Icy tree broken free from creek's path

WASSAIC — An Amenia Highway Department crew was out early Wednesday morning, Dec. 30, at Wassaic Creek, pulling a large ice-heavy, fallen tree out of the waterway, before it could cause major problems.

Highway Superintendent Stanley Whitehead said he was concerned the frozen tree would reroute the water flow and cause the creek to flood.

“It was bad,� he said. “The water was almost ready to go over the stone wall.�

According to Whitehead, the tree was standing upright, but then fell across the creek a few days earlier; it quickly became covered with ice. Wednesday morning the Highway Department received a call from the Dutchess County Soil and Water Conservation District’s Ed Hoxsie that it would be OK to remove the tree. The town’s crew immediately got to work.

“It’s not a bad job,� Whitehead said. “It took longer to get the OKs from everybody [than to do the work]. The danger is when the creek gets blocked up it could have jumped up. We tried to break the ice loose slowly because there was a lot of water backed up and we didn’t want to wash this bridge out.�

The location of the downed tree was actually private property owned by Pawling Corp., across from the company’s headquarters. The highway crew could be easily seen removing the impediment from the creek from the Nelson Road bridge, which the town is looking to replace this summer.

Before that can happen, however, the town needs to get all of the required  permits from the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). Once that’s  done the engineering firm, Morris Associates, will continue to work on cleaning up the creek and getting the water to flow down its center (versus just along the right-hand side), as well as the bridge replacement.

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