New Jersey keeps paving the way for worse flooding

We are drowning in political failure. Climate change brings heavier storms, but decades of overdevelopment and political inaction make the flooding worse.

New Jersey has become a state of extremes.

One week we’re under a drought warning. The next week, we’re under a flash flood warning. We’ve gone from praying for rain to praying it stops.

That isn’t normal weather. It is the new reality of climate change colliding with decades of reckless overdevelopment and political inaction.

New Jersey is now living through a dangerous environmental paradox—a flash drought combined with flash flooding. Despite repeated destructive storms, much of the state remains under drought conditions because the water isn’t soaking into the ground. Instead, it races across parking lots, warehouses, highways, and subdivisions before rushing into rivers and out to sea.

This year alone, New Jersey has already experienced a record 122 flash flood warnings. This beats the previous record for an entire year. Now forecasters warn conditions could become even worse if a Super El Niño develops.

Five years after Hurricane Ida, what has New Jersey done to prepare for the next disaster?

Very little.

Instead of strengthening flood protections, Governor Mikie Sherrill has delayed the DEP’s long-overdue REAL (Resilient Environments and Landscapes) flood protection rules for more than a year. Those rules had already been weakened through political compromise. Now the delay appears designed not to improve them, but to quietly bury them. She has not come up with one initiative on flood protection.

Delaying flood protections is a victory for flooding, overdevelopment, and disaster. We’ve gone from protecting the environment to protecting developers.

A state built to flood

New Jersey has become one of the most flood-vulnerable states in America.

We rank:

• Third in the nation for people at a flood risk.
• Second in the nation for development in flood-prone areas.
• Second in Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster claims.
• Fourth in the nation for National Flood Insurance Program claims.

Those rankings aren’t accidents. They are the predictable result of decades of land-use decisions that put development before public safety, politics before science, and profits before people.

Nature brings the rain, but government decisions make the flooding worse.

Paving over the sponge nature created for us

Every forest, wetland, and farm that disappears beneath another warehouse, strip mall, data center, or subdivision destroys part of New Jersey’s natural flood protection system.

Flood control begins by protecting the headwaters:

• Protect forests and the soils beneath them. They are nature’s umbrella.
• Protect wetlands. They are nature’s detention basin.
• Restore 300-foot Category One stream buffers.
• Protect floodplains, which are nature’s sponge.

Yet we keep bulldozing all three and then wonder why our basements flood.

Whose fault? Asphalt.

Instead of absorbing rainfall, asphalt and concrete create impervious cover that sends billions of gallons of stormwater rushing into already overwhelmed streams, rivers, and storm sewers.

The result is the worst of both worlds.

Water knows no boundaries

When the rain stops, we’re still in a drought. One of the biggest mistakes New Jersey continues to make is treating every development as if it exists in isolation. Floodwater doesn’t recognize municipal boundaries, property lines, or zoning maps. What gets approved upstream eventually becomes someone else’s flood downstream.

Every new warehouse, data center, shopping center, and subdivision adds another layer of asphalt and concrete that prevents rain from soaking into the ground. Instead, that water is funneled into streams and storm drains already operating beyond their capacity. Each project may claim its impacts are “minimal,” but when hundreds of projects are approved across the same watershed, the cumulative damage is enormous.

Climate change is putting weather on steroids

The evidence is everywhere.

This summer alone, repeated storms turned highways into rivers and neighborhoods into lakes. Route 22 disappeared under water. NJ Transit lines shut down. More than 150 water rescues were carried out during a single round of storms as first responders pulled stranded residents from flooded vehicles and homes.

Communities like Plainfield, North Plainfield, Berkeley Heights, Paterson, Passaic, Clifton, Woodland Park, Hawthorne, Hackensack, and Fair Lawn have become all too familiar with flooded streets and overwhelmed stormwater systems. Along the Shore, Asbury Park, Neptune, Long Branch, and Deal once again watched businesses and neighborhoods inundated during the height of the summer tourist season.

This isn’t a hundred-year flood anymore. It feels like we’re getting one every few weeks.

Storms dropped nearly six inches of rain across parts of North and Central Jersey in only a few hours, far more water than aging infrastructure or paved landscapes can handle.

Climate change is supercharging storms, but overdevelopment determines where that water goes.

