To the Editor:
Rather than enlightening, your front-page story “Murphy Urged to Adopt Coastal Flooding Rules” [July 9] left me baffled. It’s self-evident that flash flooding (of inland rivers and streams) is totally different than coastal flooding, yet your reporter, and the spokespeople they quote, ignore that difference so completely that the story reads like nonsense, damaging the credibility of your publication and of those spokespeople’s organizations.
Kerr County, Texas, the site of this week’s tragic floods, is more than 200 miles from the nearest coast, and the flash flooding there was from water rushing downstream from thunderstorms, not from tidal water pushing upstream. So, your reporter’s line “coastal flooding, which reached tragic proportions in Texas last week” is simply inaccurate. And the several spokespeople quoted who point out the Texas floods as well as recent flash flooding warnings in Princeton, and then in the next sentence advocate adopting new coastal flooding rules, are embarrassingly misleading.
I’ve seen the impact of flash flooding here in the Princeton area (most notably along the Rock Brook in Montgomery), and of coastal flooding along the Jersey Shore, and there are improvements that could be made to mitigate both. And I take it on faith that your newspaper and the organizations you quote have a genuine interest in doing so. So how ’bout cutting out the inaccurate and misleading hyperbole, which does nothing but sow mistrust, and instead present a factual presentation of the problems and proposed solutions, so as to educate and build trust towards implementing real solutions?