In the wake of last year’s Hurricane Irene, when many central New Jersey residents were still dealing with clean-up issues, a group of residents in the Penns Necks, lower Fisher Place, and Fieldston Road area banded together to see what could be done to prevent the next “100-year storm” from exacting a similar toll on their homes and property.
The 15 to 20 families involved came up with a moniker that would draw attention but keep a positive tone. They called themselves Citizens For a Safer Township.
“We decided that when you really boil everything down it is a matter of safety. When flooding occurs, as it did, if anybody had to be evacuated out of there you could not get them out. We came up with the F-A-S-T part, for-a safer-township, as we needed to react immediately,” says Michael Stevens of 25 Fieldston Road.
Today, despite much communication with West Windsor elected officials, the Township engineer, and the Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed Association, Stevens remains wary of what the next storm could bring. His lasting impression is that his residential neighborhood would not fare any better if another storm like Hurricane Irene were to hit.
“Without significant changes in infrastructure and better inter-municipal cooperation, such as the preemptive lowering of Carnegie Lake, I am afraid that another storm of the same magnitude as Irene would result in essentially the same amount of flooding in our neighborhood,” Stevens said.
A resident of Fieldston since 1993, Stevens and his wife Anne raised their two daughters, Katie and Kelsey, in West Windsor. When Stevens bought the home he learned of the threat of flooding as flood insurance was mandatory for his mortgage to be approved.
While Stevens’ neighbors have dealt with flooded basements after heavy rainfall, he feels fortunate that his own basement hasn’t flooded despite the fact that his home is at the bottom of the hill on Fieldston. “I think it’s because they (the previous owners) built my house up. When they built it they elevated the ground, and I think they did a really good job of putting black coal around the outside to keep the water out so fortunately we’ve only experienced minor flooding inside,” Stevens said.
In 1999 Stevens got his first taste of a hurricane’s wrath when Floyd brought havoc on Fieldston households. Stevens says after Hurricane Floyd there was no major flooding problems for a decade. Nonetheless, he played it safe and purchased an industrial-strength sump pump which he says “works beautifully.”
Last year the Stevens family devised a plan to manage their assets during and after Hurricane Irene. Stevens’ wife Anne, an enthusiastic equestrian who runs Silver Dollar Stables in Cranbury, headed to the stables to tend to her 27 horses along with younger daughter Kelsey, who is beginning college at Rider this fall. Stevens’ older daughter Katie, a senior at Rutgers studying animal science, stayed at home with her father and the family’s two dogs to “man the homefront.” But that almost became impossible with the rising floodwater that followed Irene’s downpours.
“We stayed up throughout Saturday night to see if water was coming in or not,” he said.
Stevens had a generator ready to go so that he could turn the sump pump on. He says power went our rather quickly, although he did not use the sump pump as there wasn’t any water coming in.
“It wasn’t until the next day when the rain had all calmed that we really started seeing a couple of our storm sewers flooding the neighborhood. At that point we got very concerned because it was coming right up, literally a couple of feet from the house. If it had risen another three inches it would have poured into our basement,” he said.
Katie and Michael Stevens spent Sunday morning getting all the family’s valuables out of the basement and carrying them upstairs. “Doing that with no electricity was fun,” he said.
On Sunday, August 28, 2011, as evening approached Stevens’ power came back on. That’s when he really became concerned.
“The water was continuing to rise and I really didn’t want to stay home overnight if it was going to flood in through the windows with the power being on. So my options were to shut the power off, but then I would not have my sump pump ready, or to leave the power on and the sump pump running and then leave — which is what we decided to do,” he said.
Help arrived thereafter as the rescue squad rushed over and launched a boat to Stevens’ residence from just down the street. Stevens, his daughter, and pets boarded the boat and took pictures of the new riverfront property their home had become.
The family ended up staying with some friends who live a few blocks away, one of whom is a first responder himself. Stevens’ wife and younger daughter were not able to go back home until the afternoon of Monday, August 29, 2011 — more than 40 hours after Irene’s rains hit the area.
For Stevens, time is of the essence as the situation has grown worse in recent years.
“It wasn’t until the last 18 months or so where I’ve noticed that water stops flowing down the storm sewer drain after a thunderstorm whirls through. As you get more water you see it start to come up out of the drain, and during Irene it was very pronounced — it was like an artesian well coming up out of the sewer system. Something has changed in recent years that our storm sewer system doesn’t seem to be able to keep up,” he said.
The implications for emergency situations have made the issue more than just one street in a corner of the township. Increased flooding can lead to blocked traffic on an already congested Route 1 and the train station area. “When that happens, how do you get to the new hospital? The first responders know that they would have lots of difficulties getting anybody out across all that water.”
Stevens believes sharing his concern has prompted a good response from the administration.
“There were a number of points which I had brought up —- specifically that we see more flooding in that area now than in the previous 17 years that I’ve lived there — that I really feel that there is something going on within the drainage system itself,” Stevens says.
This week Stevens said he and his wife saw township personnel work on the storm sewer on his block for three consecutive days earlier this year. He followed up with Township Engineer Francis Guzik, who told him there have been no blockages found at the location. Director of Community Development Pat Ward said that Public Works’ has been doing inspections all over West Windsor. Ward says Director of Public Works Alex Drummond told her the township had done PV inspections of the storm sewer, and in order to inspect the line the sewer had to be cleaned first.
“For the flooding study [to determine what causes certain neighborhoods to flood more than others] we are looking for funding. We need to do the study in order to know what corrections need to be made,” Ward says.
Stevens is content with what West Windsor township has done in the past. He had observed officials lowering the Grover’s Mill Pond prior to Hurricane Irene, something he was pleased to see “from a proactive standpoint.”
Stevens and his wife, Anne, hail from the small town of Mount Vernon, Indiana (population 6,687), located midway between St. Louis and Louisville, KY. “There, the government was us and everybody knew everybody and town meet-ups happened all the time. People would just get together and solve problems or investigate problems,” Stevens said.
Being from a small town, Stevens appreciates that Mayor Hsueh opened the floor for public discussion on the problem. Prior to the November, 2011, election, he was pleasantly surprised to see the mayor, business administrator, and four of seven candidates for Council “set aside several hours to give us a listen and to ask questions.”
“It was very refreshing to see the township wanting to investigate this further and receive feedback from residents just a week before elections, when these guys probably would have rather been out campaigning,” he says.
Michael Stevens’ mother was a homemaker, and she became a Tupperware distributor. Stevens’ father worked at an oil refinery. Stevens had an uncle who was a pharmacist and served on the Indiana state board of pharmacy. He was instrumental in his nephew’s career choice.
“I was making a choice between astrophysics and some kind of pharmacology or medicine,” Stevens said. At Purdue Stevens earned a bachelor’s in pharmacy in 1980 and a doctor of pharmacy (Pharm.D). From 1984 to 1989 he worked for Data Med Clinical Support Services. The company was purchased by Squibb and in 1993 the Stevens family moved into the house on Fieldston Road.
Stevens now works for ViroStatics, an Italian and American biopharmaceutical company founded in 2005 by the Research Institute for Genetic and Human Therapy USA, which has a U.S. office at 116 Village Boulevard in Plainsboro.
As hurricane season begins Stevens remains hopeful that relationships started by the fall, 2011, meetings will be further developed. “If we see progress that will enable it to happen. If we don’t see progress then there is a possibility that this will come up again because it does have an impact on a large number of people — especially the fact that it cuts our township in half,” he said.
