PLATTSBURGH, N.Y. (WCAX) – Two major disaster declarations were approved for Essex County, New York, this summer after the remnants of tropical storms barrelled through the area, leaving damage to roads, campsites and culverts across the county.
To address the increasing floods and severe weather, state officials are drafting reports for watersheds across New York.
Officials with New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation are carrying out flood mitigation studies on the Boquet and AuSable rivers in Essex County.
“Since the late 1990s and certainly for the past 20 years or so, we have seen increasingly severe weather events,” said Kelley Tucker, the executive director of the Ausable Freshwater Center.
Tucker says the DEC’s final report will give recommendations to towns and villages for how best to prepare against future flooding, making recommendations on things like culverts, bridges, roads and river resiliency projects.
“It is going to give so many watersheds and so many communities a leg up on taking first steps to doing work like this,” she said.
Tucker says the uptick in frequent and damaging storms led to one of their own projects on roughly a mile and a half of the east branch of the AuSable River.
“All of this material is from the river itself. So, we get permits from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who are partners from DEC and APA and we can build the river, its form, in a way that it can once again function in a self-sustaining manner,” Tucker said.
So far, she says the improvements have done their job, keeping the river moving and rocks and debris off the road.
“We finished this project in October of last year, just in time for the October storm and then there was the December storm and then there were the storms this year and it has functioned incredibly well,” Tucker said.
In eastern Essex County, Colin Powers with the Boquet River Association says he hopes the report will outline projects that save municipalities money in the long term.
“What I hope this report helps us is helping us how to right-size our crossings, whether it’s a culvert and bridge, to make sure we are not going in and doing work twice,” Powers said.
Tucker says the reports likely will not be released until later this year.