Recent Rains Has South Plainfield Truck Route Reeling

Good afternoon. As you have seen from my previous two blog posts today, there has been another major flooding event here in Central Jersey. This time two inches of rain fell in South Plainfield, which had a portion of its truck route along New Market Avenue underwater.

While an ad hoc committee has been trying to float new ideas (the first on Helen Street, which was rejected by the Department of Environmental Protection) including a new proposal to build a truck route through Hollywood Avenue, which takes it through the environmentally precious Dismal Swamp, police cars and detour signs prevailed in the area of New Market Avenue and South Clinton Avenue.

Despite the number of times in recent years that the New Market Avenue area has flooded, the town decided to have a Truck Route placed there as well as St. Nicholas Avenue, and now are trying to get a new one erected in the Dismal Swamp area. The lesson here is how the building in Central Jersey, in particular South Plainfield, and Northwestern Middlesex County have had serious consequences to its constituents. As said occasionally on this web site, whenever you build, you make changes to the flood plain, and this is what is occurring. In addition, it has created a tremendous increase in traffic.

Yet, the politicians tend to be reactive instead of pro-active on this issue. There will be more of the same things we saw in after the Nor’easter of 2007 in April and May that year for the newspapers, but once the story goes away, so will the politicians to focus on business as usual. The Green Brook Flood project is still not complete, and the towns of Bound Brook and Manville are again facing the rage of flood waters at their doorstep.

South Plainfield’s election gimmick may have gotten votes, but it is bound to cause more headaches than it solves. This latest round of flooding is just one example. It also threatens the ecosystem of the Dismal Swamp, a 660 acre environmental haven for many species of wildlife. Let’s also not forget that the Truck Route only benefits one side of the town, the South Side while the North Side still has to shoulder some of the burden in terms of truck traffic.

Progress is a great thing to have, and South Plainfield has benefited from that, but the town has built too much over a very small area compared to nearby towns Edison and Piscataway, and flooding in areas such as New Market and Woodland Avenues are an indication that this growth has put a strain on the town’s infrastructure.