A year of recovery has followed the hundred-year flood that left a torrent of devastation through the heart of the county.
Mother Nature surreptitiously moved a combination of storm systems through the Southern Tier in the last week of June 2006, depositing 8 to 15 inches of rain at some locations. The average warning time prior to the severe weather was only seven hours. New York’s goal in disaster situations is to warn citizens at least six hours ahead of a serious event.
Hydrologic conditions in Chenango and the Susquehanna basin in general were already wet from earlier storms. The inevitable result was increased runoff that caused flash flooding at many river locations.
“It was a wet year to begin with. The water table was very high and when we received those late June storms, there was just simply nowhere for the water to go except up,” said Chenango County’s Emergency Management Deputy Director Matt Beckwith.
The most severe flooding during the storm that covered several states occurred in the Chenango and Susquehanna rivers. Greene, Sherburne and Binghamton were among many municipalities which suffered drastic record floods dating back decades, even centuries. As an example of the extreme nature of the event, Sherburne’s flood was so severe that it was officially recorded as a 500 interval event and Greene’s was considered a 500 year plus interval event.
According to the National Weather Service, the average rainfall for the entire month of June is 3.8 inches; the average daily rain fall for 21 of the 30 days in the month prior to the flood exceeded it. On June 23, a cold front moved through the area raising the entire Susquehanna basin by nearly an inch. Then on June 25, precipitation again struck the area leaving 1.8 inches of rain in a 48 hour period. By June 27, a record breaking four inches fell in a torrential downpour over just a 24-hour period.
Disaster reimbursement is still on going from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The county suffered $50 million in property damage and attributed one death to the flooding between June 26 and July 10. Those two dates represent the time period in which the State Emergency Management Office declared Chenango County a federal disaster area.
The hardest hit areas in the county were Afton, Bainbridge, Norwich and Sherburne. Altogether 25,350 acres of farmland were destroyed in the county. The average loss was 38 percent to crops, reported the county in its Annual Hazard Events report.
Another victim of the flood was the New York Susquehanna and Western Railroad. Damage inflicted upon the rail lines between Sherburne and Chenango Forks was tallied in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. As a result the company has yet to decide whether the rails will operate through much of Chenango County again.
In the following monthsm aid was distributed throughout the county by the Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Conservation and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, along with several others.