Above: Judy Sugar's steps have been found! Photo by Judy Sugar.
Things have been looking up in Fleischmanns since the worst of last week's flooding, according to Paula DeSimone, who sent us an update about the village on Thursday:
Fleischmanns is moving along…..The Community Church is serving meals at 8:30, 12:00 and 6:15 with plenty of food for all. Come in, have a meal, share your day and if needed, pick up some clothes, food or toiletries. If you believe that “something good always comes out of something bad”, then a closer sense of community is our “good”. The locals are sharing more than ever, making new friends and meeting new people.
Some others in the trenches are hauling trash and cleaning up the streets. While others are delivering food, serving meals, washing dishes, shoveling mud, collecting brush, checking on people door to door, sorting donated clothes and the list goes on and on.
So, if you have even 30 minutes a day free, please come to the Community Church and spend your time helping one of your own. You may be surprised how rewarding it is.
The Fleischmanns Community Church is located at 904 Main Street. The hospitality center is open every day serving breakfast, lunch, dinner, providing food, clothing, supplies. Maintains on-site services of County Social Services Dept., drop in center for homeowners and businesses restoring their properties. English and Spanish spoken.
On Saturday, Ben Fenton, a Fleischmanns village trusttee, announced on our Facebook page that LaCabana Mexican Restaurant on Main Street Fleischmanns is open for business:
LaCabana Mexican Restaurant in Fleischmanns, NY is NOW OPEN! Just tell the National Guard you're going there (or any other specific destination in town such as the supermarket or church, etc) and they will let you in. PLEASE COME AND SUPPORT OUR MAIN STREET BUSINESSES!!!
Judy Sugar, the homeowner who sent us such harrowing images from the flooding on Sunday, had some happier news on Friday. Her front porch steps have been found! From her email:
Our neighbor showed up and said, "I think we have your steps!". During the flood I had watched out my window as my porch staircase had spun around wizard-of-oz styled past and away in the water. I thought I would never see them again and my family and I had been climbing on and off our front porch. I went to visit my neighbor who lived down the street on depot and around the corner and found my stairs upside down and all the way embedded in the foliage in the back of his house. How he realized those were my front steps in teat angle I will not know. With great skill a back Hoe driver, Don Allen carried from a well-placed rope underneath the structure and delicately placed the whole stairway, about twelve feet wide of six stairs right exactly back in its originally place. And it was fastened in place. The difference of having the front steps to our house back was like a sigh of relief for the house that looked up to now like it was missing its front teeth.
Sugar also reports that the authorities have begun dredging the Bushkill:
At one point during the day a whole parade of heavy construction vehicles manned by the Dot came through Wagner avenue in huge clouds of dust and established themselves in the park along with DEP and DEC workers to shore up the walls and widen our Bushkill. There is great resentment in this town, and understandably so, that the limitations these agencies put on our managing the flow of these creeks, especially by dredging regularly, as we used to be allowed, has put this village and its people constantly in harms way from flooding.
Below: Sugar's house before the stairs return, heavy equipment preparing to dredge, and a playground after the flood.
