It’s hard to find a single street in the working-class town of Manville that was not severely affected by flooding connected to Hurricane Ida.
MANVILLE, N.J. — In the aftermath of Hurricane Ida, it is hard to find a single neighborhood — or even a street — in the small central New Jersey town of Manville that was not severely affected by flooding. The working-class town of about 10,000 residents has seen many hardships. Manville was named after the company Johns Manville, which manufactured asbestos there. Town residents found white flakes of asbestos floating in their pools, thinking nothing of it until the material was later found to cause cancer. Another part of town was later designated a federal Superfund site, needing major environmental cleanup because a wood treatment facility had used creosote, a toxic substance dumped into two sludge lagoons. Manville families ice-skated on the frozen lagoons in winter, not knowing that the toxins had contaminated the ground and drinking water. And flooding in Manville, which President Biden visited on Tuesday, has been an issue for decades. When Regina Petrone’s house flooded this time — she has lived in Manville for 30 years — she lost everything in her basement. The federal government has let Manville suffer, she said as the stench of sewage wafted through the pile of debris from her house. In recent years, an Army Corps of Engineers study found that Manville did not meet the cost-benefit standard for any flood protection project; a series of dikes that were built in a nearby town, Bound Brook, saved it from Ida’s devastation.
