Water Damage Restoration in Union County, NJ

Union has two river gauges with a National Weather Service forecast page, and they behave nothing alike. The Rahway River at Rahway carries flood stages — 6 feet, moderate 8, major 9.5 — and no impact statements at all: none of the this-road-closes-at-this-height text a homeowner can act on. Four miles upstream, the Rahway River at Springfield publishes exactly that text, at three heights.

At 7 feet the Weather Service names minor flooding along Laurel Drive, Milltown Road and Smithfield Drive, behind the shopping centre near Black Brook Park, and near Kenilworth Boulevard between Dorset and Wilshire Drives. At 8.5 feet those same streets are moderate, and Springfield Avenue, Central Avenue and Eastman Street join them. At 10.5 feet they are major and West Holly Street goes under as well. If your building is on that list, Springfield is the gauge to watch, and it is the one nobody quotes.

The Rahway gauge does publish a crest list, and that list is a trap. The highest crest on it is 9.60 feet, on 17 September 1999. The USGS has measured annual peaks at the very same site since 1922 — 104 of them — and that series puts 28 August 2011 at 12.10 feet and 7,250 cubic feet per second on top, with 2 September 2021 second at 11.48 feet and 6,630 cubic feet per second. The weather service's own record crest is the third-biggest flood the site has ever recorded.

That is not a technicality when somebody is deciding how high to put the new mechanicals. If your contractor, your neighbour or a news story quotes the record at Rahway as 9.6 feet, they have read the short list. The number that matters is nearly two and a half feet higher and it has been reached twice in the last fifteen years.

The wider inventory is better than the forecast coverage suggests. The USGS keeps peak records at more than a dozen sites in this county — the Elizabeth River at Elizabeth and at Linden, the Rahway at Springfield, Kenilworth and Rahway, Robinsons Branch, Blue Brook at Berkeley Heights — and five of those still report gauge height today. The data exists. Most of it is simply not published as flood forecasts, which is why the claim record below does more work here than a gauge page would.

Of Union County's 212,385 housing units, 166,217 — 78.3 percent — were built before 1980, well above the statewide 62.8 percent, and 49,984 of them, 23.5 percent, date from 1939 or earlier. That is the oldest profile of any county in New Jersey, and it changes the first day of a water job rather than the last.

The reason is the federal Renovation, Repair and Painting rule, which turns on housing built before 1978, and the separate New Jersey rules that govern lead abatement as its own category of work. Between them they decide what a crew may open up, in what condition, and what has to be cleaned and verified afterwards — and an emergency moves some of that paperwork without removing it. The full account of how those two regimes fit together, and of asbestos in flooring laid up to 1980, is on the statewide page rather than here, because it is the same everywhere. What is particular to Union is the arithmetic: on a random block in Elizabeth, Roselle, Rahway or Cranford, the pre-1978 case is the normal case and the post-1978 one is the exception.

So the question to put to anybody about to cut a wet wall in this county — us included — is what they intend to do about the paint and the floor before the demolition starts, and the answer should involve identifying the material rather than a crew and a skip this afternoon.

Put the two halves of this page together and the typical job here writes itself: a below-grade room that somebody finished, in a building put up before 1978, wetted by water that came off the ground rather than out of a river. That has consequences in a particular order.

First, the water gets categorised by what it is rather than where it fell. Water that has crossed ground, a yard, a street or a driveway is not the same as water from a supply pipe, and material that has absorbed it is treated accordingly — which usually means carpet, pad, the insulation and the lower band of drywall leave, rather than being dried in place.

Second, in a pre-1978 building nothing gets opened up until somebody has thought about the paint and the flooring. That is a real sequencing constraint on a job in this county, not a formality, and it is one of the reasons a crew that turns up promising to have the walls out by lunchtime is telling you something about themselves.

Third, the drying and the rebuild are one company's problem. The structure is dried to readings that have stopped moving and re-checked rather than signed off on the first visit, mold that grew in the meantime is remediated, and then the finished room is rebuilt by the same crews — which in Union, where 2,723 of the coded claims are on finished basements, is usually the larger half of the work. If you want the whole thing priced and written out before anything starts, that is what an estimate is for.