NY Times - Flooding - NYC DEP - Catskills

EVEN before last April's disastrous floods, the Meyers Grove neighborhood
along the Neversink River wasn't exactly Malibu, just an unpretentious
jumble of modest houses, trailers and bungalows, many of them converted from
summer vacation cottages.

But 10 months after the river roared over its banks, cresting at 11 feet
over flood stage, it still looks like parts of New Orleans, with some houses
repaired and rebuilt, some vacant and condemned, and others reduced to
doleful piles of rubble, waiting to be hauled away.

Last year's flooding on the Delaware River and some of its tributaries,
including the Neversink, may be a fleeting memory downstate, but for
residents in Meyers Grove, along Rivers Edge Road down the road in nearby
Huguenot and in dozens of other riverside towns and hamlets, it's no more
past than Katrina is for residents of the Gulf Coast.

So, if Mark D. House, the supervisor of the Town of Deerpark in Orange
County, whose 9,000 residents include the people of Meyers Grove, sounds a
little hyperbolic as he talks about reservoir levels and spillway
management, it's not just him. This is one subject where the
upstate/downstate divide is now more divided than ever.

"It's like they're holding a gun to my head, it's loaded, they have their
finger on the trigger, and they're squeezing the trigger," he said,
navigating his way around the neighborhood in his PT Cruiser. "And they have
the gall to say, oh, by the way, if this should go off, it's not our fault
and it's not our responsibility."

The gun, if you want to call it that, is the water in the Neversink
Reservoir, now over 100 percent of capacity at a time that it's usually
around 80. When kept at a lower level, the reservoir, which is part of New
York City's water supply system, can help prevent or limit flooding, by
giving water from swollen rivers a place to collect rather than cascading
downstream. But keeping such reservoirs as full as possible maximizes the
city's ability to provide water downstate even in an extended dry spell.

The city's Department of Environmental Protection has always said that it's
in the water delivery business, not the flood control business, and that, in
fact, its reservoirs in the Catskill and Delaware systems have limited
abilities to release water and manage flooding.

But after two severe floods almost back to back, first in September 2004,
then in April 2005, that policy now comes across as imperial arrogance to
flooded residents and communities. So up and down the rivers, people are
hiring lawyers, forming organizations, gearing up for something other than
business as it's usually been conducted.

In a letter to New York's two United States senators and local
representatives, State Senator John J. Bonacic, whose district encompasses
much of the city's watershed, said last week it was outrageous that a year
after the flooding, reservoir levels were still at 100 percent capacity, in
advance of expected spring rains and snowmelt. He is calling on officials to
lobby against a federal designation the city needs to avoid building a $10
billion filtration system unless the city satisfactorily addresses dam
safety and flood control issues.

"The D.E.P.'s position is arrogant," he wrote. "It is the most arrogant
position by any agency that I have seen in all my years of holding public
office."

FOR its part, the environmental agency says it has already altered its
policies, consistent with its legal obligations, particularly with the
Delaware River Basin Commission, where New York State and its neighbors New
Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware must approve changes in water releases.
The agency says it has already begun a program of releases of water based on
anticipated snowmelt and has proposed a more ambitious one that would allow
releases that would be equal to the water from a one-inch rainfall over a
six-hour period.

"I think it's a start, and it's a show of good faith," said Michael
Principe, deputy commissioner of the D.E.P. "We can never reduce 100 percent
of the risk, but this is a way of mitigating some of the risk, which is the
best we can expect."

In truth, there's a lot more at issue than the D.E.P.'s flood control
measures on reservoirs and dams built with limited flood control technology.
Rivers do flood. Blame nature. People do live in flood-prone areas. Meyers
Grove is one of them.

Still, it's clear that the recent flooding has, for now at least, changed
the balance between the people upstate who live beneath the dams and people
downstate who just want to know that water will come out when they open the
tap. Like it or not, the city has a toe in the flood control business, after
all.

For now, the reservoirs are full. The rainy season is around the corner. So
people watch the weather, they watch the rivers, they wait, and they worry.

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