Neighbors complained about flooding for years before father of 2 drowned. N.J. town blames DEP. – nj.com

For years, residents of a flood-prone block in Essex County asked township officials again and again to fix an antiquated drainage system that a neighbor was trying to clear of debris when he died during Hurricane Ida. Responses by the Maplewood Township Committee have included a mitigation project that has repeatedly proved inadequate in heavy rainfall, and a more recent effort that local officials say has been blocked by the state Department of Environmental Protection.

The horrific drowning death of 55-year-old Patrick Jeffrey in a network of concrete pipes below township streets on Sept. 1 now has the township eager to renew talks with the DEP for permission to overhaul the drainage system on Maple Terrace. Meanwhile, the township and the DEP have refused to answer questions from NJ Advance Media about the situation.

Jeffrey’s death on Sept. 1 has left behind not only a grieving widow and two fatherless children, but also a tight-knit community of Maple Terrace residents whose frustration after years of complaints has turned to outrage, now that the consequences of the repeated flooding have escalated from regular property damage to the death of a friend and neighbor.

“I’m horrified,” said Gary Grochmal, a 42-year-old tech worker who was out walking on Maple Terrace with his wife and one of their two young daughters on a recent evening.

Grochmal and his family moved onto the street five years ago, and he said they soon joined the Jeffreys and other neighbors in complaining about the flooding.

“The town has totally not taken this seriously in the five years that I’ve been here and people have been complaining about it,” Grochmal said. “And my friend would be alive today if they had.”

The night of the storm

Residents of the block and police say that Jeffrey, a banking executive, tennis player and rock ‘n roll fan committed to his family and his church, went outside at about 9 p.m. on the Wednesday night of the storm to clear debris from the opening of the culvert, a concrete stormwater tunnel about three feet in diameter that runs below the street, fed by one of the narrow drainage channels that runs between his and his neighbors’ houses.

According to residents of the block and local authorities, rapidly rising floodwaters had already submerged the edges of the drainage channel where it meets the culvert inlet. Working in darkness and a downpour, Jeffrey was somehow swept by the rushing water into the mouth of the concrete pipe, then carried through the zig-zagging drainage network under Maple Terrace and then Ridgewood Road, where his body was found the next morning at 7 a.m. a few blocks from his home at an opening of the drainage system.

Despite originally being lined by stone and concrete, the drainage channel has narrowed over the decades to as little as a couple of feet and become shallow and misshapen in places, partially filled in by soil and sediment, and overgrown with trees and shrubs. Neighbors say the open mouths of the culvert where Jeffrey disappeared and others on the block are often blocked by tree limbs, branches and other debris.

Patrick Jeffrey’s widow, Beth Jeffrey, declined to comment on her husband’s death or any action she was considering as a result.

During a recent Township Committee meeting, Jeffrey’s friend and neighbor Juliana Achury praised first responders for their selfless efforts to find Jeffrey that night. But when Achury turned her attention to the committee and the DEP, her praise turned to scorn. Echoing what others have said about the incident, Achury suggested that Jeffrey might be alive today had officials taken the complaints more seriously.

“We were left to our own devices many years ago regarding the dangerous culvert that caused the tragic accident in which our dear neighbor and friend Pat Jeffrey saw the end of his life,” Achury told the committee, referring to the 3-foot-diameter pipe, which lacks bars or any other protections at its opening.

“I invite everyone involved to take definitive action and resolve this once and for all, so I never again in my life have to see a diver going into a manhole in front of my house, or a group of firemen poking the flooded culvert next to my backyard looking for a human body. Pat shouldn’t be a statistic, and the bare minimum this town can do for his family is to fix this immediately,” Acury said. “The only thing I feel right now is a lack of trust in local government institutions.”

Township Committeeman Victor De Luca, a former longtime mayor who chairs the ruling body’s engineering and public works committee, later told the Zoom gathering that the township would schedule another meeting with the DEP following one earlier this year in hopes of persuading the department to permit an overhaul of the drainage system in light of Jeffrey’s death.

“The situation has changed from our earlier meeting,” DeLuca said. “We are going to impress upon the DEP that we have to make some changes here and they have to at least work with us and can’t keep putting up these obstacles to all of our suggestions.”

Committee members seemed moved by Achury’s remarks. Deputy Mayor Dean Dafis, who is both a member of the committee and a resident of Maple Terrace, appeared to wipe his eyes as Achury spoke. When she finished, Mayor Eric McGehee thanked her and said solemnly, “Message received.”

