Lowville flooded again. Here's what we know (and don't know) (2024)

Aug 20, 2024 —

Lowville got hit again with severe flash flooding on Monday. It’s the second time this summer that the village in Lewis County has been damaged by heavy rains.

A storm in early July flooded businesses and neighborhoods in Lowville and around Lewis County. Videos from Monday’s rain showed the hallways of Lowville Academy full of water, as well as the grounds of the school and the local hospital. Lewis County Highway Superintendant Tim Hunt says the heavy rain from earlier this summer, aging infrastructure, and the changing climate all make Lowville more susceptible to severe flooding

TIM HUNT: We didn't think it was raining that hard and then we started getting reports that streets were flooding in the village. Our crew went out and started immediately checking all of the areas that we know are of concern. The heaviest rainfall was concentrated near the village and the village is the one that received most of the damage at this time. There was very little outside of the village of Lowville.

EMILY RUSSELL: I was seeing videos of neighborhood streets flooded, the school flooding, the school's new turf field again full of water, flooding around Lewis County General Hospital as well. Can you explain why that is happening, why water is pooling in those places and not draining off as it should?

HUNT: First of all, the groundwater is very high right now. It’s probably the highest we've ever seen it. It's completely saturated. So any rain that comes cannot be absorbed into the ground. It's just running off and that's very rare. So we now have a situation that's ripe for flash flooding. We have had some extreme weather patterns in the last month and a half, so we're dealing with these 250-300 year storms that we're having. We also have aging infrastructure that maybe is not working as well as it should and obviously we need to investigate areas that we can improve that infrastructure. So I think there's a combination of a bunch of things that we have to look at to try to figure out why and what is causing this and how do we go about preventing it for future storms.

RUSSELL: Yeah, can you talk a little bit more about that infrastructure? And, first of all, has this [kind of flooding] happened last summer or in a summer in the last decade- have there been times where there have been multiple severe flooding events like we've seen so far in the last month and a half?

HUNT: No. But we also haven’t seen rains like this. The first storm that did significant damage was a storm that people hadn't seen in their entire lifetime. We were talking to people who are in their 70s and 80s and said they never seen anything like it. Now, once that happens, once the first storm happened, water finds the path at least resistance. When you overwhelm your infrastructure- whether that's culvert pipes or water starts coming over a road- it's going to find the path of least resistance. You got to remember Lowville is in a low area. That's why it's Lowville. All the water coming off the Tug Hill is going to find its way to the Black River. That's the low point, so it cuts new channels when you have a massive storm like that. And now every time it rains, it follows those new channels and not the old channels that we may have hoped to or anticipated it following. And we don't know yet about all of the drainage infrastructure because it takes time to go back and make sure nothing's plugged and nothing's changed. So that's stuff that we're investigating now.

RUSSELL: What are days like Monday like for you and your team?

HUNT: We did not expect flooding. We knew it was going to rain, but we had no warning that it was going to be this significant. So we kind of got caught off guard. We went out immediately. There are sometimes things we can do for example, if debris is washed in front of a culvert pipe or on top of a catch basin, we can clean that off and relieve the situation. But other than that, when you start getting significant flooding, there's not much we can do until the water subsides. Now the fire department, they're pumping basements, we do traffic control and shut down roads and just make sure everybody's safe while this has happened. We did go out and investigate, so I had people out in the storm trying to figure out where the source of the water is, like where's it coming from? And what can we do to divert it from getting to the village infrastructure?

RUSSELL: What do you want folks in the Lowville area to be thinking about in this moment?

HUNT: You know, just reminding people to have patience. And then the other thing that happens here is it's called the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy- correlation and causation are two separate things. And what I've noticed as a highway superintendent over the years is that when something happens we try to look at something that's recently changed and blame that and that's not always the case. I've seen some social media posts about the fact that they just got done doing this expansion at Lewis County Hospital. Did that change things? Maybe, but don't automatically draw that conclusion because correlation is not causation.

And we've been talking about it for a number of years, that we're going to have to build more resilient infrastructure because of the change in the climate. We're seeing less snow on the Tug Hill. We're seeing more significant changes in our weather pattern that have long-lasting implications

Clarification: Lowville is named after Nicholas Low, who bought the land that includes the village in the late 1790s. Low was a wealthy businessman from New York City. Lowville was officially established as a town in 1800. Still, it's not uncommon to hear locals talk about Lowville being "low," especially with all the flooding that's hit the village this summer.