Water Damage Restoration in Passaic County, NJ
In most of New Jersey the water that floods a basement is rain that could not drain. In Passaic County it is more often a river. We take the water out, dry the building, remediate the mold and put it back together.
Passaic County is where the Ramapo, the Wanaque and the Pequannock have already become the Pompton, and the Pompton meets the Passaic, and all of it then has to squeeze past Little Falls and over the Great Falls at Paterson. Everything upstream of that arrives here, and there is only one way out.
You can see that in FEMA's own paperwork rather than on a map. Of the 14,385 flood claims on record in this county, adjusters coded 6,077 to a stream, river or lake leaving its banks and 5,689 to rainfall or snowmelt piling up. Only two of New Jersey's twenty-one counties put the river ahead of the rain that way, and this is the one with the wider gap — and with 6,077 river-coded claims, the largest count of them anywhere in the state. In neighboring Bergen the order is the other way round, and in Hudson rainfall outruns the river by four to one.
The practical difference is warning and repetition. Rain that cannot drain floods you during the storm and stops when it stops. A river floods you some hours after the rain has ended, upstream of you, and it can do it again on the next crest. What follows is what that means for a building here; the process itself — how drying is judged finished, what makes water contaminated, mold, older-housing rules, permits, claims and contracts — is on the statewide water damage restoration page and does not change from county to county.
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
A river gauge with a record starting in 1810
At Dundee Dam in Clifton, on the county's southern boundary, the US Geological Survey keeps a gauge on the Passaic River after it has collected 805 square miles of drainage — nearly everything the county sends downstream. Its annual peak series holds 39 entries and the oldest is dated 15 November 1810. There is not another river record like it in this part of New Jersey.
The largest flood in that series is 10 October 1903, at 8.40 feet and 35,800 cubic feet per second. Two qualifications belong with that number rather than in a footnote: the USGS flags both the 1810 and the 1903 discharges as estimates and as historic peaks, meaning they were reconstructed rather than measured by a modern gauge. Even allowing for that, the gap is wide. Hurricane Irene, which is the flood most people in this county remember, crested here on 30 August 2011 at 5.90 feet and 24,700 cubic feet per second — third in the series by flow, and two and a half feet below 1903.
The Weather Service sets this gauge's flood categories at minor 4.5 feet, moderate 6 and major 7, and publishes ten separate impact statements for it, each naming the streets that go under at a given reading. They are worth looking up if you are near the river at the bottom of the county, because they are written in street names rather than in hydrology.
Go to the other end of the county and the record almost disappears. The Pequannock River gauge at Oak Ridge, up in West Milford, has an annual peak series of 15 entries running from 2011 to 2025, and its biggest is its first: 28 August 2011 at 9.21 feet and 2,980 cubic feet per second. Two centuries of record at the bottom of the county, fifteen years at the top. If somebody tells you what the river has never done up there, ask how long anybody has been measuring.
One year holds more than a quarter of the county's claim record
These are National Flood Insurance Program claims coded to Passaic County in FEMA's redacted claims file, 1978 to 2026, counted with the API's own row count rather than one page of results. They cover insured buildings only, which is the limit the hub explains.
2011 alone produced 4,042 claims — 28 percent of everything on record, in one year. Hurricane Irene accounts for 2,440 of them. For scale in the other direction, Hurricane Sandy produced 38 claims in this county. Thirty-eight. The storm that defines flooding for most of New Jersey barely registered here, because Sandy was a surge event and this county is a hundred feet up a river system.
The next thing in the list is not a hurricane at all. 1,964 Passaic claims — one in seven — are filed under FEMA's unnamed label, simply “Flooding”. Add the March 2010 nor'easter at 1,403 and the April 2007 nor'easter at 1,380 and the pattern is plain: this county is flooded about as often by weather nobody named as by the storms that got on television.
What the water does when it arrives is consistent. 8,769 of the claims are on a building recorded with a finished or unfinished basement or enclosure and another 179 on a crawlspace; only 197 are recorded with neither, and the field is blank on 5,240. Those four add to the county total exactly, which is the check that the split is being read correctly.
Every rated community here earns a real discount
The Community Rating System is FEMA's scheme for rewarding a municipality's own floodplain work with a discount on federal flood-insurance premiums inside the mapped high-risk zone. Class 10 earns nothing; the lower the number, the deeper the discount. Five of Passaic's sixteen NFIP communities hold a class, and all five earn a real discount — a clean sweep, which is not the usual pattern: Bergen has ten rated communities of which only seven earn anything, and Hudson has none at all.
Two of the five sit at class 5 and a 25 percent discount, which is as good as New Jersey gets outside Cape May County; no community anywhere else in the state holds better. Woodland Park and Bloomingdale hold class 8 and 10 percent. All sixteen communities participate in the program and not one is sanctioned, which cannot be said of Bergen or of Morris.
The whole county also sits on one flood map, effective 17 April 2020 — the newest county-wide flood map of any county this site covers, and worth knowing because a map date is when the zone lines you are being quoted against were last revised.
