What would normally be almost a month’s worth of rain was dumped on Essex County from this past Friday into Saturday courtesy of Tropical Storm Hanna, and some of Montclair’s usual flooding hotspots again found themselves underwater.
During the entire month of September, the area’s typical average rainfall is 4.01 inches, said Peter Wichrowski, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. But from last Friday night, Sept. 5, through Saturday, 3.75 inches of rain fell in Newark, Wichrowski told The Times.
Hanna soundly broke the daily rainfall record for Sept. 6 in Newark — 1.93 inches, a record set in 1979, Wichrowski said.
This past Saturday alone, the storm poured 3.64 inches of rain on New Jersey’s largest city and its environs.
The storm retained its tropical characteristics, producing gusty winds and heavy rain, until it blew through New Jersey heading northbound into New England, where it ceased being "a named storm" and was reclassified as "just the remnants of what once was Tropical Storm Hanna," Wichrowski said.
But while Hanna hovered over the Garden State, she was still packing roughly 40-mph winds and plenty of rain.
In Montclair, one motorist’s car stalled out under the train trestle spanning Valley Road near Brookfield Road after that portion of the street had become submerged under several feet of water, Township Manager Joseph Hartnett said.
Burnside Street, a block-long roadway stretching from Watchung Avenue to Appleton Place that’s in a bowl-shaped, low-lying area, also backed up with water above curb level, Hartnett said.
The street, which had regular flooding problems until municipal officials took some corrective steps, including cleaning out a culvert and a large pipe as well as fixing the gate valve at Edgemont Pond, had not flooded in a while, the township manager said. Municipal officials developed methods to alleviate the street’s flooding woes in May 2007.
Staffers will be investigating why flooding reoccurred there last weekend.
Hanna also brought down trees across the area. A falling tree limb mashed the hood of a Highmont Terrace resident’s 1998 Nissan Maxima at around 2 p.m. Saturday, police said.
Hartnett said a power outage affected the area around the South End Business District, starting around 6:30 or 7 p.m. and lasting for a couple of hours. He did not know the cause of the electrical shutdown.
