BRIDGEPORT, Pa. (KYW Newsradio) — As Eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey were expected to be hit with more severe weather on Wednesday night, Pennsylvania's governor made a request of President Joe Biden to declare a major disaster declaration after storms and flooding from August 31 to September 5.
The governor was seeking a major disaster declaration allowing assistance to individuals for Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, Philadelphia, and York counties. He is seeking public assistance for those counties and Fulton County as well as hazard mitigation grants to be available for all 67 counties.
A cold front was expected to move eastward across Pennsylvania late into the evening. Showers and strong thunderstorms was expected bring threats of locally heavy rainfall, isolated damaging winds, possibly even tornadoes.
The National Weather Service has issued a flash flood watch for Chester and Montgomery counties until Sept. 9, 2 a.m.
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf toured the flood damage in Bridgeport on Wednesday afternoon to see storm damage firsthand before issuing the declaration request. The town continues to clean up and dry out from last week's record flooding.
“This is devastating. You go around, and what can you say?" the governor asked.
"People have lost so much. Just shake their hands, look them in the eye and say 'I’m so sorry for your loss.' It’s poignant.”
Citizens in Bridgeport wanted to know what they can do to limit flooding in the future.
“I think there are some thing from an infrastructure point of view we can do" said Wolf. "From a climate change point of view, I think we’ve got to acknowledge that it real and we’ve got to address it.”
Bridgeport, Montgomery County, is a small borough situated on the Schuylkill River, which saw historic flood levels last week. With the threat of more nasty weather, resident Justin Stoeckle says he thought he should get an early start. He arrived with a rental van at his home on 2nd Street near Mill Street around 4 a.m.
"We've already got so much water in the ground now, I don’t think it's gonna hold. So, I’m preparing for it to flood again here," he said.
When the storms that came through last week and flooded the area, Stoeckel says his family moved as many of their possessions as possible to the second floor. He says he was not able to save a new stove that had been installed a few weeks prior: $2,000 down the drain because of water damage.
"So, now we’re here early this morning, trying to get as much as we can out — everything that we threw upstairs. The basement is trashed and flooded, and it’s just a mess all the way around. We lost three cars. We lost everything.”
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Much of the neighborhood was still without power Wednesday and may be for weeks to come, according to residents who spoke to KYW Newsradio. There are piles of mud-stained and water damaged debris -- furniture, torn-up carpet, Christmas decorations -- in front of many homes, waiting to be hauled away. Neighbors lost so many of their belongings, but they still hold on to the nightmares they lived though a week prior.
"I heard a scream like I never heard before," said resident Silvia Wood. "I got up, looked out my bedroom window, and the water was [about 3 feet] high in the street. So, I woke my family up and said, 'It’s go time. Move your vehicles. We gotta go!'"
Wood and her family made it out safely. Her husband Mike said he got in his truck and happened to see a woman clinging to a pole as the water was raging around her.
"I grabbed her, drove her up to Wawa and dropped her off," he said. "And I [drove] back home, but shouldn’t have, because the water was rising."
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One Bridgeport resident, Jack Caroluzzi, died in his flooded basement during the storms. His wife was able to make it out alive. His friends are still shaken.
"I was just talking to him the day before," Mike Wood recalled.
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Borough residents also say they are grateful for each other during such a trying and frightening time.
"We’re a community here. We all care about each other," Silvia Wood said. "It might be a small community, but we care."
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said the emergency alert system saved lives in South Jersey, as everyone seemed to get into their basements when the tornado touched down.
That didn’t happen with flood warnings, and he says all of the warnings need to be treated with extreme caution.
“We don’t want to 'cry wolf.' We don’t want to make every one of these warnings a high sea, but we need to be factual," Murphy said.
"We need to be fact based and when the warnings go off, they’re real.”
He says to not go out on the roads when a strong storm is out there, and never drive into standing water.
So far, six counties including Gloucester have been approved as major disaster areas. With that comes additional assistance from the government for people or businesses with property damage.