Water Damage Restoration in Paterson, NJ

This city has no river gauge of its own — checked against all 221 gauges in the cached New Jersey-area set — so every sentence below is published by an instrument somewhere else: the Passaic River gauge downstream at Dundee Dam on the Clifton bank, and the Passaic River gauge upstream at Little Falls. Start at the bottom of the Little Falls ladder, because the first Paterson sentence in the whole record arrives before any flood category does. At 5.5 feet: "The lower end of East-Holsman Street in Paterson, closest to the river, begins to flood."

That gauge keeps 48 crests going back to October 1903, and every one of the 48 is at or above 5.5 feet. So the earliest published warning about this city describes a reading the river reaches on every occasion anybody has logged. Read it as the baseline rather than as an alarm: if your building is on the low end of East-Holsman Street, the published record says it is at the front of the queue every time.

Climb the ladder and the sentences stay on the road. At 11 feet: "The West Broadway Bridge in Paterson is subject to closures." At 11.5 feet: "Tyler Street, Shady Street, Arch Street, Lowe Street, Wood Street, and Bleeker Street in Paterson are closed due to flooding." Those are quoted exactly as the Weather Service publishes them. Between and around them sit three more statements — at 9, 9.5 and 10.5 feet — which between them name another twenty Paterson streets and three more bridges, and which are quoted on the Little Falls, Lincoln Park and Hawthorne pages rather than repeated here.

The eleven-foot and eleven-and-a-half-foot readings are not everyday events on that gauge: seven of the 48 crests reach 11 feet and six reach 11.5. The highest was 17.5 feet in 1903 and the highest since was 14.19 feet on 30 August 2011 — which is the same year that produced a third of this city's claims.

Two limits belong with every one of those sentences, and they matter more here than on any other page in this line because this page prints more street names than any other. A statement about a street is not a statement about an address: the distance from that street to your foundation, and the elevation between them, is not in the data, and FEMA's Map Service Center is where an address question gets answered. And a street that appears in none of the eleven has not been declared dry — these statements are written from what somebody reported at a given reading, so a street nobody reported is simply a street nobody reported.

76.7 percent of Paterson's 52,519 housing units were built before 1980 and 17,158 of them — 32.7 percent — date from 1939 or earlier. Put that beside the basement figures and the flood job here has a predictable first obstacle: the water is in below-grade space, in a building old enough that what comes out of the wall is a regulated question before it is a carpentry question.

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. Which federal and state rules apply, and exactly where the emergency exception stops, is identical in every New Jersey municipality and is set out in full on the hub. What is specific to this city 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, and a great many of them have a finished or unfinished basement that has taken water more than once.

The rest of the work follows from the building rather than from the flood. On a masonry rowhouse or a wood-frame three-decker the below-grade walls are usually the original material, the mechanical equipment is on the basement floor because that is where it has always been, and the stair is the only route in and out of the wet volume. The questions worth asking once, with the wall open, are how high the finish has to start before it stops being the thing that gets destroyed; whether the wall below that line wants a material that tolerates being wet and dried; and whether the heating plant, the water heater and the panel can be raised above the height the water has actually reached. None has a universal answer and all of them are cheaper answered once than three times.

One last thing about the record, since it is unusually clean on this point. FEMA's mitigation file holds 45 Paterson properties — 33 bought and demolished, 12 acquisitions of vacant land — and every single row is dated to program year 2011. One grant cycle, after one flood, and nothing before or since. That is the whole public intervention in this city's floodplain, which is worth knowing when you are deciding how much of the next flood is going to be your own decision. Ask us for a written estimate before anything is opened, and if the water is contaminated or the building is older stock, say so when you call. Openings below grade — the sash, the frames and the wells around them — are a separate trade, and our Paterson windows and glass page covers them.