Well, this week's storm left the state pretty soggy in some places and still flooded days after the rain started in other places.
North Jersey saw some of the most severe flooding with drivers needing to be rescued from their cars.
Others with flooded homes, towns and cities bordering the Passaic River saw the worst of it.
Like Wayne Little Falls, Passaic, Lincoln Park and Paterson.
Paterson Mayor Andre Sayegh held an event today to explain how the flooding, combined with freezing temperatures, were leading to dangerous road conditions.
Enough to close the Paterson schools for the next two weeks.
Ted Goldberg was there and has more.
Three days after Monday's rainstorm and much of North Jersey is still flooded.
The Passaic River overflowed on Tuesday, choking off roads and forcing more than 30 people in Paterson to evacuate.
I feel badly for those residents that have to endure this, especially right before Christmas.
Mayor Andre Sayegh declared a state of emergency earlier this week and said the Silk City schools will be closed until the new year.
Don't want to put anyone in danger and I want people to know it's about the students, it's about the staff.
It's about people who drive the busses.
We don't want them driving on black ice and sliding them, creating an accident or hurting someone, a pedestrian.
You get a situation where you get a, you know, some very cold air coming in right behind the rain event.
And it doesn't need to be a flooding event, but it just could be just a rain event.
You can get black ice.
You don't need a lot of rain to have black ice form and have that impact travel.
While New Jersey is no stranger to flooding, weather experts tell us this storm was unusually rainy for this time of year.
North Jersey doesn't typically get 3 to 5 inches of rain.
During a December rainstorm, it said.
You know, any time of year we're going into the holiday season and unfortunately, it looks like we're going to know we're going to see flooding, at least on the main stand.
Passaic River last all the way through Christmas.
The storm was a powerhouse from Florida up to Maine.
Rutgers climatologist Dave Robinson says this was the wettest December rainstorm on record with those state records dating back to the late 1800s.
The ground was saturated, the rivers were up, and that exacerbated the situation.
This would have been a bad situation had it not rained for weeks before it.
But the fact that the ground was already saturated, the water had nowhere to go.
Ground tends to be moister because there's less evaporation than in the summer.
The ground, the grasses aren't growing, the trees aren't using that moisture, so it doesn't take as much rain in the winter to generate a flood than it would in the summer.
Robinson added that climate change has made these kind of storms more intense and more frequent.
Can I tell you how much more rain fell than would have fallen?
No, not for an individual storm.
But it stands to reason with this more ramped up souped up atmosphere that just that much more energy went to the storm, just that much more rain fell.
At one point, Paterson had to close 28 streets, but some of them have reopened.
Mayor Sayegh says parts of his city are particularly prone to flooding and the city is looking at potential solutions.
Are there measures we can take with federal state funding that could help Paterson mitigate the impact that these floods or these storms are having in Paterson?
Because they're very severe?
While weather experts say this could be a rainy winter because of El Nino in the Pacific.
Sayegh says there is some good news in his city.
The river, though, is receding.
That's encouraging because when it crested, it got up to over ten feet and now it's gone down significantly.
I'd say like several inches.
In the meantime, drivers in North Jersey will have to be on the lookout for road closures.
The National Weather Service encourages drivers turn around, don't drown if there's too much water on the street.
In Paterson, I'm Ted Goldberg.
NJ Spotlight News.
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