---
title: "Jersey Shore flooding forces motel rescues and closes roads"
url: "https://bepreparedsolutions.co/reports/alert-pulse/nj-week-2026-09-21"
description: "Every emergency alert sent across New Jersey in Sep 21 – 27, 2026, and what happened behind them. Figures for the week, with the data behind them."
source: "BePrepared Solutions"
---

[BePrepared](https://bepreparedsolutions.co/)[Alert Pulse](https://bepreparedsolutions.co/reports/alert-pulse)

[Try freeFree 7\-day trial](https://bepreparedsolutions.co/trial?source=alert-pulse&utm_source=alert-pulse&utm_medium=report&utm_campaign=nj-week-2026-09-21&utm_content=masthead&returnTo=%2Freports%2Falert-pulse%2Fnj-week-2026-09-21)

Alert Pulse · New Jersey · Weekly report · Sep 21 – 27, 2026

# Jersey Shore flooding forces motel rescues and closes roads

Floodwater entered rooms, trapped drivers and cut off roads along the Jersey Shore. Residents faced evacuations and businesses faced cleanup, while WHYY reported no New Jersey deaths by Sunday.

[1](#jersey-shore-flooding "Coastal storm in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, September 22 to 27")

Each story below, on the day it peaked

-   Coastal storm · Sep 22–27

    New Jersey, Delaware and New York

    Ocean County spent 7 days under warning

Warnings gave notice of coastal flooding, but they could not keep water out of homes or make flooded roads passable.

[Read the week](#jersey-shore-flooding)

## Where the week happened

Each numbered area is one of the stories below, drawn over the counties its warnings covered.

-   Coastal storm in New Jersey, Delaware and New York, Sep 22–27

Fig. 1. The counties each story covered, numbered as the report tells them. Colour groups the hazard: water, heat and fire, storms. Counties are the smallest area these warnings describe.

The same areas as a list

-   **1.** Coastal storm in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, September 22 to 27 · Water · 18 counties drawn

Figure 02

### When it happened

Each square is one day of the week, shaded by how many warnings went out.Shade is warnings that day. A number is the story it belongs to on the map. A ring marks a day on which news or officials reported what the event did to people.

-   Fewer warnings
-   More warnings
-   Impact on people reported

View as a table

| Day | Warnings | Story on the map | Documented impact on people |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Sep 21 | 3 | — | — |
| Sep 22 | 4 | 1 | Yes |
| Sep 23 | 9 | 1 | Yes |
| Sep 24 | 9 | 1 | Yes |
| Sep 25 | 12 | 1 | Yes |
| Sep 26 | 13 | 1 | Yes |
| Sep 27 | 15 | 1 | Yes |

## [1](#the-map)Floodwater enters Jersey Shore homes and motels, forcing rescues

![People wade through a flooded residential intersection in Wildwood, New Jersey, with water surrounding parked cars beneath cloudy skies.](https://www.inquirer.com/resizer/v2/ENURYIMGHJCO3CU2X2TRPN43RI.jpg?auth=0aaf7f4e8b92c048cc213d4de8b726865aa73431479cf78831a40615ac3ca27a&width=800&height=533&smart=true)

[Photo: Brett Sholtis / Staff · The Philadelphia Inquirer](https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/new-jersey-shore-noreaster-mikie-sherrill-philadelphia-weather-20260927.html)

1.  SEP 22, 4 PM EDT

    First warning

    Ocean County, New Jersey

2.  SEP 27, 8 PM EDT

    Last warning

    Ocean County, New Jersey

-   Coastal storm — coloured as water. 18 counties in New Jersey, Delaware and New York, Sep 22–27.

On Saturday in Egg Harbor Township, responders rescued nine adults and a dog from flooded rooms at the Travel Inn and New Sea Breeze motels, police told The Philadelphia Inquirer. In Atlantic City, crews also rescued trapped drivers, the newspaper reported. These were the immediate consequences of a coastal storm whose warnings had begun earlier in the week along the Jersey Shore, the area marked 1 on the map.

The first coastal flood warning for Ocean County went out Tuesday afternoon, forecasting inundation near shorelines and tidal waterways. By Friday, forecasts identified the weekend morning high tides as periods of concern. The governor’s office declared an emergency effective at 5 p.m. Friday in Ocean County and in Atlantic, Cape May and Monmouth counties. Manasquan recommended voluntary evacuation for residents of non-elevated buildings in low-lying, flood-prone areas, Star News Group reported. Some Ship Bottom residents evacuated on foot that day, according to WHYY.

