I n any other year, the April 22 nor’easter would have left Port Monmouth roads underwater, flooded until Bray Avenue in Middletown resembled the Bray River. But by the time the tide had ebbed, the streets were already dry. “The township has done more to prevent flooding than anyone right now,” Middletown Township Administrator Anthony Mercantante said in an April 26 interview.
“In Port Monmouth, the flooding is caused by water that comes in through the creeks into the wetlands, fills up the wetlands, the ditches and the storm drain system, and the water … essentially backs up out of the storm drain system.”
Last summer, the township constructed a floodgate on Main Street, near Renfrew Avenue.
Mercantante said the $200,000 project, which also includes berms along Main Street, has helped mitigate flooding during modest storms, such as last weekend’s nor’easter.
“It’s made a big difference. A modest storm where we used to always get flooding, now we don’t get flooding. Larger storms — this one [April 22] was a fairly good storm — we still had some street flooding, but it was flooded for a much shorter period of time than it would have been,” he said.
The floodgate system works like any other gate, keeping water in and out of the storm drainage system.
In anticipation of flooding, the gate can be set to close so it doesn’t allow water to enter the storm drain system and eventually flood.
But water will eventually enter the system, anyway, through the creeks and wetlands.
“It’s not designed to eliminate flooding. It can’t do that. But what it does is minimize the [number of] times we get flooded in modest storms and the duration of time the streets are flooded,” Mercantante said.
“As soon as the tide goes out, we open the gate and all the flood waters could drain out through the valve system. And so the streets are flooded for a shorter duration.”
With the gates open, the waters recede much quicker, Mercantante said.
“During the last couple of storms, we’ve had somebody there manually operating it so we can learn firsthand the way it’s best used,” he noted.
“Ultimately it will be programmed to work automatically based on the level of the water on either side.”
The floodgate system will work in conjunction with a larger federally funded flood control project from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has been in the works for over a decade.
“The project involves the construction of about 7,070 feet of levees, 3,585 feet of floodwalls, 2,640 feet of dune and beach renourishment … along the Raritan Bay and Sandy Hook Bay in Port Monmouth,” a fact sheet for the project states.
However, only the first phase of the project — beach renourishment — is scheduled to take place sometime soon.
“The first part of the first phase includes pumping sand onto the beach and then constructing a terminal groin, which would help manage the movement of the sand,” said Chris Gardner, a public affairs specialist for the NewYork District of theArmy Corps, on April 27.
Construction on that phase won’t start until at least 2013, Gardner said.
The beach replenishment, which would cost approximately $10 million in federal and state funds, of which nearly $8 million has been funded, would help during larger storms, Gardner said.
Last December, Rep. Frank Pallone (D- 6th District) announced that $2.94 million for the project had been appropriated in the 2012 federal budget, in addition to $3 million appropriated in February 2011.
The total amount funded for the project stands at approximately $7 million, Gardner said.
“With renourishments, the primary purposes of them are to mitigate costal storm surge. What you’re doing is creating a buffer that is keeping out the storm surge, the giant waves during a large storm,” he said.
But to Mercantante, beach replenishment would only solve part of the problem.
“There’s good and bad to it. Obviously, the beach is in rough shape and has had major erosion problems and really needs to be replenished. The bad news about it is that’s not the cause of the flooding,” he said.
“When it floods, the water doesn’t flow up over the dunes across Port Monmouth Road and flood to neighborhoods.
“You could have all the beach replenishment in the world. It’s not going to solve that problem. It’s a good part of the bigger picture, but it doesn’t solve the immediate problem of the neighborhood flooding that comes up through the creeks and ditches,” Mercantante continued.
The funding for the project has left it stalled for many years, however.
The corps first completed a feasibility study in June 2000 and to date, the project is yet to commence, leaving Mercantante “skeptical.
“It’s such a massive project. It involves property acquisition, It involves building a huge dike. And the federal government is sort of providing funds in drips and drabs toward the whole thing,” Mercantante said.
“Over time, the cost of living alone has gone up so much that the project is so much more expensive. That’s why I’m sort of skeptical that it’ll ever really happen. Every year that goes by it gets more expensive, so they’re falling behind further and further.”
Gardner said the later stages of the project didn’t have a set timetable.
“In the long term, there are flood walls and levees, and a comprehensive flood- risk reduction project. Those aspects are more down the road,” he said.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is funded from year-to-year depending on different aspects of the federal budget, Gardner explained.
“The corps is funded incrementally. Each year, we get different amounts, so who knows [when later phases would begin construction],” he said.
For example, a flood reduction project in Green Brook, N.J., got $30 million in funding from the federal stimulus package in 2009.
In February, Pallone announced that the larger flood control project had received $1 million in funding in the 2013 budget.
“You never really know. Sometimes a project will get $7 million. Sometimes it will get zero. And we’ve seen both,” Gardner said.
Mercantante said the later stages of the federal project would provide more direct help to the area.
“There are other parts to the federal project that can actually be more beneficial sooner than the beach replenishment part of it. But they’re doing the beach replenishment first, and I don’t know when they’re going to get to the other phases,” he said.
In the meantime, he hopes the floodgate will mitigate the flooding.
“That’s why we went ahead and did this floodgate project. That’s the only thing that provides some immediate relief. It’s not a perfect solution but it’s an improvement,” Mercantante said.
“Unless Congress is going to write a $40 million check to the residents of Port Monmouth … you get to the point where you almost have to ask yourself — maybe they’d just be better off buying everyone’s home from them and saying, ‘Let’s maybe not have as many houses there.’ ”
Contact Mike Davis at [email protected].