By Jackie Roman
nj.com
EDGEWATER, N.J. — Firefighters in Bergen County rescued two teenage boys Sunday who climbed on top of a metal pipe to evade rising flood waters in an abandoned railroad tunnel.
The Edgewater Fire Department responded to an old New York, Susquehanna & Western Railway at 4:25 p.m. for a report of two juveniles stuck about 300 feet from the Edgewater entrance to what’s called the Edgewater-Fairview Tunnel, fire Lt. Thomas Clinton said.
After seeing the boys, Clinton said he and Lt. Robert Jacobson changed into water rescue suits and deployed an inflatable rescue boat to retrieve the teens from 5-foot flood waters.
“When we arrived they were sitting on a pipe that runs through the tunnel and they were just sitting, kind of half in the water, half out,” Clinton said. They performed the rescue without incident and EMS checked out the boys on scene.
Edgewater, a small borough located along the Hudson River, is prone to flooding during heavy rains. “We’ve had a few rescues, obviously Edgewater is very low,” Clinton said. “During all the major storms we’ve used our boat many times.”
New Jersey was under a flood watch in all 21 counties Sunday with multiple rounds of heavy downpours and thunderstorms in the forecast following the drenching storms that saturated parts of the state with up to 4 inches of rain at the start of the weekend.
The flood watch ran through 10 p.m. Sunday.
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