In a brief phone interview last week, De Luca declined to respond to criticism that he and his colleagues had been unresponsive to residents’ concerns and said they had been advised by the township attorney, Roger Desiderio, not to talk publicly about the issue. McGehee, Adams, Desiderio and Committeeman Greg Lembrich all failed to respond to multiple requests for comment.

In an interview earlier this month, Dafis described his experience searching for Jeffrey on the night of the storm with neighbors and first responders, and how his own property on Maple Terrace across from the Jeffrey residence had been flooded that night and in the past. But he declined to comment on how the township would address the drainage issue.

In a request under the Open Public Records Act, NJ Advance Media asked Maplewood for correspondence between the township and the DEP regarding its drainage proposal and the DEPs response. However, the township had not provided the materials sought as of Monday, though it was still within its statutory deadline to respond to an OPRA request.

A spokesperson for the DEP said her agency had no comment on the issue, and would not provide the correspondence voluntarily.

The project that the township did undertake in response to residents’ complaints several years ago essentially diverted some of the stormwater flow from the Maple Terrace culvert to an alternative trunk line beneath Ridgewood Road. But residents say that project, which followed a 2008 consultant’s report, has failed to prevent flooding during heavy rainfall and done nothing to minimize obstructions to the culvert entrance or enhance safety.

The township’s second effort, a set of proposals either to expand an overgrown open drainage channel feeding into the culvert in order to increase the flow of stormwater through the system or replace the exposed ditch with a covered pipe, has been denied a permit by the DEP based on the agency’s position that the channel originated as a natural waterway and is protected by environmental regulations. Indeed, the township’s own consultant, NV5 Engineering, produced topographical maps from as early as 1888 indicating the existence of a waterway along the path of the channel.

Maple Terrace is one long block, whose northeastern end lies in neighboring Millburn Township. The 2008 consultant’s report, prepared by the Parsippany-based RBA Group, cited jurisdictional challenges of expanding capacity of the Maple Terrace drainage system, because it feeds into neighboring Millburn’s pipes.

“Correction of this problem is difficult since the pipe upgrade would also require drainage improvements to the downstream piping trunkline within Milburn Township,” stated the report by RBA, which has since been acquired by NV5 Engineering.

The 13-year-old report itself alluded to “public complaints” about flooding.

It identified Maple Terrace as a trouble spot within the Upper Ridgewood Road Study Area, where the major flooding problem is occurring in the open channel at the downstream limits of the study.

The report was followed by actual mitigation work involving the diversion of some excess runoff during high volume periods from the Maple Terrace culvert to a trunk line on Ridgewood Road that empties into a tributary of the Rahway River.

But neighbors say the project has proven ineffective at preventing flooding even in rains much less heavy than Ida’s. And the complaints continued, including demands that something be done about the open drainage channel feeding into the culvert, where excess stormwater would rush over the channel walls into surrounding yards and basements.

For a time, residents said the township’s response was that the drainage channel was on private property and therefore it was the property owners’ responsibility to maintain it.

Then in 2018, a resident of Maple Terrace, Kai Moy, directed township officials’ attention to state rules for municipalities enrolled in the state Municipal Stormwater Regulation Program. Moy, the deputy chief environmental engineer at the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, pointed out that Maplewood and other enrollees were responsible for the maintenance of stormwater drainage facilities regardless of whose property they were on, either by conducting the maintenance work directly or by acting as the local enforcement agency to ensure the property owner had the work done.

It was after that, residents said, that the township took steps leading to its most recent flood mitigation effort on Maple Terrace, including commissioning a geological analysis of the site by NV5 in May 2020.

Juliana Achury’s husband, Fred Meyer, led an email group of Maple Terrace residents, including Pat and Beth Jeffrey, in consultations with NV5 to provide grassroots input into the proposal. But residents and officials say the DEP told the township this spring that it would not permit either of the proposed channel widening or piping alternatives to address the flooding problem.

Meyer spoke just before his wife at the same Sept. 9 Township Committee meeting — about 34 minutes into YouTube video posted above — when he called on the township to immediately put grates on the entry points to the Maple Terrace culvert, which would let in stormwater but not people, as a short-term, relatively low-cost measure that would improve safety even if it wouldn’t reduce flooding.

“We need grates on all entry points into the system immediately,” Meyer told the committee. As a long term measure to address the flooding, Meyer added, “NJ DEP must get out of the way and approve full piping and filling of all parts of this drainage system that are still open to the air. We need far greater capacity to handle the water that we know with climate change will continue to come. This system is unsafe for the ten children and many adults who live around it and it is wholly inadequate for the amounts of water that flow into it.”

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Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com