A shark swam through flooded Surf City streets during a nor'easter, gliding past a home and up a driveway on video as the storm hammered the New Jersey coast.
Around noon on September 26, resident Drew Procaccino caught the fish on camera as floodwaters pushed it past his place on Long Beach Island. The shark moved up a driveway, then headed west toward Barnegat Bay while someone on the video asked the obvious question.
“Is that a little shark?” an unidentified voice said. Another line followed: “He’s coming this way.”
Smithsonian Magazine reported the scene from the recent nor’easter that dumped heavy rain, high winds, and coastal flooding across parts of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. Surf City sits on the 18-mile barrier island off New Jersey’s coast, exactly the kind of place where storm surge can turn streets into temporary channels.
Marine biologist Greg Skomal, who heads the Massachusetts Shark Research Program at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, identified the animal for ABC News as a smooth dogfish.
"which is a very small, harmless shark that is common in those waters"
Smooth dogfish usually run about three feet long and can reach five. They range the western Atlantic from eastern Canada down toward Argentina. Females can live up to 16 years; males closer to ten. After a ten-month pregnancy, a litter often runs four to 20 pups. None of that makes the sight of one cruising a driveway any less strange for the people who live there.
The same weekend system brought severe flooding to parts of New Jersey and travel headaches and power outages across a wider stretch of the East Coast. National Weather Service meteorologist Matthew Belk, based in Norton, Massachusetts, told the Associated Press the pattern was straightforward.
"It’s definitely going to be a case of the closer to the coast you are, the more impacts from the storm you’re likely to see."
Nor’easters form most often between September and April, frequently within about 100 miles of the East Coast and typically between Georgia and New Jersey. This one did what those storms do: push water where people walk, drive, and keep their pets.
In Ocean City, New Jersey, dog owner Robin Shaffer faced water high enough that ordinary trips outside stopped working. She told WHYY’s Tom MacDonald she had to change plans for Daisy, a small Corgi mix.
"There was so much water surrounding my house that I had to literally get the kayak out to bring the dog, a little Corgi mix, just to get her over to dry land where she could do what dogs do."
Clips of the dog riding through the flooded streets made the rounds as another snapshot of the same system.
In Middletown Township, New Jersey, a doe tried to run through a metal fence and got stuck. Middletown Township firefighters covered the animal’s head with a blanket, cut the fence with an electric saw, and had her free in about 15 minutes. No injuries. Spokesperson Rob Allen put the department’s view plainly to The Washington Post.
"They’re our neighbors just as much as the next person."
That is the unglamorous side of a coastal storm: people and working crews dealing with whatever the water and wind drop in their path.
The storm was not only odd video and animal rescues. In Brooklyn, 56-year-old Leighton Brown was walking when part of a tree fell and struck him. He died. Across New York City’s five boroughs, the system toppled nearly 1,000 trees. Farther up the coast, the same weather may have uncovered what could be remains of a 19th-century shipwreck on Nantucket, Massachusetts.
Barrier-island towns like Surf City sit where ocean, bay, and weather meet. When a nor’easter stacks rain and surge, streets flood, wildlife moves with the water, and residents grab phones, kayaks, or saws and handle what shows up. A smooth dogfish in a driveway is memorable. The tree that killed a man in Brooklyn is the cost that does not trend as easily.
Coastal living has always meant dealing with water on its own terms, no press release required.
