Popular navigation apps fail local drivers during Dec. rainstorm

Flooded roads in the Monroe-Woodbury area during a rainstorm are now as regular an occurrence as weekend traffic jams at Woodbury Commons. This week saw over four inches of rain dumped on the area, according to the National Weather Service.

As leader of the climate campaign group, 350.org and contributor to The New Yorker, Bill McKibben, told The Photo News, “We’re seeing rain storms of the kind that can only come on a globally warmed planet. Warm air holds more water vapor than cold, which may be the most important fact about our century.”

And getting reliable information on how to navigate area roads can be easier said than done. As local resident Chris Maurer told The Photo News, “I used WAZE and it was totally unreliable. Directed me to a number of closed roads. I took Route 6 and had to turn around.”

Reliable information can be hard to come by, with many residents telling The Photo News that Facebook was their primary source of information, which may not always be reliable. Representatives from State Senator James Skoufis’s office suggested area residents instead use 511ny.org. This is a service maintained by New York State which provides up to the minute traffic information.

Another area resident, Dana Caleca, also suggested drivers sign up for NY-Alerts at Alert.NY.Gov/Sign-NY-Alert-0. Using a NY.gov account, this service allows you to customize notifications sent to you by New York State, including specific notifications on road closures and other travel disruptions in Orange County. Regarding the local road closures this week, Monroe Town Supervisor Tony Cardone said, “The road closures were short in duration. Catch basins, once they were cleared of debris, made those areas passable. Information can be found on our websites monroeny.org and we do send out multiple constant contacts during emergencies and do encourage our residents to sign up for those at monroeny.org. Residents can also sign up for Code Red (which alerts residents via a text message) through our website, which has a link to register. Let’s be grateful it wasn’t snow!”

Finding solutions

When asked whether anything was being done to mitigate the increasingly frequent flooding on roads such as County Route 5 (Lakes Road) and 17M representatives from Senator Skoufis’s office referred The Photo News to local elected officials such as Supervisor Cardone, who said, “We can plan all we want, although sometimes... you cannot control the wrath of mother nature’s amount of snow, rain and winds incurred, especially when they come in extremely condensed periods of time. Our current town board would be exceedingly concerned if we were the only municipality that had issues, yet while there are some trepidations... we feel lucky, as towns in many parts of Orange County, Westchester County and in northern NJ still had roads closed as of this afternoon [Dec. 19]. Living by large bodies of water, streams with mountainous areas increases the potential of problems during heavy snow and rain.”

When we asked Senator Skoufis’s office about Route 6/Long Mountain Parkway, specifically, given its importance to area commuters, the senator’s office brought up issues of jurisdiction and future development, “The entirety of US-6 is under the purview of the Federal Highway Administration. For the state-maintained portions that overlap with the Route 17 to I-86 conversation project, the environmental realities of our moment and the future will certainly be considered in DOT’s planning processes, but we can’t speak to specifics. Above all else, extreme weather as a common occurrence makes the 2019 passage of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act all the more significant.”

According to MIT, “To prevent worsening and potentially irreversible effects of climate change, the world’s average temperature should not exceed that of preindustrial times by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). According to ABC News, by 2029 the planet is likely to reach the 1.5 degrees threshold and may even exceed it if drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are not taken.

McKibben gives us some hope, however, saying, “I’ve found that most town supervisors, DPW heads, and so on in the northeast are completely understanding about the dangers of climate change — they’ve spent the last decade pulling out 12-inch culverts and replacing them with 18-inch ones because the old book simply doesn’t work anymore.”

Supervisor Cardone added, “We have been monitoring and evaluating our culverts, catch basins and problem areas on a regular basis even before my tenure. Note that our highway department has been awesome at correcting issues daily pertaining to those items. In addition, working with our town planner, planning board and town engineer to re-evaluate and improve drainage requirements with new projects has become a higher priority.”