New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill tours flood damage in Camden after flash flooding caused by torrential downpours Monday

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Gov. Mikie Sherrill toured flood damage in Camden on Tuesday to see firsthand the damage that swift-moving storms caused to the South Jersey city a day prior.

Sherrill visited a city fire station to see a high-water rescue vehicle that had just arrived in town — and was pressed into service before firefighters had a chance to be trained on the new $360,000 emergency response vehicle. 

“They have done a really good job here in Camden with some of these resiliency efforts,” Sherrill said. “It’s why this wasn’t worse. It’s why the flooding dissipated very quickly after the event was over.”

Fire Chief Jesse Flax said a grant paid for the rescue vehicle that arrived about a week before the storms that dumped more than 4 inches of rain in about an hour. 

“It was probably the MVP of the whole day. It went out, and it stayed out the entire day until sometime late in the evening,” Flax said. 

The big red vehicle is equipped with 4-foot tires and a multi-step platform, allowing stranded motorists to walk above the floodwaters when rescued. It also has a hydraulic platform in the rear that can lift things like a wheelchair or stretcher and put them into the vehicle.

Flax praised the grant writers who got the money in on time so they didn’t have to go about rescues the old-fashioned way, using boats to extricate people from vehicles one or two at a time.

“At one point in time, from the stories I was told, the apparatus actually hit a street where there were submerged cars lined up, and they were just able to go down and grab everybody down the street,” he said.

Flax said once his firefighters are officially trained on the vehicle, it will probably be more important for water rescues. For now, it was used exclusively to remove people from flooded vehicles.

Sherrill said the state is constantly looking for more resiliency efforts as extreme weather events continue to occur more frequently due to the effects of climate change.

The state Office of Emergency Management will review claims from people who lost items, from heaters and other home appliances to cars swept away by the storms, which caused major flooding across the city and surrounding areas.

“Some of the applications we will have for federal assistance will be very technical, so we are asking people to report them so we can calculate them,” Sherrill explained.

Whether there will be federal funding remains in the air because officials still have to calculate if the damages meet federal thresholds.