Dredging the Stony Clove this morning. Photo and video by Marilyn Manning.
Our Shandaken correspondent Tom Rinaldo spoke with Shandaken Town Supervisor Rob Stanley this morning. One big story: Today, town officials are taking advantage of emergency permit waivers for storm cleanup to dredge Stony Clove in Phoenicia, a project that has been delayed for months.
Phoenicia resident Marilyn Manning took the above photo of heavy machinery dredging the Stony Clove this morning on Rt. 214, just beyond the Phoenicia firehouse command post.
Stanley says that because of damage to several levees and a looming storm headed for the region tonight (more on that later), Shandaken is interpreting New York State Department of Environmental Conservation's disaster permit waivers as a green light for dredging.
"We’re going into the Stony Clove to do the work we were planning to do with DEC," he said. "We’re just doing it now. There’s a permitting process that we were trying to follow and we worked with them and worked with them. At this point DEC has given general permits for stream activities. That clears us of liability and we’re going into that stream."
It looks like the town following the long-proposed plan to remove the gravel sandbar near the bridge over Rte. 214. The town will also put concrete monitoring markers in the stream with help from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection.
From Stanley:"We are going to do basically what we laid out in our plan and try to resolve this problem. We’re working with the DEP engineers to get monitoring stations set along that portion of the stream so we can monitor it for better assessments over time. They are just simply going to be concrete markers in the stream. They may be concrete pilings or something, just something to show us the level. They will be from about the bridge to the firehouse or so."
