http://www.thruway.ny.gov/index.shtml

http://www.zingmit.com/2011/08/massive-flooding-in-fleishmans-ny.html

Fleishmans

U.S. authorities: At least 19 killed as a result of Hurricane Irene

תוקן על ידי שלמהווייס ב- 29/08/2011 03:49:01

Officials consider flooding Vermont's capital

MONTPELIER, Vt. - A raging river swept a woman away, officials told hundreds of people to leave their homes and a utility considered flooding the state's capital to save a dam after Tropical Storm Irene dumped torrential rain on Vermont on Sunday.

Parts of downtown Brattleboro and Bennington were under water, as were several smaller communities. Evacuations were ordered around the state and shelters filled up.

"It's pretty fierce. I've never seen anything like it," said Michelle Guevin, who spoke from a Brattleboro restaurant after being evacuated from her home in the Williamsville section of Newfane. She said her house was high enough to be OK, but the fast-moving Rock River was washing out the road that runs by it.

The capital city issued an ominous warning to residents: "A major emergency is on the horizon in Montpelier and is already occurring in other communities in the region."

A dramatic video posted on Facebook showed an 1870 covered bridge over the Williams River in the Bartonsville section of Rockingham being swept away by rushing water, then disappearing seconds later. In another, an empty car somersaulted down a river in Bennington.

Green Mountain Power warned that Montpelier could be flooded twice, once in the initial storm and again if the utility decides it must release water to save the earthen Mashfield Dam, about 20 miles up the Winooski River northeast of the capital.

Residents of 350 households as far downstream as East Montpelier were asked to leave Sunday evening as a precaution, GMP spokeswoman Dorothy Schnure said.

Releasing the water "would increase the flooding of the Winooski," Schnure said. "We don't want to do it. But if the dam were to be compromised, it would be a far greater effect." If the water is released, it would take about four hours to reach Montpelier. It was not clear how much water would be involved and how much damage it might do.

The storm began with rain early in the day, heaviest in the southern part of the state, moving slowing north as the day went on. By late afternoon, officials were reporting roads closed by flooding from Guilford on the Massachusetts line to Derby, which borders Quebec. The Red Cross expected to house 200 people at 10 shelters overnight.

"This is the worst I've ever seen in Vermont," said Mike O'Neil, director of Vermont Emergency Management.By 6 p.m., much of the state had picked up 4 to 6 inches of rain, with 1 to 2 more inches forecast before it was expected to taper off as the storm exited northern Vermont.

"It's really important that Vermonters take this storm seriously and stay inside," Gov. Peter Shumlin said at an afternoon news conference at Vermont Emergency Management headquarters.

"Don't stand next to rushing water, which is what she and her friend were doing at the time of her disappearance," Shumlin said of the woman swept away in Wilmington, whom authorities did not identify.

The center of Wilmington, a ski resort town at the junction of Vermont Routes 100 and 9, was flooded by the East Branch of the Deerfield River but could not be reached by either of those state roads because of washouts. Vermont National Guard members deployed in a rescue operation had to travel south of the state line and travel back north from Massachusetts, Shumlin said.

In Bennington, a team of firefighters had to be rescued after their boat tipped as they were pulling a man who was having a medical emergency from his home. The firefighters were OK, officials said; the man they were rescuing was airlifted to a hospital.

Across the state, there were reports of culverts and roads being washed away, large trees coming down and water seeping into homes. At about 3 p.m., rescue workers were dispatched to a stream in Grafton, where a woman was reported clinging to a tree in rushing water.

Earlier Sunday in Montpelier, lawyer Dot Helling came downtown to see if merchants needed any help moving items out of their basements. The flooding was even worse than this past spring, when high water damaged businesses.

"It's deja vu, and this is not a good deja vu," Helling said.

The storm's path shifted west of what was forecast initially, moving up through western Vermont and eastern New York state, rather than the Connecticut River valley.

Shumlin cautioned that Vermont residents should stay at home even after the storm appears to have passed. Roads will be flooded and power lines down, creating continuing dangers, he said.

The storm did not produce winds as strong as had been feared, with gusts topping 50 mph but not getting to the 70 mph forecasters had predicted. Even the lesser winds were enough to topple trees onto power lines, and by mid-afternoon more than 25,000 electric customers without power, utility officials said.

"Line crews have been restoring outages since early this morning, but in some areas extreme flooding conditions and road closures are hampering our ability to respond and restore power, especially in Dover and Wilmington," Schnure said.

The state ordered all nonessential employees to delay their start Monday until 10 a.m., and to check their email for notifications of possible further delays. The University of Vermont in Burlington delayed the start of fall classes, which had been set for Monday, until Tuesday.

AP – A damaged historic covered bridge spans Cox Brook in Northfield, Vt., Monday,
 
Aug. 29, 2011, the day

 
Irene's toll jumps to 40; Vt. towns battle

 floods

By WILSON RING and JENNIFER PELTZ, Associated Press – 1 hr 12 mins ago

MONTPELIER, Vt. – The full measure of Hurricane Irene's fury came into focus Monday as the death toll jumped to 40, New England towns battled epic floods and millions faced the dispiriting prospect of several days without electricity.

From North Carolina to Maine, communities cleaned up and took stock of the uneven and hard-to-predict costs of a storm that spared the nation's biggest city a nightmare scenario, only to deliver a historic wallop to towns well inland.

