It was the sound of glass shattering. I raced around the house searching for broken windows because it was the only thing I could think of in that frazzled moment to explain the clamor. Then it hit me: The crashing sound wasn’t glass, it was a waterfall. In my home.
On June 8, a bizarrely intense rainstorm hit my region of New Jersey — a “once-in-a-lifetime” type of event, as one municipal building official and a parade of contractors and drainage experts would later put it. This wasn’t even a flood-prone area, so we, like many homeowners, hadn’t anticipated a problem. The prevailing theory is there was so much water that it had nowhere else to go but up — up through the window wells on the external perimeter of our finished basement. Eventually, the window seals gave way and Niagara Falls came pouring in from two sides, creating that distinct sound as the water smacked the tile floor before forming a pool between our newly built gym on one side and the place on the other side where a future baby’s playroom is meant to be. Our pandemic hoards of toilet paper went swimming.
Fast-forward a few weeks. Another bout of torrential rain descended upon us with Tropical Storm Elsa, and we held our breath to see whether our emergency fixes worked. And again in late August, when the slow-moving Tropical Storm Henri drenched the Northeast. Then Wednesday evening, the remnants of Hurricane Ida — which had already devastated Louisiana — ravaged New Jersey and New York, delivering record-breaking rain to Central Park, where Henri had set the record just days earlier. The National Weather Service had to issue a flash-flood emergency to New York City for the first time; it’s different from a warning and is reserved for “exceedingly rare situations” in which there’s a “severe threat to human life and catastrophic damage.” It sure seems like a lot of “once-in-a-lifetimes” for one summer.
This is the increasingly everyday reality of climate change. Wet storms are becoming wetter, and floods have become larger and more frequent in many parts of the country, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. U.S. electrical failures also jumped 73% in 2020 amid natural disasters and extreme weather, according to PowerOutage.US. As a result, the booming U.S. housing market has brought with it some unpleasant lessons for homeowners on the various facets of weatherproofing and waterproofing, such as regrading lawns to direct flow away from a foundation and how much gas pressure is needed to keep the house running when the power cuts out.
On the other side of this newly acquired vocabulary is an industry selling everything from generators to sump pumps and mold-remediation services. Servpro water cleanup technicians have said they couldn’t keep up with the calls this summer, while consumers keep racing to local home-improvement stores for construction parts that weren’t previously high on their shopping lists. Home Depot in Passaic, New Jersey — about 12 miles outside Manhattan — said Thursday morning that it quickly sold out of pumps, hoses, air blowers and wet vacuums.
