New Paltz was hit with a rain storm last week. The temperature surpassed 32, and the sun came out. All of the leftover snow melted. The fire department immediately went on alert.
It's not the flooded basements that put us on standby. Basements were looking pretty pond-like along certain roads like Ohioville (North and South). Instead, it's the threat of downed power lines that we fear. As the ground soaks up all that water, the Central Hudson poles tend to sag a bit. Sometimes these get hit by trucks, and sometimes they just snap under high winds.
Luckily we didn't have to deal with one of those situations, but we did have lots of basements to pump out. Some had a foot of water; some had enough to get into the waders that the firemen were wearing. As it happened, I didn't go onto a basement until a day after the major flooding. For those who DID go in on the bad day, they often came out with a couple bootfuls of H20. One young guy new to the department came out of a basement with more water than was left in the basement after we'd finished, or so he claimed.
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