Upstate Prattsville reeling from Irene

PRATTSVILLE -- While growing up here, Ann O'Hara could look across the street from her porch at her father's gas station. Today, no trace of it remains: Floodwaters from Tropical Storm Irene swept the building off the banks of Schoharie Creek.

"My father, he always said we're going to lose everything to flood," said O'Hara, 55, last week as she stepped through 3 inches of mud and debris among the furnishings of her mother Betty's house, where the family has lived for five generations.

"It's very heartbreaking," said Betty O'Hara, 82, who showed a photograph of her with her late husband, Thomas, on a muddy page of a salvaged photo album. "I have to cry every little while, then I straighten my back and I say, 'I'm not worse off than anyone else.' We'll stick together and we'll come back."

Flooding is nothing new to the people living in the shadow of the Schoharie Reservoir, which is part of the vast system that delivers drinking water to more than 8 million people in New York City. But many in these communities, from Schoharie north of the reservoir to Prattsville to the south, say the damage wrought by Irene is unprecedented.

While one drives through a labyrinth of washed-out roads, damaged bridges and roadblocks, the mountain slopes of the Catskills turn into pockets of disaster at the turn of a corner, pieces of a mosaic of loss throughout the state estimated at nearly $1 billion. North of the reservoir, rows upon rows of cornstalks bowled over testify to $45 million of agricultural damage and an estimated 140,000 acres of farmland lost.

Already hurting before Irene

Last week, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo choppered into town. Accompanied by a phalanx of federal and local officials who walked through the streets past National Guard troops and Humvees, the governor promised residents that the state would help them rebuild it better than before.

Federal Emergency Management Agency officials set up a mobile center in town where residents used phones, the only ones working in Prattsville, and registered with the agency for disaster aid. Workers from the Red Cross and Salvation Army walked past destroyed homes and debris as the smell of fuel oil, presumably from overturned tanks in people's basements, wafted through the air.

Betty O'Hara said she'd been through 18 floods before and never evacuated. This time she had no choice. As the waters rose last Sunday, volunteer firefighters and members of this community of 700 went door to door on foot and even by kayak to get people to safety.

Her daughter Ann, a hairdresser who lives in nearby Windham, a resort town that was also hit with flood damage, joined other family members in trying to clean the mess. Inside the house, everything 3 or 4 feet off the ground -- pictures, bookshelves, wineglasses -- looked undisturbed, while muddy chaos reigned on the floor.

Ann said the community was already hurting before the storm. "Everyone you see here has been suffering through the economic downturn," she said. "We don't have a lot of tourism; these are people that are self-supporting. I don't know what they will do now."

Outside Jim's Great American, the town grocery store, employees hosed down cans of soda and jars of Ragu spaghetti sauce. The store's owner, Jim Eisel, 45, said he probably lost about 80 percent of his products, from dairy and meats to food on shelves lower than 3 feet that had been soaked.

His wife, Geanine Eisel, 42, estimated their losses would be about half a million dollars. The store has flood insurance, but Geanine said it would cover less than a third of their damages. The Eisels said they're hoping federal aid will help them get back to business. Their employees are volunteering to clean up the store. "We have no money coming in, so we have no money going out," Geanine said.

To the north in the town of Schoharie, and downstream from the reservoir and Gilboa Dam, the flood toppled three fuel oil tanks at Ottman & Enders, a fuel retailer. The Department of Environmental Conservation hired a contractor to contain the spill and try to recover as much fuel as possible.

DEC spokeswoman Lori Severino said in an email that many water districts were restricting use because of the potential threat to water supplies from spills, sewage and other sources.

Gas-powered generators and water pumps buzzed on Main Street in Schoharie last week. Along a mountain road, a crew with chain saws chopped up downed trees that had snagged power lines. Many towns and villages were without power.

A grand opening delayed

The Parrot House, an inn, restaurant and pub, was to have its grand opening Sept. 9. Last week, a grim-faced Dave McSweeney, 48, of Milton, Mass., pumped water out of the basement of the first inn he hoped to open. He had just finished a more than three-month, $350,000 renovation of the property. It would take another $300,000 to get the inn back in the condition it was in before Irene, he said.

"We just finished putting the carpeting in on Friday," he said.

McSweeney wanted to know where the government was. "They're flying around in helicopters; you can't see anything from a helicopter," he said. Cuomo toured the county Saturday.

Ruey Schell, 53, had planned to hold an open house at her mother's home in honor of her 90th birthday -- this Tuesday.

"This is the house I was brought home to when I was born," Schell said as she entered a house full of tables and chairs lying jumbled. Though the first floor of her own house had flooded, she said she was "more heartbroken for my mom."

Her mother, Dotty Ottman, whose family owns the fuel station where the spill took place, suffers from macular degeneration, which impairs her vision.

"I don't know what I'm going to do with her because she can't come home," Schell said. "I wonder if this will put her over the edge."