In New York City, where people had braced for a disaster-movie scene of water swirling around skyscrapers, the subways and buses were up and running again in time for the Monday morning commute. And to the surprise of many New Yorkers, things went pretty smoothly.

But in New England, landlocked Vermont contended with what its governor called the worst flooding in a century. Streams also raged out of control in upstate New York.

In many cases, the moment of maximum danger arrived well after the storm had passed, as rainwater made its way into rivers and streams and turned them into torrents. Irene dumped up to 11 inches of rain on Vermont and more than 13 in parts of New York.

"We were expecting heavy rains," said Bobbi-Jean Jeun of Clarksville, a hamlet near Albany, N.Y. "We were expecting flooding. We weren't expecting devastation. It looks like somebody set a bomb off."

Meanwhile, the 11-state death toll, which had stood at 21 as of Sunday night, rose sharply as bodies were pulled from floodwaters and people were electrocuted by downed power lines.

The tally of Irene's destruction mounted, too. An apparently vacant home exploded in an evacuated, flooded area in Pompton Lakes, N.J., early Monday, and firefighters had to battle the flames from a boat. In the Albany, N.Y., suburb of Guilderland, police rescued two people Monday after their car was swept away. Rescuers found them three hours later, clinging to trees along the swollen creek.

"It's going to take time to recover from a storm of this magnitude," President Barack Obama warned as he promised the government would do everything in its power to help people get back on their feet.

For many people, the aftermath could prove more painful than the storm itself.

In North Carolina, where Irene blew ashore along the Outer Banks on Saturday before heading for New York and New England, 1,000 people were still in emergency shelters, awaiting word on their homes.

At the same time, nearly 5 million homes and businesses in a dozen states were still without electricity, and utilities warned it might be a week or more before some people got their power back.

"Once the refrigerator gets warm, my insulin goes bad. I could go into diabetic shock. It's kind of scary because we don't know how long it's going to be out for," said Patricia Dillon, a partially paralyzed resident of a home for the disabled in Milford, Conn., where the electricity was out and a generator failed. Her voice cracking, she added: "I'm very tired, stressed out, aggravated, scared."

Russ Furlong of Barrington, R.I., ruefully remembered the two weeks he went without power after Hurricane Bob 20 years ago.

"Hopefully, we won't have to wait that long this time," he said. "Last night we had candles. It was romantic. It was fun. But that feeling doesn't last too long."

Up and down the Eastern Seaboard, commuters and vacationers found their travel plans scrambled. Airlines warned it would be days before the thousands of passengers stranded by Irene find their way home. Some Amtrak service in the Northeast was suspended. Commuter trains between New Jersey and New York City were not running. Trains between the city and its northern suburbs were also disrupted.

Kris and Jennifer Sylvester of Brooklyn sat on a bench in the town center in Woodstock, N.Y., with luggage at their feet and their daughters, aged 4 and 9, holding signs reading, "Need a Ride 2 NYC" and "Help Us, No Bus, No Train." They rode Amtrak out for a long weekend in the country, but were unable to get home.

"We're hoping for anything," Jennifer Sylvester said.

In Vermont, the state's emergency management headquarters stood empty, evacuated because of river flooding from Irene's heavy rains. Rescuers used a boat and bucket loaders to pluck seven people from a swamped mobile home park in Lyndonville.

In upstate New York, authorities were closely watching major dams holding back drinking water reservoirs.

Throughout the region, hundreds of roads were impassable because of flooding or fallen trees, and some bridges had simply given way, including a 156-year-old hand-hewn, wooden, covered bridge across Schoharie Creek in Blenheim, N.Y. In all, more than a dozen towns in Vermont and at least three in New York remained cut off by flooded roads and bridges.

Still, there were glimmers of good news. In Pennsylvania, the Delaware River largely remained in its banks, cresting several feet lower than feared. The forecast for flooding on the Mohawk River in New York also eased at Schenectady, N.Y., where officials had worried that high water might threaten the city's drinking water and sewage treatment plant.

Early estimates put Irene's damage at $7 billion to $10 billion, much smaller than the impact of monster storms such as Hurricane Katrina, which did more than $100 billion in damage. Irene's effects are small compared to the overall U.S. economy, which produces about $14 trillion of goods and services every year.

While hard-hit regions, such as the North Carolina coast, will suffer from lost tourism, rebuilding homes, repairing cars, and fixing streets and bridges should provide a small boost to economy, experts said.

Irene was also good for business at Fantastic Kids Toys in New York City, where sales of board games and arts-and-crafts items surged on Friday and Saturday. "People were buying anything to keep their kids busy," owner Steve Reis said.

Many people were surprised by the destruction that Hurricane Irene wrought in communities far inland. But National Weather Service records show that 59 percent of the deaths attributed to hurricanes since the 1970s have been from freshwater flooding.

As for why the flooding was so bad this time, Shaun Tanner, a meteorologist with the forecasting service Weather Underground, noted that August had been unusually wet, and Irene's sheer size meant huge amounts of rain were dumped over a very large area.

"More attention should have been paid to the torrential rain that Irene was going to dump not only on coastal areas, but also inland. That was clear several days ahead of time," Tanner said.

http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110830/ap_on_re_us/us_irene

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