Nidhi Rana, 18, and Ayush Rana, 21, are among the six people still missing in New Jersey, Passaic Mayor Hector Lora said. Nidhi’s father, Prakash Rana, said the two are friends and unrelated.
On Saturday, crews used drones, boats and sonar technology to search the Passaic River, where the drain of the two is believed to have been swept away by cables, Lora told CNN. The river heads to Newark, a nearby city that was soaked with record daytime rainfall of nearly 8.5 inches on Wednesday.
“It’s a challenge because you can’t move forward. It’s almost like a pain in limbo. You don’t know what’s going on. You don’t know if you’re bad for a loss or you still worry if the missing people can be found, even though everything can to say they won’t, we’re still hoping for the best, ”Lora told CNN on Friday.
Ongoing research efforts illustrate how parts of New Jersey continue to suffer the startling devastation of Wednesday caused by torrential rains.
Four people died in Pennsylvania and one in Maryland, Connecticut and Virginia in the storm.
In Paterson, New Jersey, about six miles north of Passaic, 30 families seek refuge in emergency shelters.
“As if a once-a-century virus wasn’t enough, we had a one-century-old storm,” Paterson Mayor André Sayegh told CNN’s Evan McMorris-Santoro.
New Jersey storm-related deaths rose two Saturdays to 27, according to Gov. Phil Murphy. Eighteen people died in New York State, 13 of them in New York City.
Crews pierce the bridge to rescue the man
Sayegh said so far 300 have been rescued in Paterson and nearly 100 cars have been abandoned.
One of those rescues involved drilling crews across a bridge to reach a man on the banks of the Passaic River as the storm raged Wednesday, Paterson fire chief Brian McDermott said.
To reach the man, the city’s Metro Urban Strike team drilled a hole in the concrete bridge, McDermott said. Rescuers traversed several layers of steel and corrugated steel bars to see to the bottom of the bridge and finally pull the man out.
“If it weren’t for the work of our guys, Captain Tom Dyk and his Rescue 2 guys, and a group effort of all my staff, it’s absolutely 100% dead,” McDermott said.
The rescue operation took about 45 minutes, which includes the time the team received the call, arrived at the scene, assessed the situation, obtained the drill, and began creating the opening needed to arrive. to the man and take him out.
“Even though the storm is raging, the winds are blowing and we are handling a third alarm fire. An ambulance is trapped with people. One hundred and fifty people are calling for help and we only have 8.4 square kilometers. That’s a lot,” he said. say McDermott in reference to the general rescue operations of his team.
They travel to visit New Jersey and New York
President Joe Biden will travel to New York and New Jersey on Tuesday to study the widespread damage from the storm, the White House said Saturday. Biden previously approved a declaration of disaster for both states.
“There is a lot of damage and I made it clear to the governors that my team of … FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) is on the ground and ready to provide all the assistance it needs,” he said. Biden last week the situation in the northeast after the storm.
Biden will make stops in Manville, New Jersey, and Queens, New York.
Manville’s emergency management director estimates that at least 100 homes in the community are uninhabitable, according to WCBS.
This would be Biden’s second visit to study the damage caused by Ida.
Biden visited Louisiana on Friday to examine the damage caused by Hurricane Ida and promised federal help.
CNN’s Evan McMorris-Santoro, Linh Tran, Rick Hall, Sahar Akbarzai and Jason Hoffman contributed to this report.