Standing on the Mill Creek Bridge outside Stuyvesant, it's clear that nobody will be driving across it anytime soon. State Department of Transportation officials wouldn't even let me set foot on the bridge without protective gear. "Hard hats and vests!" they announce, as they open a box of them.
After putting mine on, I walked along the bridge with a gaggle of state and local officials. Workers warned us not to stand too close to the guardrail, where large chunks of Route 9J have collapsed. The muddy water in the creek remains high, very close to street level. The road is still encrusted with mud and sand from Wednesday, when the creek overtook the bridge.
After we toured the damage, State DOT Commissioner Marie Therese Dominguez stood at a podium and gave a sobering prognosis on the repairs. It will likely be weeks before the bridge is safe to use, she said. Crews will have to fix the collapsed portions of the road, and the extent of the damage to the base of the bridge is unknown. "We got to get divers in into the water to actually understand exactly how the infrastructure was impacted, the structures that support this bridge, to make sure that it's safe before we open it up again," she said.
Flooding, Dominguez pointed out, is a particularly challenging emergency. Unlike snow, which plow crews can usually start clearing even as the storm is raging, flood response tends to be reactive. You have to wait until the rain stops, and in the moment of the storm, there's no way to know what's going to happen or how bad the damage is going to be. "Water, as we all know, it finds its own way," said Dominguez. "It finds its own path, and with the intensity that we saw, you can see the damage, you can see the the trees that have moved and all the vegetation. You've seen the the actual roadway ripped up. You really don't have to be an engineer to understand the force that water can have."
Still, Dominguez said, while these repairs will take time, they will get done.
Elsewhere in upstate New York this morning, the picture was murkier. In Coeymans, Democratic Congressman Paul Tonko toured a sewage treatment facility, and the badly damaged homes of two town residents. One of them, Jason Hutchinson, told Tonko about the moment on Wednesday morning when he looked out his window and saw a cascade of water rushing towards his front door. "We were scared for lives for a short bit, because it came right to the front door," said Hutchinson.
The sloping driveway outside Hutchinson's house has deep pits in it. He urged Congressman Tonko to step carefully as he surveyed the scene. Hutchinson said it took three dump trucks of gravel to refill the path cut by the rushing water.
At the sewage treatment plant, chief sewer plant operator Keith Geraldsen pointed out cracks in the aging building's walls, and showed Tonko a set of manhole covers that blew out on Wednesday, sending sewer water spewing all over the place. "Those manholes just flew up in the air, you know? They're up in the air, and the water's just running down the street!"
Geraldsen said the plant needs federal money to fortify the town's infrastructure for future storms. Among other things, he wants to build a routing system under the town's roads so that the existing patchwork of individualized residential sump pumps doesn't get overwhelmed.
A few blocks away, Monica Ricard said she woke up on Wednesday to a crackling sound, like fireworks. She ran down to her basement just in time to see the wall collapsing under the weight of water rushing down the hill in her backyard. "The foundation wall, literally, you could see the paint falling in and the bricks start falling in," she recalled. "And it was just like a monsoon river of uncontrollable dirt and everything rolling in there."
Ricard's house is not safe to live in at the moment. She's staying at her sister's. Just this morning, she got a call from her insurance company saying the damage is not covered, because it was weather-related. Ricard teared up as she talked about this. The repairs are likely to cost tens of thousands of dollars. What, she asked Congressman Tonko, is she supposed to do?
Speaking to the group after viewing all three sites, Tonko criticized the Trump administration's priorities. He said there should be FEMA money readily available to help address situations like this. But he worries the administration will be slow to support Democratic-leaning states like New York, and that it's spending money that could be allocated to help with these repairs on things like the war in Iran and other projects. "You know, this should teach us that the priorities in Washington should be about everyday needs," Tonko said. "The essentials of water, sewer, transportation, bridges, healthcare, education...all of that. Not this frivolous stuff where we're spending money needlessly on, you know, revamping reflecting pools and knocking down West Wings of the White House. I mean, this is foolish prioritization."
