I did my graduate work in Binghamton, NY so I lived in the area for six years. In the summer of 2006 we had a really bad flood, though it hardly affected me personally. We didn’t get any flooding in the apartment where I lived and none of my friends had anything worse than a slightly soggy basement. The university campus was also fine, but because there was a state of emergency in the area, I had to take two days off from work (something about not wanting us to work in chemistry labs when all the emergency personnel are off campus). While there was certainly a lot of damage, I mostly remember it as “those couple of days when I couldn’t do any experiments”.
Now the record flooding from 2006 is being beaten by even worse flooding going on now. Due to a bad combination of the saturated ground from Irene and days of heavy storms, Binghamton and the surrounding area is under feet of water. I don’t live there anymore, yet I feel like it’s affecting me much more this time. A lot of my friends in the area are teachers who had barely gotten the first week started before all the schools closed down. One friend was evacuated from her neighborhood, and another had her house fill with over a foot of water. The photo above (credit to Bill Walsh and http://www.wbng.com) shows the downtown area. You can barely distinguish the rivers from the streets!
I’m wishing everyone in the area a speedy recovery! Stay dry!
For Science! 