West Deptford Residents Dry Out From Repeated Floods

Jim Cyphers moved his family into their new rental home, a low-slung, yellow rancher that backed up to Mantua Creek on West 1st Avenue at the beginning of August.

Four weeks and two catastrophic floods later, Cyphers was tossing belongings back in the trunk of his truck in the wake of Hurricane Irene Sunday afternoon–the few that hadn’t been wrecked by the floods, anyway.

With more than a foot of water in parts of the home, and several inches of flooding throughout, they were done, and had already been on the phone with their real estate agent to make new arrangements.

“It may never happen again,” Cyphers said. “But I don’t want to be around for it to happen again.”

He knew there was a chance of flooding; the home’s owner had told him of the creek overflowing and reaching the back of the house at the crawl space, but Cyphers never imagined it could be this bad.

And he never imagined it would happen twice in two weeks.

“It’s enough,” Cyphers said.

His neighbors on the creek couldn’t all pull up stakes as easily, though.

Cheri Brown, who’s lived on the street for more than five years, joked that her bungalow was now waterfront property, after the creek rose to more than hip-deep overnight.

Though it had dipped lower by the afternoon, as the tide carried some of the floodwaters–and a few pieces of lawn furniture–away, Brown’s house was still surrounded by the creek.

“I thought April was bad,” she said, referring to a flood that drove the creek up into her back laundry room.

After the flood two weeks ago, Brown stayed with neighbors a little farther up the avenue, where they watched the creek pour into the basement from a first floor elevated about six feet above ground level.

She’d tried to get all of her possessions as high up as possible, but that plan didn’t work out as well as she’d hoped.

“We had [everything] high up, but not high enough for this one,” Brown said.

Inside her home, the lowest four feet or so of drywall had been ripped away, leaving bare studs throughout the house. With a claim filed with her flood insurance from the previous catastrophe, Brown had already gotten the work done to fix the drywall in her bedroom–but that project will have to start over now.

She said she has no plans to leave the quiet neighborhood, even after getting hit back-to-back.

“I love it here, but yeah, it does make me think,” Brown said.

Across the township at the beleaguered Willow Woods mobile home park, it was a ghost town in the rear of the complex, which was under several feet of water at one point.

The only sound was the warbling roar of industrial pumps, which were shunting water back into the main body of Woodbury Creek. Many of the abandoned trailers had Xs of tape across their windows, and a few had been boarded up ahead of the storm.

One resident, who didn’t want to give his name, got out of his car after stopping at a series of orange road hazard barrels, and jabbed an angry finger at the high-water marks from this latest flood as wind whipped his Grateful Dead t-shirt.

“It’s not my trailer that’s the problem, it’s the boat slip it’s sitting on,” he said.