None of which means people are insured. Inside the mapped high-risk zone 1,793 of 3,719 residential structures hold a policy, 48.2 percent. Step outside the zone line and it collapses: countywide the figure is 2,164 policies against 99,647 residential structures, 2.17 percent. The mapped zone here is small — only 3,719 residential structures, a third of Bergen's — and the flooding is not confined to it.
| Figure | Passaic County | Read from |
|---|---|---|
| NFIP flood claims on record, 1978–2026 | 14,385 | OpenFEMA NfipClaims v3, countyCode 34031 |
| Of those, closed with a payment | 12,381 | Building, contents or ICC payment above zero |
| Paid on those claims | About $316.7 million | Summed by paging the county to exhaustion |
| Coded to stream, river or lake overflow | 6,077 | Cause-of-damage code 2 |
| Coded to rainfall or snowmelt accumulating | 5,689 | Cause-of-damage code 4 |
| On a building with a basement or enclosure | 8,769 (plus 179 crawlspace) | Blank on 5,240; 197 recorded as neither |
| NFIP communities, and how many take part | 16, all 16 participating | Community Status Book, refreshed 2026-08-25 |
| Holding a Community Rating System class | 5, all 5 earning a discount | Two at class 5, a 25% discount inside the zone |
| Buildings in the mapped high-risk zone, and how many are covered | 3,719, of which 1,793 insured (48.2%) | FEMA penetration rates; the mapped zone here is about a third the size of Bergen's |
| Residential structures countywide | 99,647, of which 2,164 insured (2.17%) | Same file |
| Housing units built before 1980 | 143,748 of 185,816 (77.4%) | Census table B25034; the sum of its lines 007 to 011 |
One counting note that changes how the first row reads. FEMA's claims file records insured buildings, and this county insures 2.17 percent of its residential structures — so 14,385 is a count of policies that paid out, not a count of buildings that flooded, and the second number is much the larger. One arithmetic note on the last row: pre-1980 is the sum of B25034 categories 007 to 011. Category 006 is “Built 1980 to 1989” and including it, as several published summaries of this county do, overstates the share by roughly eleven points.
Second-oldest housing stock in the state, in a county that floods
77.4 percent of Passaic County's 185,816 housing units were built before 1980. Only Union County is older by that measure, and 53,543 units here — 28.8 percent — date from 1939 or earlier, third-highest in New Jersey. Put that next to the claim history and you have the county's real problem in one sentence: old buildings, on rivers, with basements.
It matters because age decides what the tear-out has to deal with before anyone starts. Lead paint rules attach to housing built before 1978, flooring installed up to 1980 is presumed to contain asbestos until somebody establishes otherwise, and asbestos removal in this state is licensed work that is not on our list. The statewide page sets out which federal and state rules apply and exactly where the emergency exception stops, because that part is identical everywhere. What is specific to Passaic is the probability: on these figures, most of the buildings we would be called to here are old enough for both questions to be live.
What a river basement actually needs, and what it does not
The second thing about a river is that it is not finished when the rain stops. A basement in this county can be emptied while the crest is still upstream and take water again that night. The gauge reading for your stretch of river is a more useful number than the rainfall forecast for your town, and it is public.
That changes the order of the work, which is the one scheduling decision a river county forces. If the crest above Little Falls has not passed yet, say so when you call: it decides whether the first visit pumps and holds or starts drying a structure that is about to take water again. You can ask us for a written estimate before anything is opened either way.
Common questions
Hurricane Sandy barely touched this county. Why?
Because Sandy pushed the ocean into the estuary, and Passaic County is a long way up a river system rather than on it. FEMA records 38 Sandy claims here, against 2,440 for Hurricane Irene a year earlier. The floods that hurt this county come down the Ramapo, the Wanaque, the Pequannock and the Passaic after heavy rain inland, which is why a coastal forecast is close to irrelevant here and an upstream river gauge is not.
My town has a Community Rating System discount. Does that mean I am safer?
It means your municipality does floodplain work FEMA rewards with a premium discount on federal flood insurance inside the mapped high-risk zone — five of the county's sixteen communities hold a class and all five earn a discount, two of them at 25 percent. What it does not do is change what happens in your basement. Nor does being outside the mapped zone mean much here: countywide only 2.17 percent of residential structures carry any flood policy at all, and plenty of the flooding is outside the lines on the map.
Sources
- FEMA, OpenFEMA NFIP Redacted Claims (v3), Passaic County rows (countyCode 34031) — retrieved
- FEMA, OpenFEMA data dictionary, NfipClaims cause-of-damage code list — retrieved
- US Geological Survey, annual peak streamflow, Passaic River at Dundee Dam at Clifton (01389890) — retrieved
- US Geological Survey, annual peak streamflow, Pequannock River at Oak Ridge (01382210) — retrieved
- NOAA National Water Prediction Service, Passaic River at Clifton (Dundee Dam) flood categories and impact statements — retrieved
- FEMA, NFIP Community Status Book, the 16 Passaic County entries (refreshed 2026-08-25) — retrieved
- FEMA, NFIP Residential Penetration Rates, Passaic County (as of 2026-08-03) — retrieved
- US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2020-2024 5-year, table B25034, Passaic County — 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.