Hurricane Irene hits the Adirondacks

The river babbles behind us as we carry things to a storage container parked on the front lawn. Two months ago Hurricane Irene tore through the area with record-breaking rains that turned the now benign stream, about maybe 20 feet wide, into a raging torrent that leapt over it’s banks, surged across lawns and roads, through houses and businesses, tearing up trees, buildings, pavement and lives. Now the couple is moving memories to install a new heating system. “The neighbor’s barn was there”, she points to the corner of an ell on the back, the river side, of their old mountain farmhouse that has withstood many other storms in it’s almost 200 years. “It caught on our house and the water went under it”. The water dug a hole more than five feet deep under their house and tore out the foundation, went into the basement and destroyed the furnace and everything else there. “There were five brook trout on the floor”, she adds.
The course of the river changed, “it’s about 20 feet closer to our house now, and it just drops off, there used to be lawn there and a gentle slope down to the water”, I am shown. “I miss our lawn”. An old cedar tree was torn up by the roots when the water surged by, she had some of it pulled near the house to use the wood for something, she’s not sure what. The trunk is a good foot and a half thick.
They are just one of dozens of families whose lives were torn up by the roots when Hurricane Irene’s torrential rains hit the Adirondacks on August 28. The water came from the tops of the mountains in this High Peaks region, rushing to small streams and sometimes taking parts of the mountains with it. The small streams held what they could and the rest stormed of their banks onto fields, forest, lawns and roads. When the streams got to the Ausable River’s East Branch, which runs through the towns of Keene, Upper Jay and Jay it did the same thing.
Two branches of the Ausable River, West and East, flow through two valleys and meet at the village of Ausable Forks – where the water was up to the door handles of the pizza parlor, two blocks from either river. “It’s probably in Ausable Chasm” is a catch phrase about things that were washed away. It’s about 20 miles from Ausable Forks to the popular tourist spot where the river narrows and pours through deep rock walls before broadening out and finally dumping into Lake Champlain.
You first see some damage on Route 73, where pavement was torn up by what are usually tiny brooks you can step across; orange cones and new pavement now line the road. Then you notice the storage containers beside houses that are near a stream. Then, turning onto Route 9N and heading north, some houses are empty, some have piles of rubble outside: possessions and walls heaped together to be taken away. Near the house where I was helping several piles of trees, bushes, branches, boards and bicycles and more sit in the trees between the road and the river. She found her kayak under one of the piles, pulled it out and set it in the sun, undamaged.
On a side road I take photos of piles of trees and rocks, then notice that some of the rocks are black, look closer and see that some of those have yellow stripes on them - it’s not rocks, it’s pieces of pavement, torn up and left there by the water of a small brook as it raced past to join the bigger river and add to the woes downstream.
Along the road, which runs beside the river from Keene to Keesville, pieces of buildings, furniture, scraps of clothing and trees lie in fields, along the river bank, stuck in trees and on guard rails. Bridge abutments are scraped to the top by the debris pushed past. In Jay, the water was up to the bottom of the recently restored covered bridge, some 20 feet above the normal height of the river. An 8 foot high wall of 2 foot thick concrete blocks on the opposite side of the road from the river is marked about a foot from the bottom with ‘April, 2011’, showing the depth of the flooding then. Now added, at the top, with arrows pointing up, is “Hurricane Irene, August 28, 2011’. On the other side it says “Irene was here-don’t come back!’
Firehouses in Keene and Upper Jay are empty, with damage that might not be repairable. In Upper Jay, the fire chief gave the order to move the trucks just in time; the water was up to the doors as the volunteers drove them out. The hamlet’s library was flooded, the soccer and ball fields destroyed, a woman watched her livelihood float away as she stood downstream from her antique shop.
The once popular family attraction Land of Make Believe, no longer operating but with many of the memorable pieces still in place, is now bare, with piles of sand pushed from the road to open it to traffic standing in what once was a parking area filled with excited children. A pony kept there was swept away.
Near where one town road meets the highway, a three car garage blocked the view of the field behind it. Now you can see the whole field, there is no trace of the garage. You can also see a house in the middle of the field; it used to be beside the road, a hundred yards or so away.
Upper Jay is tiny, with just a few people and fewer businesses in the hamlet. One, a motel, opened for refugees until they could return to their houses, or make other arrangements if that was not an option. A woman tells me that she brought food from Lake Placid, 20 plus miles away, for them. “People in Lake Placid had no idea, we didn’t get this kind of damage”, she says, adding that some of the things that were sent were “Lake Placid people’s idea of what these folks needed – a chocolatier sent boxes of fancy chocolates” and she shakes her head.
People are picking up and putting their lives back together. Some may not be able to. The neighbor of the couple I was helping may not, their house has been condemned. Some say ‘well, they live in a flood plain, they should expect it’. You can’t expect a ‘500 year flood’, as this is being called. ‘They should move’, those same people say. To where? With what?
No, it wasn’t as big and bad as Katrina’s flooding of New Orleans. Or the tornadoes in the southeast, perhaps. Or maybe not event he scope of the destruction when the floods took out the towns in the Catskills. But for the people affected, it is. When it’s your disaster, it’s big. This is big, for that area.
To help: www.helpjayny.com

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