Archived alert · Sep 21 – 27, 2026Sent September 22, 2026 · NWS Mount Holly NJ

> For the Coastal Flood Advisory, up to one foot of inundation above ground level in low-lying areas near shorelines and tidal waterways. For the Coastal Flood Warning, one to two feet of inundation above ground level expected in low-lying…

On Saturday, emergency crews in Sea Bright rescued a woman and her dog from a vehicle in floodwater, according to ABC7 reporting cited by the Associated Press. Separately, Governor Mikie Sherrill said responders rescued dozens of people from homes and vehicles in the Atlantic City area that day, WHYY reported. That broader tally should not be added to the individual rescues. WHYY reported road closures in Ship Bottom and Sea Bright; Ocean City officials told the Inquirer that the morning high tide temporarily closed bridges into town. Monmouth County reported 2,500 residents without power that day and said restoration coordination was underway.

On Sunday, the weather service in Mount Holly warned, “Flooding caused by excessive rainfall is expected.” The Inquirer reported Sherrill’s account of severe dune loss in Atlantic City and Brigantine. Wildwood’s mayor told the newspaper that flooding contributed to multiple fires after water poured over bulkheads Saturday morning. WHYY reported on September 27 that no New Jersey deaths had been reported; the wider reporting reviewed for this story also contained no reports of injuries.

In Cape May, the Lobster House remained closed because of flooding, the Inquirer reported Sunday. Its owner said cleanup would require washing and disinfecting surfaces and replacing carpeting. For residents, even getting to work had required adjustments. Atlantic City resident Damere Kellum, a dispatcher at Atlantic City Linen Supply, told WHYY that flooded intersections forced him to change his scooter route Saturday: “It’s flooded all over there, so I had to come this way just to get to work.”

[Flood alerts by the numbers](https://bepreparedsolutions.co/flood-preparedness#flood-statistics): every published month, by state and county.

## How BePrepared monitors this, all year

This report exists because we already monitor the whole country. Every couple of minutes, around the clock, we read the emergency alerts going out across all fifty states and territories, and we keep them. A month of that record is what you have just read.

The national picture is the part most people never see. What matters to you is much smaller: which of these warnings would have reached your street, and what the risks around you look like on an ordinary day.

That is what BePrepared is for. Put in your ZIP code and you get the picture for where you live — the flood, fire and storm history around you, the dams and facilities nearby, and a plan for your household rather than a general one. With a free account you can keep a watchlist of the places you care about, like your home, your parents' address, and your kids' school, and set what you want to hear about.

## Where it hit hardest

Counted as distinct warnings, and as the days a county spent under one. A county is the smallest area these warnings describe.

### Warnings by region

-   Mid-Atlantic6
-   Northeast1

### Most days under a warning

-   Ocean County, NJ7 days Ocean County, NJ was under a warning on: Sep 22, Sep 23, Sep 24, Sep 25, Sep 26, Sep 27, Sep 28
-   Atlantic County, NJ7 days Atlantic County, NJ was under a warning on: Sep 22, Sep 23, Sep 24, Sep 25, Sep 26, Sep 27, Sep 28
-   Cape May County, NJ7 days Cape May County, NJ was under a warning on: Sep 22, Sep 23, Sep 24, Sep 25, Sep 26, Sep 27, Sep 28
-   Monmouth County, NJ7 days Monmouth County, NJ was under a warning on: Sep 22, Sep 23, Sep 24, Sep 25, Sep 26, Sep 27, Sep 28
-   Burlington County, NJ7 days Burlington County, NJ was under a warning on: Sep 22, Sep 23, Sep 24, Sep 25, Sep 26, Sep 27, Sep 28
-   Middlesex County, NJ7 days Middlesex County, NJ was under a warning on: Sep 22, Sep 23, Sep 24, Sep 25, Sep 26, Sep 27, Sep 28
-   Cumberland County, NJ7 days Cumberland County, NJ was under a warning on: Sep 22, Sep 23, Sep 24, Sep 25, Sep 26, Sep 27, Sep 28
-   New Castle County, DE7 days New Castle County, DE was under a warning on: Sep 22, Sep 23, Sep 24, Sep 25, Sep 26, Sep 27, Sep 28

Figure 03[Embed this chart](#use-these-figures)

### Where the warnings landed

Every county in New Jersey that received a warning this week, coloured and scaled by how many; the faint dots are counties this edition does not cover.43 counties in New Jersey received at least one warning; the faint dots are every other county in the country, which this edition does not cover. Each county wears its MOST frequent kind of warning and its dot scales with how many it received; the month's three biggest kinds carry color and every other kind wears gray, with the panels below giving each kind its own map. The full per-county mix is in the CSV. 3 warned areas — marine zones and territories — have no county position on this map, about 3% of county-level warning volume. They are still counted in every figure and table.

