![]() She recalls her attorney waving it off by saying that at the rate we’re going, everyone in New Jersey will live in a floodplain. Coleman had only discovered she would be living in a “special flood hazard area” once she was reading the closing paperwork in 2006. ![]() ![]() Best of all, it was affordable, a rare find in a town so close to New York City. She and her husband liked their house, a prewar colonial. “I started to realize that, in a sense, we were victims of a system because we were living in a neighborhood that should have never been built,” she says.Īlthough she had flood insurance-her mortgage required it-Coleman knew that her premiums would soon go up, and she worried that her property value would go down. As Coleman researched more deeply, a bigger picture emerged. She discovered that parts of her neighborhood, like many chunks of this region, were developed atop low-lying wetlands, which had been elevated with poorly draining “fill” back around the early 20th century. Spurred by previous storms, Coleman had already learned a bit about the ecological history of her nearly 350-year-old township. She heard that the Army Corps of Engineers wouldn’t be coming to build a berm or tide gate the area had recently been evaluated, and such costly protections seemed unlikely. Woodbridge sits in the pinched waist of New Jersey, where a network of rivers and creeks drain to the Raritan Bay and then to the Atlantic Ocean. Taxed by the repetitive assault of hydrodynamic pressure, some foundations had collapsed.Īs evacuees returned home for another round of sump pumps and mold, Coleman considered her options. But for Coleman and many residents of the Watson-Crampton neighborhood in Woodbridge Township, the disaster marked the third time their houses had been inundated by floodwaters in just three years. ![]() Sandy was being billed as an unusual “Frankenstorm,” a one-in-500-year hurricane that also dropped feet of snow. The “build it back stronger” sentiment never resonated with Coleman, who lived not on the state’s iconic barrier islands but in a suburban tidal floodplain bisected by 12 lanes of interstate highway. ![]() Just days after Superstorm Sandy churned into the mid-Atlantic region, pushing a record-breaking surge into the country’s most densely populated corridor, the governor of New Jersey promised to put the sand back on the beaches. Monique Coleman’s basement was still wet with saltwater when the rallying began. ![]()
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