Flash flooding is often called the first flush because the first wave of stormwater carries everything with it—oil, fertilizers, pesticides, trash, raw sewage, and toxic chemicals.

Streams become a witch’s brew of pollution. Combined sewer systems overflow, dumping raw or partially treated sewage into rivers.

When it rains, it pours sewage.

Climate change is loading the dice. Overdevelopment is stacking the deck.

Flooding doesn’t stop at the property line. One development rarely causes a flood. Hundreds of developments across an entire watershed do. It’s called death by a thousand cuts. Yet New Jersey continues to review projects one permit at a time, instead of looking at their cumulative impacts across an entire watershed.

The Passaic River: NJ’s deNile river

Nowhere is our failure to act more obvious than in the Passaic River Basin.

Communities from Wayne and Little Falls to Paterson, Passaic, Clifton, Woodland Park, and Newark repeatedly find themselves underwater after major storms. Yet instead of asking whether we should continue building in flood-prone areas, politicians ask how quickly they can approve the next project.

That’s like throwing gasoline on a fire and wondering why the flames keep getting bigger.

The answer isn’t simply raising buildings another two feet. Elevating one building doesn’t eliminate flooding. It simply pushes the water onto someone else’s property.

Instead of flood protection, we continue approving massive redevelopment on former wetlands around Newark and the Meadowlands while fast-tracking permits and allowing developers’ consultants to, in effect, certify their own projects.

Trying to control rivers with more concrete is a fool’s errand. Eventually, the river wins.

Instead of fighting nature, we should work with it by restoring floodplains, preserving open space, expanding Blue Acres buyouts, and giving rivers room to spread out before they cause more damage.

Christie’s rollbacks still haunt us

This crisis didn’t begin yesterday.

The Christie administration weakened stream buffers, rolled back flood protections, loosened stormwater standards, and undermined the Flood Hazard Area Control Act. Those weren’t regulatory reforms. They were invitations to flood.

Governor Murphy failed to restore many of those protections.

Governor Sherrill now has the opportunity to reverse those mistakes. Instead, she has chosen delay while continuing to accelerate development.

Every year those rollbacks remain in place, another community pays the price through flooded homes, damaged businesses, polluted waterways, destroyed infrastructure, and skyrocketing insurance costs.

Stop fast-tracking disaster

Whenever politicians promise to “cut red tape,” they’re usually cutting environmental protections.

New Jersey continues approving new sewer hookups, water allocations, warehouses, data centers, and sprawling developments while simultaneously telling residents to conserve water and prepare for floods.

That isn’t planning. It’s political rationalization.

We cannot engineer our way out of flooding while we continue paving over the very land that naturally absorbs water. You can’t solve flooding by pouring more concrete on top of concrete.

What New Jersey must do

New Jersey doesn’t need another blue-ribbon commission or task force. We already know what works.

Climate resiliency and flood protection must become the foundation of the DEP’s mission.

We need watershed-wide planning instead of town-by-town approvals that ignore environmental impacts. We need stronger land-use regulations, limits on impervious cover, tougher stormwater and water-quality standards, and an end to the redevelopment loophole. We need to remove impervious cover and restore stream buffers, floodplains, forests, and wetlands while giving the DEP the legal support and resources to say “no” when projects make flooding worse.

The state must immediately adopt the REAL flood rules, reverse the Christie rollbacks, end fast-track permitting and developer self-certification, stop building in the most dangerous flood-prone areas, spend the more than $1.1 billion sitting in Green Acres before more open space disappears, and expand Blue Acres buyouts where flooding has become chronic.

We need to evaluate the cumulative impacts of development throughout an entire watershed and river basin before issuing a permit. Unfortunately, the DEP still reviews too many projects in silos instead of taking a holistic, comprehensive approach to flooding and watershed protection.

We also need to eliminate the redevelopment loophole that allows projects to escape modern stormwater standards simply because something was previously built there. Redevelopment should reduce flooding, not make it worse.

Flooding doesn’t stop at the property line, and neither should environmental planning.

We also need the Climate Superfund bill, which should really be called the Flood Recovery, Adaptation, and Mitigation Act, so the public better understands that the industries driving climate change should help pay for the resulting damage instead of sticking taxpayers with the bill.