-   Flooding
-   Everything else

Flooding93 warnings · 17 counties

View as a table

| County | State | Warnings | Most frequent kind |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Ocean | NJ | 24 | Everything else |
| Cape May | NJ | 23 | Everything else |
| Atlantic | NJ | 23 | Everything else |
| Monmouth | NJ | 20 | Everything else |
| Hudson | NJ | 16 | Flooding |
| Essex | NJ | 16 | Flooding |
| Union | NJ | 16 | Flooding |
| Bergen | NJ | 12 | Flooding |
| Sussex | DE | 10 | Everything else |
| Richmond | NY | 10 | Flooding |
| New York | NY | 9 | Flooding |
| Burlington | NJ | 8 | Flooding |
| Passaic | NJ | 6 | Everything else |
| Middlesex | NJ | 6 | Flooding |
| New Castle | DE | 4 | Everything else |
| Salem | NJ | 4 | Everything else |
| 09001 | CT | 4 | Everything else |
| 09009 | CT | 4 | Everything else |
| Rockland | NY | 4 | Everything else |
| Westchester | NY | 4 | Everything else |

The human record

## What it cost, and who reported it

These figures are not ours. Our archive records that a warning was issued, never what happened next, so every number here comes from the organization named beside it and was retrieved on September 28, 2026.

-   Toll

    WHYY reported on September 27 that no deaths had been reported in New Jersey from the storm.

    Source: [WHYY](https://whyy.org/articles/noreaster-flooding-new-jersey-2026/)

    ArchiveOur records show coastal storm warnings covering this area on September 27.

-   Displaced

    WHYY reported that some Ship Bottom residents evacuated on foot on September 25.

    Source: [WHYY](https://whyy.org/articles/philadelphia-new-jersey-delaware-noreaster-coastal-flooding-high-waves-winds/)

-   Rescue

    9adults rescued

    Egg Harbor Township police said nine adults and a dog were rescued from the Travel Inn and New Sea Breeze motels on September 26 after more than two feet of water entered first-floor rooms.

    Source: [The Philadelphia Inquirer](https://www.inquirer.com/news/new-jersey/new-jersey-philadelphia-weather-rain-wind-noreaster-20260926.html)

-   Rescue

    dozens of people rescued

    Governor Mikie Sherrill said responders rescued dozens of people after floodwaters two to three feet deep swept through homes and vehicles in the Atlantic City area on September 26.

    Source: [WHYY](https://whyy.org/articles/noreaster-flooding-new-jersey-2026/)

-   Rescue

    1person rescued

    Emergency crews in Sea Bright rescued a woman and her dog from a vehicle trapped in floodwaters, according to ABC7 reporting cited by the Associated Press.

    Source: [Associated Press, published by WKMG ClickOrlando](https://www.clickorlando.com/news/national/2026/09/26/powerful-noreaster-causes-coastal-flooding-and-knocks-out-power-to-parts-of-the-northeast-us/)

For one of these stories, research looked for reported deaths and injuries and found none. As far as the record shows, no one was hurt.

BePrepared

## 65 warnings reached New Jersey in Sep 21 – 27, 2026. See which reach your street.

We read the emergency alerts going out across New Jersey and the rest of the country, around the clock. That is where this report comes from. Enter your ZIP and get the version that matters to you: the flood, fire and storm history around your address, what sits nearby, and a plan built for your household.

[Start your free 7-day trial](https://bepreparedsolutions.co/trial?source=alert-pulse&utm_source=alert-pulse&utm_medium=report&utm_campaign=nj-week-2026-09-21&utm_content=card&returnTo=%2Freports%2Falert-pulse%2Fnj-week-2026-09-21)

No card. It ends on its own.

