Above: Damage in Prattsville, N.Y. following the floods following the rains of Hurricane Irene. Photo by the New York National Guard, via Flickr.
As of Sunday afternoon, the barricade on SR-23 from Grand Gorge to Prattsville was still up, but was open to local traffic, according to Velga Kundzins, the Community Resource Manager at Western Catskills Community Revitalization Council. Kundzins also reports, via email, that Cobleskill, the staging area for much Prattsville and Greene County relief efforts, was surprisingly normal yesterday:
We went up to Richmondville / Cobleskill this morning, early afternoon. Nothing to take photos of. The Duracell & Tide buses were in the Wal-Mart parking lot, but other than that, you wouldn't have known anything had happened in the area. (OK, so they were selling generators at the front of the Wal-Mart store, but other than that, the parts of Coby that I went through (downtown) didn't look any different than it normally does ... The Cobleskill Fairgrounds are being used as a staging place for relief, but even that wasn't as busy as I would have assumed.
Prattsvile, however, is still a disaster zone, according to photos taken posted by the New York National Guard. Below: Flood damage in Prattsville, N.Y. in Delaware County. Photo by Lt. Col. Richard Goldenberg, NY National Guard, via Flickr:
Below, a Red Cross volunteer in Prattsville, N.Y. uses the internet at the National Guard Joint Incident Site Communications Capability. Photo by Lt. Col. Richard Goldenberg, NY National Guard, via Flickr:
Our Schoharie County correspondent, Marty Rosen, was in Prattsville on Saturday. She filed this report:
Above: Ray Hendrickson, 31, from Jefferson, owns Timber Tree Service and has been volunteering his services to cut trees off of homes in the Prattsville area, where he has friends.
"Prattsville, they lost their houses, they lost their roads, I've never seen anything like it. It's destroyed," he said.
There is mounting concern along the Schoharie Creek that a critical mass of residents and shop owners who provided vital services won't have the will or the resources to rebuild.
Meaghan Sebastian, 23, of Bloomville (left), went through Gilboa and was helping in Prattsville on Friday. She described the Prattsville homeowners she helped:
"They said they're salvaging what they can and getting out. Right now they're at hope's end. But people say things they might not mean. But their neighbor is leaving, an old lady whose house is gone."
Sebastian said that the first impression she had as she drove into Prattsville on the road from Gilboa was of utter devastation:
"Oh my God, it was like a bomb."
Then you're struck by the stink.
"You smell a mix of oil and gas and sewage and dirty water," she said. "But there are so many people, so many volunteers. There were electric trucks from Minnesota." -- Marty Rosen
The Associated Press was in Prattsville on Wednesday. The story quotes Carolyn Bennett, the director of the Zadock Pratt Museum, where historical artifacts have been damaged and destroyed by the flooding:
People like Carolyn Bennett, 61, drenched in sweat and mud, just kept working after the press conference. "This is absolutely the worst in memory," said Carolyn Bennett, director of The Zadock Pratt Museum, trying to save 5,000 letters from settlers, 200-year-old documents and more artifacts. Some people worry about FEMA having less than $800 million left for relief to serve the entire Eastern Seaboard.
