Irene: Hundreds of Cellars Being Pumped Out in Martinsville

They have been out for days, pumping out basements and responding to calls—even at the expense of taking care of their own homes.

Since Sunday, members of the Martinsville Volunteer Fire Co. have been pumping out cellars around the Martinsville section of town, assisting those whose sump pumps are not working.

“We’ve literally done hundreds of cellar pump outs because of the general widespread lack of power,” said Bill Rose, spokesman for the Martinsville Volunteer Fire Co. “The first night, the guys were out all night, and then they were out all the next day too.”

And in the late Monday night hours, Rose said, 60 more calls came in for pump outs throughout the area that is still dealing with widespread power outages.

“We have high expectations that now with power being restored, a lot of the cellars will take care of themselves because of sump pumps,” he said.

Aside from the cellars, Rose said, the fire company has been getting calls for alarms going off, including carbon monoxide detectors because people are using gas generators in their garages.

“And then the carbon monoxide seeps into their houses,” he said.

“Plus this morning, we already responded to several calls for alarm activations because the power comes back and the alarms go off,” he added. “We have to make sure it’s just the alarm being tripped to make sure things don’t short and create a potential problem.”

Rose said the department has been working on 12- to 16-hour days at this point, pumping cellars out.

“We’re really taking care of our residents to the best of our ability,” he said. “A lot of this is related to power not being available.”

“For people if they don’t have a generator, some buy battery backup pumps, but they only work for a couple hours,” he added.

Rose said the firehouse actually lost power as well in the storm, but the department has a stand-by generator that has been running since Saturday.

“We are very fortunate we have the generator and it ran successfully,” he said.

At this point, Rose said, power is starting to be restored to the center section of town, and businesses that had to shut down are beginning to be able to reopen.

“Only Pizza Brothers was open because it had natural gas, and they used lanterns to light the place,” he said.

While the firefighters are working, Rose said, some of the businesses have assisted to donate food, including peanut butter and jelly and rolls and other items.

“The next biggest problem was we had a lot of guys here, but we had to keep them fueled as much as the pumps,” he said. “And some people have bought pizza and other items that we are cooking in the galley.”

“Part of the issue is we have to be self sufficient to an extent to get the guys fed,” he added. “Things are pretty dry now, but I don’t think we will have to do as much work.”

Fortunately, Rose said, with the new building on Washington Valley Road, they have showers and a kitchen when they have lots of people working during more emergency situations.

With continued comparisons to Hurricane Floyd, Rose said the fire company was actually more involved in assisting Bound Brook and Manville 12 years ago—but this time, Martinsville has needed more attention.

“Irene was a lot tougher on Martinsville,” he said. “We can go back to some issues we knew about going in to this storm because we knew we had saturated ground.”

“A lot of trees were uprooted in the storm, and that’s directly attributed to the soft ground,” he added.

But the fire company has also been assisting nearby towns, Rose said. When Bound Brook officials realized they would have to evacuate residents, he said, they called on the Martinsville Volunteer Fire Co., which sent two apparatus trucks, including a four-wheel drive vehicle that has high clearance to evacuate people.

“We had two whole crews there to support the evacuation Sunday,” he said.

Rose said he is proud of the work the volunteers of the fire company have been doing these past few days, despite the fact that they have been dealing with their own issues of uprooted trees and flooded basements.

“The Martinsville department is still out there doing what needs to be done to help our community,” he said. “The volunteers have really stepped up and helped the community even when they really had their own issues in their homes.”

Rose said it has helped that, after situations in past storms like the nor’easter in 2010, the company purchased more equipment to help in these situations.

“We had a lot of pumping after that weather disturbance, so we’ve spent a lot of time and money upgrading and getting additional pumps and generators so we could get a lot of guys out on the roads,” he said. “We were much better prepared for this storm based on our experiences from the last ones.”

“We have had four or five teams out simultaneously these past few days,” he said. “The last time we could only send out two or three.”

All the volunteers will continue to work through the days to help those residents in need.

“We are trying to make people less miserable, and trying to unburden them the best we can,” Rose said. “The firefighters continued to deal with issues they had on their own and to help out with the department. They did both, and that really speaks highly of their dedication to the community.”