[Or just look up your ZIP](https://bepreparedsolutions.co/zip)

The numbers behind this report

Every warning counted once, by type, place, day and hour, with the method below and the whole table downloadable at the end of the page.

Distinct warnings

65

carried by 353 messages (5.43× echo)

Counties reached

46

across 3 states and territories

Overnight

23

10pm–6am local · 0 of the most severe

Effective on arrival

100%

take effect the moment they are sent

### What was warned about

| Alert type | Warnings | Messages |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Wind Advisory | 21 | 53 |
| Coastal Flood Warning | 12 | 89 |
| Rip Current Statement | 10 | 55 |
| Coastal Flood Statement | 7 | 8 |
| Coastal Flood Advisory | 6 | 75 |
| High Surf Advisory | 3 | 52 |
| Flood Warning | 3 | 3 |
| High Wind Warning | 2 | 10 |

### Where

| State | Warnings |
| --- | --- |
| NJ | 47 |
| DE | 14 |
| CT | 4 |

The busiest hour of the period was 4am local time, with 10 warnings.

### Counties reached most often

| County | State | Warnings |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Ocean | NJ | 24 |
| Cape May | NJ | 23 |
| Atlantic | NJ | 23 |
| Monmouth | NJ | 20 |
| Hudson | NJ | 16 |
| Essex | NJ | 16 |
| Union | NJ | 16 |
| Bergen | NJ | 12 |
| Sussex | DE | 10 |
| Richmond | NY | 10 |

A county with no alerts is not a county with no risk. It can mean a quiet period, or a hazard that this feed does not carry.

Figure 04[Embed this chart](#use-these-figures)

### When the warnings arrived

Distinct warnings by the local hour they were sent, across the whole period.Local time in the place each alert was sent to. 23 arrived between 10pm and 6am, 0 of them at the highest severity.

View as a table

| Local hour | Warnings | Of which most severe |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 12am | 0 | 0 |
| 1am | 0 | 0 |
| 2am | 2 | 0 |
| 3am | 5 | 0 |
| 4am | 10 | 0 |
| 5am | 4 | 0 |
| 6am | 2 | 0 |
| 7am | 1 | 0 |
| 8am | 1 | 0 |
| 9am | 1 | 0 |
| 10am | 0 | 0 |
| 11am | 5 | 0 |
| 12pm | 2 | 0 |
| 1pm | 4 | 0 |
| 2pm | 5 | 0 |
| 3pm | 6 | 0 |
| 4pm | 7 | 0 |
| 5pm | 3 | 0 |
| 6pm | 3 | 0 |
| 7pm | 0 | 0 |
| 8pm | 0 | 0 |
| 9pm | 2 | 0 |
| 10pm | 1 | 0 |
| 11pm | 1 | 0 |

Figure 05[Embed this chart](#use-these-figures)

### The feed repeats itself

How many messages the feed carried, how many distinct warnings they represent, and how many counties those reached.An echo rate of 5.43× — for every warning issued, 5.43 messages carried it. Reporting messages as warnings would overstate this week by 288.

View as a table

| Stage | Count |
| --- | --- |
| Messages received | 353 |
| Of which updates | 311 |
| Of which cancels | 0 |
| Distinct warnings | 65 |
| Counties reached | 46 |

Figure 06[Embed this chart](#use-these-figures)

### How severe they were

Distinct warnings by the severity the issuing agency assigned.

-   Minor
-   Moderate
-   Severe

View as a table

| Severity | Warnings |
| --- | --- |
| Minor | 16 |
| Moderate | 31 |
| Severe | 18 |

Figure 07[Embed this chart](#use-these-figures)

### What people were told to do

The share of warnings carrying each instruction to the public.These are response counts. They record the instruction an alert carried, not the hazard behind it.

-   Avoid
-   Follow instructions
-   Monitor
-   Everything else

View as a table

| Response | Warnings | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Avoid | 28 | 43.1% |
| Follow instructions | 21 | 32.3% |
| Monitor | 13 | 20.0% |
| Prepare | 3 | 4.6% |

### What this report cannot tell you

-   This report records the warnings that were sent: when, where, and what people were told to do. It cannot say whether anyone received them, whether they acted, or whether they had anywhere to go.
-   Deaths, injuries, damage and acreage come from the news organizations and agencies named beside each figure. Our own records measure warnings, never outcomes, and are never the source for a toll.
-   A county is the smallest area these alerts describe, so "a county was warned" does not mean every street in it was at risk.
-   Where no figure has been reported, this report says so rather than estimating.

