3rd Major Flooding Event on Hewitt Road
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
We have been fortunate that the last couple of storms missed West Amwell and swung North and South of our location. That luck ran out last night. West Amwell took a direct hit from overnight storms, with it being particularly bad between 3am and 5am. Our poor dogs were up all night.
We got up at 6:15 to survey the damage on Hewitt Road from our problem child, 25 Hewitt Road.
The tl;dr - the incomplete silt fence system failed at the corners, precisely as many people had predicted; the center driveway was in fact a water, mud and rock super highway last night; the hay mats in the drainage ditch are indeed causing issues; and culvert pipes are clogging again.
We start with the south east corner of property along Hewitt. The original outer silt fence failed badly, being overwhelmed with water, rocks and sediment. The rocks and sediment are half filling the drainage ditch.
Video #1 - Southeast Corner Fronting Hewitt
We hopped up to the corner to see what happened with the Super Silt fence. It's still there, but the perpendicular fence they installed running west was never secured to the super-silt fence. It was simply staked in next to it. The water and mud and rocks simnply pushed the regular silt fence aside. The super silt never joined the outer silt fence, so all of the water and mud in this section was concentrated at this one spot.
Video #2 - Silt-fencing joining failure at Southeast Corner
Peeking over the fence we can see the sea of mud being held back, and even the super silt fence is beginning to strain and bulge.
Video #3 - Bulging super-silt fence
Heading up Hewitt Road to the North East, we can see the fate of the middle driveway. Not surprisingly, the hay bales used to block the driveway did little to nothing. We see mud and rocks strewn across Hewitt Road.
Video #4 - Driveway mud, rock and water super highway
Surprisingly, even the super silt fence has failed, at least in this place. The corner appears to have been installed incorrectly and the fence unravelled at this spot.
Video #5 - Super Silt failure.
As we walk further up the road, we can see the drainage ditch appears to be backed up. Brown muddy water is filling it almost entirely more than an hour after the storms passed.
Video #6 - Blocked up drainage ditch.
The Northeast corner seems to have gotten the worst of it. As we approach the corner, we can see one of the hay mats in the drainage ditch has started to bunch up and tangle itself up. We have mud and water backing up behind it. We then see a failure of the outer silt fence that looks a lot like what happened at the southern corner.
At the 19 second mark you can see where, again, the perpendicular silt fence was not properly joined to the super silt fence. It was simply staked next to it. The video closes showing the debris field of how far out the flood waters went.
Video #7 - Failure at the Northern corner
The final video details the fence failures at the northern corner.
Video #8 - 1 fence, 2 fence, 3 fences or 50 fences doesn't matter if they are installed wrong
Keep in mind, these videos were taken over an hour after the storms had passed. Just imagine what this looked like at their height. And we still have more storms potentially coming in today.
NJDEP, Hunterdon County Soils, West Amwell Township, and neighbors were all informed of the issues this morning. What, if anything, they can do about it is another question.
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