The flood after the flood

The damage doesn’t end when the water goes down. In many ways, that’s when the real disaster begins.

Floodwaters don’t simply carry rain. They carry everything in their path. As stormwater races across highways, parking lots, industrial sites, farms, and neighborhoods, it picks up oil, gasoline, pesticides, fertilizers, road salt, trash, heavy metals, and toxic chemicals before dumping them into our rivers, reservoirs, and drinking water supplies. Floodwaters don’t just move water. They move pollution.

They also stir up contaminated sediments that have been sitting undisturbed for decades. Old industrial sites, landfills, and toxic waste areas can become sources of new contamination when floodwaters wash through them. In communities already struggling with PFAS and other hazardous chemicals, flooding can spread pollution far beyond the original site.

Then comes the sewage. Many of New Jersey’s older cities still rely on combined sewer systems. During intense storms, those systems are overwhelmed, forcing raw or partially treated sewage into rivers, streams, streets, and sometimes even homes.

When it rains, it pours sewage.

The health impacts don’t end there. Flooded homes become breeding grounds for mold, bacteria, and other contaminants that can linger for months, making families sick long after the floodwaters disappear.

That’s why flooding isn’t just a water problem. It’s a public health problem. It’s a drinking water problem. It’s an environmental justice problem. And it’s an economic problem because taxpayers end up paying to clean up pollution that better planning could have prevented in the first place.

Every flood leaves behind more than mud. It leaves behind contamination, damaged ecosystems, higher cleanup costs, and communities wondering whether the water coming out of their tap is still safe. That’s why preventing floods is far cheaper and far smarter than cleaning up after them.

The cost of doing nothing

Every major flood carries a price tag that taxpayers end up paying.

Families lose homes, businesses lose customers, roads collapse, bridges wash out, drinking water becomes polluted, and emergency responders put their own lives at risk rescuing people trapped in flooded homes and stranded vehicles. Insurance premiums continue climbing while more homeowners discover that flood damage isn’t fully covered. Those who can’t afford the higher premiums simply carry the risk themselves.

Then the government spends billions rebuilding the same roads, bridges, culverts, and utilities, only to watch them flood again during the next storm. Since 2011, the cost has totaled $40 billion.

That’s not resilience. That’s an endless cycle of repair, regret, and repeat.

The cheapest flood is the one that never happens. Every dollar spent protecting wetlands, preserving forests, restoring floodplains, and preventing irresponsible development saves many more dollars in disaster relief, infrastructure repairs, and emergency response.

We also need to stop calling it the Climate Superfund Act if people don’t understand what it means. Call it what it really is—the Flood Recovery, Adaptation, and Mitigation Act. Its purpose is simple: The industries that helped fuel climate change should help pay for the damage it causes instead of sticking taxpayers with the bill.

For decades, we’ve socialized the costs of flooding while privatizing the profits from overdevelopment. Developers make the money. Taxpayers pay for the flooded roads, washed-out bridges, sewer failures, and emergency response.

We can’t keep making the same mistakes

Every flood is followed by promises. Every disaster produces another study. Every study gathers dust while another permit gets approved in another floodplain.

In New Jersey, flood studies are just something to stack higher when you’re trying to keep the furniture dry.

New Jersey doesn’t have a flooding problem. It has a land-use problem. It has an overdevelopment problem. It has a political problem.

Climate change may fill the clouds, but Trenton keeps paving over the sponge that once protected us.

While Gov. Sherrill says she is concerned about climate change, she is actually making things worse by fast-tracking development and failing to take action on flood prevention.

If we continue delaying flood protections and putting developers ahead of public safety, the next flood won’t be the surprise. The only surprise will be how much higher the floodwaters get.

At the rate we’re going, New Jersey should change the state bird from the goldfinch to the duck. The state ducks responsibility for flooding, and at least ducks know how to live in water. Unfortunately, our politicians seem content to leave the rest of us there too. Before long, summer’s must-have fashion accessory won’t be sunglasses. It’ll be a life jacket with a matching snorkel.

Editor’s note: Columnist Jeff Tittel served on the HUD Sandy Task Force, FEMA Sandy Task Force, Passaic River Flood Task Force, and Delaware River Flood Task Force.