## How these numbers were counted

Counted SEP 21, 2026 – SEP 28, 2026 · Frozen at publish

The alert figures in this report — how many warnings, where, when, and how severe — come from the alerts this archive received from FEMA IPAWS and the National Weather Service between September 21, 2026 and September 28, 2026, counted once and frozen when the report was published.

Deaths, damage and acreage are **not** ours and are never drawn from this archive. Each is attributed to the organization that reported it, above.

### What was counted

-   Only alerts covering at least one county in New Jersey. An alert warning several states is counted in each of them, so state editions do not sum to the national total.
-   cap\_status = 'Actual' (tests, exercises and demos excluded)
-   SAME test codes RWT/RMT/DMO/NPT/NAT excluded, and any event type containing "test"
-   An event is the first message of a CAP identifier chain; updates and cancels are counted separately
-   Alert time is cap\_sent, falling back to ingest time when the feed omits it
-   Counties come from the alert geocodes (SAME/FIPS); statewide codes are not counted as counties

### What these numbers cannot tell you

-   Lead time is the gap between when an alert was sent and when it takes effect. This archive collapses CAP onset into effective, so for many products those are the same instant by design — it is not a measure of forecast warning time.
-   0 alerts expire exactly 24 hours after they were sent because the feed omitted an expiry and the ingest substitutes a default. They are excluded from the duration distribution rather than charted as real forecasts.
-   Evacuation and shelter figures are RESPONSE counts. They record what people were told to do, not what caused it; where the alert text does not name a hazard, the row is reported as unstated.
-   Hour-of-day figures use each alert’s own local time, resolved from its state. Alerts spanning several states resolve to the first state in their geocodes.
-   National Weather Service alerts began arriving in volume on 2026-06-12. Earlier months hold only the handful that reached this archive by other routes, so they undercount weather alerts badly and cannot be compared with later months.
-   Population figures are not available for these counties, so alert counts are reported per county and never per resident.

### This archive

Collection began 2026-03-27. National Weather Service alerts began arriving in volume on 2026-06-12 (a small number reached the archive by other routes from 2026-03-31). Months from 2026-07-01 onward can be compared with each other; earlier ones cannot.

### Photographs

The photos come from the reporting each story cites, or from public-domain and openly licensed collections. Each is credited as published and links to the page it came from; none belongs to BePrepared, and each is shown uncropped. To ask for a photo to be removed, write to [support@bepreparedsolutions.co](mailto:support@bepreparedsolutions.co).

For newsrooms and researchers

## Use these figures

Figures v2 · Frozen

Journalists, emergency managers and researchers are welcome to reuse anything in this report, including the underlying counts, with attribution. Version 2 of these figures is frozen: if a correction changes them, it appears above as a dated note rather than silently replacing what you cited.

[Download the figures (CSV)](https://bepreparedsolutions.co/reports/alert-pulse/nj-week-2026-09-21/data.csv?v=2)[Ask about the data](mailto:hello@bepreparedsolutions.co?subject=Alert%20Pulse%20data%20question)

Cite this report

BePreparedSolutions.co. "Jersey Shore flooding forces motel rescues and closes roads." Alert Pulse, September 28, 2026. https://bepreparedsolutions.co/reports/alert-pulse/nj-week-2026-09-21

Attribution line for a chart or table

Source: BePrepared Solutions, Alert Pulse (2026). Alert counts from FEMA IPAWS and National Weather Service feeds; casualty and damage figures as attributed in the report.

Embed a chartWhere the warnings landedWhen the warnings arrivedMessages, warnings, countiesHow severe they wereWhat people were told to do

Paste this where the chart should appear

<iframe src="https://bepreparedsolutions.co/reports/alert-pulse/nj-week-2026-09-21/embed/reach\_map" width="100%" height="520" style="border:0" loading="lazy" title="Jersey Shore flooding forces motel rescues and closes roads"></iframe>

The embed updates itself if we publish a correction, so it never goes stale the way a screenshot does.

The CSV carries the same frozen figures as this page, keyed to version 2.

---

_Guidance here is general and cannot account for your circumstances. In an active emergency, official instructions from local authorities take precedence over anything published by BePrepared Solutions._