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People in Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont still recovering from Irene.
Bruce Shade is evacuated from his mobile home park Wednesday along Zimmy’s Drive in Conewago Township, Pa. The remnants of slow-moving Tropical Storm Lee were dumping more rain this week on an already waterlogged Pennsylvania, with forecasters warning residents across the state to brace for more potential flooding.
AP PHOTO
WINDHAM, N.Y. — Northeastern U.S. residents still weary from the flooding wrought by Tropical Storm Irene braced Wednesday for the leftovers of Tropical Storm Lee, which brought welcome moisture to farmers in parched parts of the South on its slog northward.
New York positioned rescue workers, swift-water boats and helicopters with hoists to respond quickly in the event of flash flooding. Teams stood by in Vermont, which bore the brunt of Irene’s remnants last week, and hundreds of Pennsylvania residents were told to flee a rising creek.
“Everybody’s on alert,” said Dennis Michalski, spokesman for the New York Emergency Management Office. “The good thing is, the counties are on alert, as they were for Irene, and people are more conscious.”
Lee formed just off the Louisiana coast late last week and gained strength as it lingered in the Gulf of Mexico for a couple of days. It dumped more than a foot of rain in New Orleans, testing the city’s pump system for the first time in years, and trudged across Mississippi and Alabama.
Heavy rain fell Wednesday morning on the already-battered town of Prattsville, on the northern edge of New York’s Catskill Mountains, where residents were ready to evacuate as the Schoharie Creek escaped its banks and smaller streams showed significant flooding.
Flooding also led to voluntary evacuations in the Catskills town of Shandaken, and some schools in the Hudson Valley north of New York City closed or delayed start times.
In the rural Schoharie Valley west of Albany, officials were encouraging residents to find higher ground but hadn’t yet ordered evacuations.
Along the road in Windham were several soggy, cardboard signs from last week’s storm that said “Thank you for your help” and water turned red from the clay riverbed that rushed over roads. As National Guard troops directed traffic, a crane dug into the upstream side of a culvert, trying to open it up to allow more water through.
To the south in Broome County, officials told residents of Conklin, nearly wiped out by flooding in April 2005, to be ready to evacuate if the Susquehanna River flooded as expected.
A flood watch was in effect through Thursday afternoon in soggy Vermont. Parts of the state are still recovering from massive damage inflicted by floodwaters from the remnants of Irene, which was a tropical storm by the time it swept over the area.
Irene hit upstate New York and Vermont particularly hard, with at least 12 deaths in those areas and dozens of highways damaged or washed out. Several communities in Vermont were cut off entirely and required National Guard airdrops to get supplies.
Meanwhile, in the open Atlantic, Hurricane Katia brought rough surf to the East Coast but was not expected to make landfall in the U.S. Tropical Storm Maria also formed Wednesday far out in the Atlantic.