On Tuesday, President Biden will visit Manville, NJ, the town where I grew up. It has been hit the hardest of any locality in the Northeast by hurricane Ida.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9M5mz5wQZo&t=36s There was a lot more rain here this week than we had during Superstorm Sandy, and the Delaware, Raritan, Passaic, and Millstone Rivers crested a couple of feet higher than in Sandy or any previous tropical storm. The flooding inland was much worse, although the lack of high winds meant there were lower and fewer storm tides, largely sparing the Jersey Shore areas. Sandy was worse for us because we lost power for 8 days, whereas the lack of high winds with Ida spared us that (although other areas did lose power). There were 3 explosions of homes and a restaurant in our area, and the resulting fires were uncontrolled because the flood waters denied access to emergency vehicles. There are a number of homeless families in the three towns surrounding us. Our home was unscathed, but our next door neighbors had three feet of water in their basement and suffered thousands of dollars in damages which insurance will not cover. They are now in a hotel because of the mold and odor from the basement that permeates the entire building. Earlier in the week, I was drafting a contract for the sale of a commercial building in Manville owned by my cousins. Thursday there was three feet of water in the building, and it was isolated by flood waters for 36 hours. Yesterday, I helped my cousin and his grandkids tear up the wet carpeting before it could get moldy, and we turned off the gas and electric to the HVAC. There is a lot of drywall that is no longer dry and must be replaced. The transaction is up in the air at this point, in part because the buyer had a retail store up the street and also suffered substantial damage. Our family was extremely lucky, but there is devastation all around us. Dan Matyola *https://tinyurl.com/DJM-P entax-Gallery <https://tinyurl.com/DJM-Pentax-Gallery>* -- %(real_name)s Pentax-Discuss Mail List To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
