Representatives of nine municipalities and Somerset County met last week in Manville to organize the brand new Raritan and Millstone Rivers Flood Control Commission.
They chose seats on either side of a long table and carefully began to introduce themselves and learn more about their fellow public servants. Bright eyed and eager, the members seemed ready to take on the challenge of finding ways to mitigate ever-more-frequent flooding problems of the two rivers.
Then they started hearing sobering tales of how it took the nearby Green Book Flood Control Commission more than 20 years to achieve some physical solution to flooding of the Raritan downstream.
People may have flinched, but no one got up and left. In fact, members appeared ready to go. They eagerly told why they wanted to get involved. They hinted at their knowledge of specific challenges and possible remedies for each municipality.
There was the impression that there was a lot that members didn’t know. Indeed, there is probably a lot that they don’t know that they don’t know.
Some speakers hinted at upstream flood control measures, even for development that seemingly has little proximity to a stream. Some talked about the need for education.
Here are nature’s basic rules: Water goes somewhere, and it flows downhill. If you move water off your property, it can very easily just become your downstream neighbor’s problem, even disaster.
Manville representatives and people in the audience seemed to imply that their neighbors owed them cooperation and solutions, that what had blasted their borough this summer came from water of neighboring municipalities literally pouring down on the town. That will be a chip on the shoulder that both sides will have to be aware of and avoid.
Every first meeting has to break the ice, and this was one was little different. The one substantive move was to ask the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to present a program at the March 28 meeting on where its studies over the last decade now stand. That will begin to erase some of the common knowledge gap.
Still, the group left with no committee structure, no assignment of jobs, no survey of interests and eight weeks to the next meeting. That belies the sense of expressed urgency.
Let’s hope the pace picks up. Or we could be looking at another 20 years.

