Treading water

Mother Nature has a way of letting us know who”™s in real control of our planet.

Witness the recent nor”™easter that turned the Black Dirt region of Orange County into the Black Dirt ocean.

But onion farmer Paul Ruszkiewicz thinks man had more to do with this flood than Mother Nature. Ruszkiewicz, who is chairman of the Wallkill Valley Drainage Improvement Association, points to lack of maintenance of the Wallkill River as the culprit.

In other parts of the Hudson Valley there are other culprits, from the Rondout Creek to the Ramapo River.

Nearly 70 years ago, the Army Corps of Engineers began work on improving drainage along the river. The work stopped when the funding got dammed up. Since that time, the region has endured innumerable flooding. Farmers are a hardy bunch, who generally roll with the punches thrown their way. This time, as the third 50-year flood has drowned the area in as many years, residents are saying enough is enough.

The long-eroded banks of the river need to be fixed.

The Drainage Improvement Association is researching to see what grants are available to make the repairs.

“You can”™t completely avoid flooding in the area, but there are things you can do to avoid it,” Ruszkiewicz said.

Some help is on the way via a presidential declaration that listed Orange, Rockland and Westchester counties as disaster areas. Gov. Eliot Spitzer had also asked that several other counties also be named, including Dutchess, Putnam and Ulster counties.

More disaster declarations could follow, as representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and State Emergency Management Office investigate.

We hope that rather throwing money after the fact for damages inflicted, that elected officials push to make fixes in our “natural infrastructure” to avoid the kind of flooding recently incurred in the region.