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By Steve Sears

Perhaps the words Township of Denville Mayor, Tom Andes, are the most apropos. 

“We expected it to be bad, but we didn’t expect it to be that bad,” says the then-Councilman.

On Saturday, August 27, 2011, Hurricane Irene passed through Denville, pelting it with 9 ½ inches of rain, on departure leaving the community in shambles.

“There was a lot of loss from the hurricane,” says Chief of Police, Frank Perna, who in 2011 was a road sergeant. “You know, some of those people (residents) were used to it a little bit, but this was major loss. A lot of the houses collapsed on Riverside Drive. There were some major issues, a lot of businesses downtown that never came back.”

Fire Department Chief, James Crothers, held the same role back in 2011. “It only happened one time before and that was in ’79. ’79 was not a hurricane; it was a January storm. We had a lot of snow and everything. That was the last time the town got flooded the way it did. It (Hurricane Irene) took me right back to when I was only in a couple of years, and it took me right back to that because we spent weeks in the center of town pumping out basements and everything else for that one. I mean, I never thought we’d ever have something like that happening again, and then 2011 rolls around, and 2011 was actually worse than ‘79.”

“I remember clearly that Saint Clare’s Denville was an island,” says Jan Bednar, currently Chief Nursing Officer at Saint Clare’s Hospital on Pocono Road. “We became so badly flooded that we literally had no access to Denville, and those of us that were here in Denville at the time, me being one, never left for three days because you could not get out of it.”

Charlie Kerr was the hospital’s Chief of Security and headed as well the Emergency Preparedness at the facility.

“We are always preparing, and in this particular case, with this hurricane and the forecast and the destruction caused in the other areas, we basically activated our command center early,” he explains. The leadership team for the hospital gathered, and all areas of services – operating room to outpatient, visitation, staffing levels, food and deliveries, and more – were discussed. “We basically conducted an inventory of all that stuff to make sure that we had enough at least to get us through the next 96 to 120 hours.”

As Perna recalls, the rivers overflowed. “We had a problem in town with flooding for a long, long time. If we got severe thunderstorms, we would get streets that would flood right along the river; the Rockaway River runs through us. Then it (the rain) stopped for a little bit, and then the hurricane came. It really hit us hard. So, when I got in, the center was flooded. It was all flooded; the center was pretty high. Broadway and Bloomfield, First Avenue and Second Avenue – our downtown area had two to three feet of water up to the stores. So the whole downtown area was bad, and then there were certain other sections of town that people were cut off from. Because of the flooding, mandatory evacuations had to happen.”

“There’s only so much you can do in the very beginning, besides take people out of their houses, evacuations, and just trying to keep people safe,” says Crothers. “That’s our first priority, and as fire chief, I had to make sure we had boats and everything ready. When we arrived late Saturday night and early Sunday morning, we started evacuating.” After the water receded two days later, clean up and pump outs began. “That became a 24 hour a day, 7 days a week job for us. And now, we’re all volunteers; we had guys taking off work. Basically, for the first week, I think I saw my family maybe for a couple of hours – that was it.”

Saint Clare’s Hospital, located in a flood zone, had a lot of experience with adverse weather. “We’re very accustomed to it,” says Kerr, “except the only difference was this was an extreme. We were literally an island. We were inaccessible for a couple days.” Some staffers were moved to the Boonton and Dover locations to work, and the lots of these other facilities as well as local churches were used for employee parking. Kerr also adds, “We’re fortunate that we have a great working relationship with our local and county OEM. They played a major support to us because the one thing – and I appreciate their services – was they always prioritized the hospital for obvious reasons.” 

Picatinny Arsenal was also a huge help, providing amphibian vehicles that were able to transport hospital employees as well as supplies into the facility. “And I do remember a woman – it was during the storm – who was going outside to bungee down her patio furniture, and the bungee cord gave way and it hit her in the eye, and she lost her eye,” says Bednar. “And I remember they brought her in. Being a trauma of the eye, we didn’t have the capability here to deal with it. We could not get an ophthalmologist to get into the building, and we needed to get her to Newark. And I remember that the Picatinny Arsenal vehicle came and took her for us.”

Cars near Saint Clare’s sustained water damage and had to be towed, and a lot of the debris from upstream carried onto the parking lots and property. “It was really just a cleanup – it was a major cleanup of the mud that carried over into our parking lots,” remembers Kerr. He then chuckles and continues, “The funniest thing, though, to see was that the traffic lights continued to work. There was three or four feet of rain on Pocono Road, and yet the traffic lights were still working, which I thought was very interesting.” 

What Andes recalls most of all was the way the town came together. ”Volunteers were helping people clean up their stores. People came to town hall and started asking us, ‘What can I do to help?’” 

“This really speaks to Denville and what Denville is all about,” says township Business Administrator, Steve Ward, who had just entered his second year in his role. “For every one telephone call we got from someone who needed assistance, we had to have been getting 10 or 12 from people who wanted to offer assistance.” 

When Ward arrived at the municipal building the Monday morning after the hurricane, bags of dropped off clothing and supplies greeted him. He and Andes then put their heads together and tried to devise ways to raise money for volunteers and residents. “We started asking people to donate gift cards where people can get some basic supplies, clothing, food, that sort of thing,” says Ward. Within a week, over $50,000 in gift cards for the community were donated and eventually distributed. Later that week, a public meeting was held to detail current status and ramifications from the hurricane, and to invite the residents to fundraise. “We told the public you have free rein. Whatever ideas you have to raise money, we will support and assist and facilitate that as best we can.” Over the next month, almost $500,000 of money was raised through volunteer and fundraising efforts locally. “Absolutely remarkable!” exclaims Ward, who then adds, “I can’t say enough about how our police department, our fire and first aid squad, and our DPW performed an amazing job and stepped up to the challenge, and how our Office of Emergency Management, just under arguably the worst circumstances, did a fabulous job doing what they could.”

“The community was amazing,” says Kerr. “Everybody had pulled together. And that’s the one thing I would tell you about Saint Clare’s and the Denville community is that, when this stuff happens, everybody pulls together.”