and hand it to you; what happens to your claim after that is between you, your carrier and, if you hire one, your own public adjuster.
| What was counted | Monmouth County | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| NFIP claims on record, 1978 to 2026 | 20,039 | OpenFEMA NfipClaims v3, county code 34025 |
| Of those, closed with a payment | 16,939 | A payment on the building or on contents |
| Paid on those claims | About $937.5 million | Building $800.8m, contents $97.0m, compliance $39.6m |
| Claims naming tidal water overflow | 8,631 | FEMA cause-of-damage code 1 |
| Claims naming accumulated rainfall or snowmelt | 8,279 | Cause code 4 |
| Claims naming a stream, river or lake overflow | 1,647 | Cause code 2 |
| Claims carrying any basement or enclosure code | 8,730 of 20,039 | Blank on the other 11,309 |
| Of those, a finished or unfinished basement or enclosure | 6,377 | Basement codes 1 and 2 |
| Of those, a subgrade crawlspace | 1,176 | Basement code 4 |
| Of those, no basement, enclosure or crawlspace at all | 1,177 | Basement code 0 — slab and elevated construction |
| Largest single episode | Hurricane Sandy, 10,032 claims | FEMA event name; year of loss 2012 |
| Second largest | The December 1992 northeaster, 3,336 claims | Every one dated December 1992 |
| Third largest | Hurricane Irene, 1,662 claims | Year of loss 2011 |
| Residential flood policies in force | 14,530 of 196,460 structures (7.40%) | FEMA's residential penetration file, 3 August 2026 |
| The same, inside the mapped high-risk zone | 10,288 of 14,605 (70.4%) | Same file |
| The same, outside it | 4,242 of 181,855 (2.33%) | Arithmetic on the same row |
| Municipalities holding a Community Rating System class | 16 of 53, every one earning a discount | Community Status Book, refreshed 2026-08-25 |
| Housing units built before 1980 | 154,263 of 270,415 (57.0%) | Census table B25034 (2020-2024), every pre-1980 category |
Two cautions on this table. FEMA's cause-of-damage field permits more than one code on a single claim, so the three cause rows are counts of claims naming that cause and are not shares of a whole. And the basement rows describe only the 8,730 claims where the field was filled in — the lowest coded share of the eight counties with a page here, which is itself a coastal signature: a great many of the buildings in this file have no basement to code.
What the work involves on a building built for the shore
Look again at the basement column. Of the Monmouth claims that carry a construction code at all, 1,177 are on buildings with no basement, enclosure or crawlspace, and 1,176 are on subgrade crawlspaces. Together that is more than a quarter of the coded file, and it is a proportion no inland county comes close to. Monmouth is full of buildings on slabs, on piles, and over crawlspaces — and each of those dries differently from a basement.
A subgrade crawlspace is the hardest of the three and the one most often left alone. It is shallow, it has restricted access, it usually has soil or a vapour barrier over soil rather than a slab, and the ground under it keeps feeding moisture upward long after the standing water is gone. Drying it means getting the water and the saturated material out, then getting the cavity itself to a documented endpoint and coming back to confirm it held — which is the same standard we apply to a basement wall, applied somewhere much less pleasant to work.
Salt is the other coastal difference. Water that came off the bay or up a tidal river leaves salt in absorbent materials, and salt holds moisture in a way fresh water does not. It changes what can be cleaned and kept and what has to come out, and it is one of the reasons the category of the water gets settled by looking at it rather than by looking at the forecast.
After that it is the ordinary job, and one company does all of it — the water out, the material that cannot be saved out, the structure dried and then re-checked, the mold that grew in the meantime remediated, and the building put back. If you are weighing up a call, the fastest useful thing you can send us is photographs of the affected rooms.
- Slab, pile and crawlspace buildings dry differently from basements, and this county is full of them.
- A subgrade crawlspace keeps taking moisture from the ground under it after the water is gone.
- Salt from bay or tidal-river water stays in porous material and holds moisture there.
Common questions
Sandy set the record at every tide gauge in this county. Is that the storm to plan around?
It is the wrong end of the list to plan from. The second-place crests are the ones that recur: 10.83 feet at Keansburg in November 1950, 9.43 feet at Sea Bright in the December 1992 northeaster, 7.73 feet there in March 1962. Inland it is starker — the records at Neptune City and at Marlboro were set in December 1969 and September 1989 by storms with no name at all. A house that only floods in a Sandy floods once in a lifetime. A house that floods at the second-place number floods again.
We are on a crawlspace rather than a basement. Is that better or worse for drying?
Different, and often slower. A subgrade crawlspace is shallow and awkward to work in, it usually sits over soil rather than a slab, and the ground keeps releasing moisture into it after the standing water has gone — so the reading that says it is dry takes longer to arrive and is worth confirming on a second visit rather than assuming. It is also the space most often skipped, because nobody wants to go down there. In this county's claim file 1,176 losses were on exactly that kind of building, so it is not an unusual case here.
Sources
- USGS, annual peak streamflow, Manasquan River near Allenwood (01408029): 56 annual peaks, record 20.38 ft at 12,600 cfs on 2011-08-28 — retrieved
- FEMA, OpenFEMA NFIP Redacted Claims (v3), Monmouth County rows (county code 34025) — retrieved
- FEMA, NFIP Residential Penetration Rates, Monmouth County row (as of 2026-08-03) — retrieved
- FEMA, NFIP Community Status Book, the 53 Monmouth County communities (refreshed 2026-08-25) — retrieved
- US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2020-2024 5-year, table B25034, Monmouth County — retrieved
- NOAA National Water Prediction Service, New Jersey Atlantic Coast at Sandy Hook (SDHN4), 70 crests and the record note — retrieved
- NOAA National Water Prediction Service, Raritan Bay at Keansburg (KSBN4) stages, impacts and crests — retrieved
- NOAA National Water Prediction Service, Shrewsbury River at Sea Bright (SBIN4) stages, impacts and crests — retrieved
- NOAA National Water Prediction Service, Shark River at Belmar (BLMN4) and Swimming River at Red Bank (RDBN4) impact statements — retrieved
- USGS, annual peak streamflow, Manasquan River at Squankum (01408000), 94 annual peaks from 1932 — retrieved
- USGS, annual peak streamflow, Shark River near Neptune City (01407705), 59 annual peaks from 1967 — retrieved
- USGS, annual peak streamflow, Big Brook near Marlboro (01407290), 46 annual peaks from 1980 — 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.