Berlin NY Begins Digging Out From Hurricane Irene Floods

The floods from Hurricane Irene are subsiding in many places except the high mountains in Vermont and NY Catskill and northern tier mountains.  The rivers and streams in my own small town are still at flood level but finally dropping.  Neighbors are coming out to see each other and check out the damage.  The people in the above photo all lost their driveways and can’t drive their cars.  Last night, it was still raining and all roads in and out of Berlin were closed but today, a few are open but certainly, not all at all.  There is still very little traffic on the main road, Route 22 because of floods in the larger rivers above and below our town.  

Here is a photo of some of the small buildings which were swept downstream yesterday and are now lodged in the trees that line the brook.  This is a very small brook, not a river.  Yet, the volume of water yesterday was at river-levels.  Fortunately, no one lost their homes unlike the unfortunate people elsewhere in our state.

There is siding from the trailers up the road where it turns and climbs steeply up the mountain.  If we had 14 inches of rain like in the Catskills, those people would probably lost their homes and maybe even their lives.  I am happy we got only the huge amount of over 7 inches.

There are many people online who imagine the perfect world is one where there is minimum government.  I am most emphatically not of that belief.  I pay taxes and I expect services.  I don’t want to pay taxes to spend trillions trying to control angry Afghanis.  This is stupid.  I want this money spent here, keeping the good citizens of the USA alive and well.  Unlike Ron Paul who believes the entire costs of struggling to survive hurricanes should be borne by the victims, for example.  That cold-blooded lizard mouths off about how independent he and his libertarians are yet, he begs for government money after hurricanes while grand standing about how he doesn’t ask for money (hint: we nice people offer it freely to victims in Texas!).

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The county, state and local road crews were all out today, working hard to fix the mess and to reconnect us with the rest of the nation.  This brief bout of total isolation unnerved many people and it shows how slender the threads that tie us all together really are.  And why we need to be united, internally and externally, across the entire nation, not just locally, to run a good,  healthy and strong community.  A strong nation means a strong community!  The costs of this storm would bankrupt my tiny town, wreck the finances of my county and make life hard for my state and if California has the inevitable San Andreas 9.0 event, I fully expect all of us to help there, too.  This is the only sane way to run a nation, run a civilization.  No civilization runs the other way, they disintegrate.

This has been hidden by the US empire since WWI and especially since WWII with all the many tiny nations on earth as well as former empires like Japan, Germany, France, Britain and Spain, all expecting the mighty US to protect and bail them out from military menaces, internal revolts, trade difficulties, banking problems, natural disasters and whatever.  Tiny nations that are proud of being ‘independent’ really are not even slightly independent: they all thrive or exist in the shadow of US generosity and protections. Which is going to collapse because we are running everything in the red.

Just as great floods washed away my local road which runs right past my home, so can events erode the imperial highways of the great US empire.  Ron Paul and his buddies on the right are whining about cutting something so we can fund FEMA.  Ron is correct in saying, we should cut out our many military interventions and bring home our troops.  I agree with him. But…his allies in his own party won’t do this any more than the Democrats, run by AIPAC, will cease the endless wars against Muslims.  We get all the cuts, every last penny of the cuts will come out of our own welfare, our own protection at home, our own lives here in America, not our foreign protections, interventions and agitations.

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We will still spend trillions on our empire while cutting life and limb at home.  Ron could turn on his own party and become an independent like Bernie Sanders, a far, far finer man and one I would like to see more.  Sanders will fight for Vermont and fight for national money to flow to the catastrophe there and unlike Ron Paul, won’t pretend that Galveston needed any Federal help at all after a major hurricane.  Senator Sanders is honest, Ron Paul is delusional.

 

Things are actually getting worse up here, not better.  Unlike the flatlanders along the shorelines where the damage is done, up here it is continuing.  The mountain towns are digging out like my own little hamlet but the waters here are flowing very strong still and even the small stream on my driveway which runs only in spring is still running strong, hours after the rain has stopped due to hydraulic pressure underground.  Hurricane Irene 2011: Upstate New York, Vermont Face Major Flooding

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In Windham, for instance, news sources and images linked on the site have depicted a scene of “total destruction,” with most houses in the low-lying parts of town covered to their roofs in water. The town has been “wiped out,” in the words of Windham Fire Chief Michael Scarey, according to the Mid Hudson News.

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Commenters on the site have described a rapidly deteriorating situation, with the local emergency services reportedly being completely overwhelmed by the number of people in need.

 

While talking to my fine neighbors about surviving the floods here, all of them were expressing concern about the people in the Catskills to the south.  They all thought we were barely touched in comparison to those poor people.  This is how humans should work: show concern for people they don’t know.  This is what is seemingly totally missing from libertarian ideology.

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We may have dam collapses up here, too!  Evacuations in Schenectady, Troy and possible dam failure in Johnsonville – Times Union

The Hudson River was also rising. Troy issued a voluntary evacuation order for South Troy and Lansingburgh.

The evacuations involve all neighborhoods from Ferry Street to the Troy-Menands Bridge and the riverfront to Fifth Avenue. In Lansingburgh, all neighborhoods from 112th Street to 126th Street from the waterfront to Fourth Avenue were also being evacuated.

Travel out of the Capital Region was difficult.

Amtrak was running no trains out of the station in Rensselaer.

Big chunks of the Thruway remain closed as flooding brought on by Tropical Storm gradually recedes. The highway was closed between Amsterdam and Canajoharie and between Nyack and Harriman.

In Albany, the southbound side of Interstate 787 was closed at the Exit 4A ramp because of flooding.

Power outages remained widespread.

Residents on River Road in Johnsonville were ordered to leave their homes Monday because of fears that the hydroelectric plant dam in Pittstown would burst, Rensselaer County officials said.

The order applies to people living on the Route 67 side of River Road.

“The dam at the hydroelectric plant is in imminent danger of failure,” Deputy County Executive Chris Meyer said.

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I hope people in NYC think about all of us here upstate!  This is how true communities work.  They barely got hurt down there and should be quite grateful for being spared and now we all have to work together to save upstate NY and Vermont.  Just as we would pay higher taxes or help send workers down to the shore to save people if a category 3 or 5 hurricane blew in there.  Thank you, all.

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