Highway Department

Hi Everyone:

I have a lot of respect for highway departments, especially in the winter time. Somehow they always manage to clear the roads of snow and make them passable. The area where I live is covered by both the town highway department and the county highway department. The county is responsible for the main road where my driveway is located. It is the only east west road in my county.

This east west road is located, for at least a part of it, along two reservoirs that supply New York City with drinking water. On the other side are the hillsides that supply water to the reservoir via streams and brooks. Whenever we have very heavy rains, the road floods making driving very dangerous. This has been a long standing problem with no attention paid to it. So what is this county highway department doing this summer? They seem to have good intentions to try to alleviate the flooding problem.

For a week, they had a grade-all vehicle, a dump truck and about 8 employees digging a trench between the road and the hillsides. The new trenches do eventually end up at different pipes that divert the water into the reservoirs. The first problem that I noticed is that the distance between the pipes is about 1/2 to 3/4 of a mile apart. That seems to me to be a very long distance for the water to travel before reaching the pipes. I won't know if the long distance is problematic until we have a heavy rain storm.

The second problem that I noticed is more significant and without a doubt will become problematic. While they dug the trenches, they left numerous areas where they ended up making good size depressions with the overflow having to go up hill to continue. Just by looking at it, one can surmise, that during a heavy rain storm, the water will collect in the depressions and become deep because the water has to travel up hill to continue its journey to the pipes. But before the water can do that, it will undoubtedly spill onto the road and the flooding will continue, as if they had done nothing at all. If a novice like me can see the inevitable problem that will occur, why couldn't the highway employees see it? Somehow the supervisor(s) also missed this potential problem. Now I understand that maybe, just maybe they couldn't see the error of their ways when they were up close and personal to the areas. But all one has to do is drive by the areas and anyone can tell what's going to eventually happen.

Where was the common sense in spending all the time and money to accomplish basically nothing? The flooding will continue until someone takes a close look at the work that they did. Water flows down hill and will collect in low lying areas until it floods over. The next heavy rain will prove my point and the road will flood as usual. Then most likely, sometime in the future, they will be back to fix it correctly. If common sense was used the first time, it could have been fixed correctly.

Common sense rules.

Til next week.