This past weekend, while taking care of a family matter, I had occasion to drive down to New Hope, where I resided for nearly a decade and a half before deciding to relocate to Easton four years ago.
I haven’t been down that way for nearly a year. Running The Easton News keeps me pretty busy, and the furthest I’ve gotten into Bucks County in quite a while is Riegelsville, since it’s part of our coverage area.
The further south I traveled along the river, the more shocked and upset I became.
It’s a mess down there.
Route 32, south of where it meets Route 611, was broken by the second flood, so that was not a surprise. What was a surprise was how much other damage still has not been repaired and in many cases has worsened.
The sad state of the Delaware Canal near Reigelsville is nothing compared to the damage in Plumstead and Solebury Townships. Whole sections of the retaining wall that separates the canal from the river were washed away, and the river is actually flowing through the canal in spots.
What’s worse is, where the river is flowing in the canal, the current is washing away more of the roadbed. In places, the guardrails are beginning to crumble into the canal.
Along the way, I noted that it might be safer to make certain I took an inland route home, since traveling north would mean my car would have to travel over spots of road bed that appeared in places to have little or no real support. I’m not paranoid—this situation truly looks dangerous.
Okay, so why do I bring this up? It’s a state road, and the Delaware Canal is a state park, right?
Yup, they are, but there’s more to it. Those might be state issues, but there’s a local problem as well.
As I said, I haven’t been down that way in most of a year. The other half of the equation, in addition to flood damage, is this:
After what was just a small, relatively short rainstorm this weekend, well before it was even over, all along River Road in Bucks County, I noticed a virtual deluge of water coming off the steep slopes that border the river. Water, more than I’d ever seen from a small rainstorm this time of year, was rushing down the hill at breakneck speed toward the river, washing across the road, forming an uncountable number of 4- and 5-inch deep puddles that stretched 20 or 30 or more feet.
The river itself was far higher than it should have been, higher than it was in Easton.
On the high ground, and in some cases, on the low ground, to the west, all along that stretch of road, there has been a lot of development over the past decade. And it hasn’t stopped.
As far as I know, there’s no real conservation planning going on, and if there is, it clearly isn’t being followed. It’s not just the farmland either. While the lots are fairly large, forested land, formerly untouchable as either wetlands, floodplain and/or land that won’t perc, or deemed infeasible due to building cost issues is now being built upon. With the smallest, rundown freestanding shack on a postage stamp-sized piece of land commanding nearly half a million dollars and the chintziest condo you can find starting upward of a quarter-million with continually brisk real estate sales, it’s easy to understand why developer-types are foaming at the mouth to get their hands on more Bucks County land to rape.
What it’s not easy to understand is why it’s being allowed to happen, why a county whose residents’ median income is double that of their neighbors to the north (us), seemingly can’t get things together enough to do half as much when it comes to resident services or protecting resident interests.
Perhaps the difference in resident attitude has something to do with this? In Northampton County, dozens of homes along the river have been lifted up since the last two floods, out of harm’s way. Many, many other local residents have taken steps to flood-proof their homes. Others have taken steps to minimize the damage as much as possible, moving electrical panels to higher locations and installing removable furnaces and water heaters so they can be quickly uninstalled and moved to safety in the event of another flood. As I covered this past June’s deluge and it’s aftermath, I was amazed at how many local people told me how they’d “gotten good” at dealing with the soggy situation. The modifications were somewhat expensive, but the alternative is even more costly, people told me. Driving River Road around here, you’d barely notice we had a declared national disaster less than six months ago.
To the south, you could definitely guess, unless you happen to be blind. Many riverfront houses have still not been repaired, and in some cases are still unoccupied—or unoccupiable. Speaking with friends back in June, I heard how many people lost major building equipment, such as water heaters and furnaces for the third time, and often many, if not all of their basement and first floor possessions for the third time too. Simple things, like yards and landscaping, the easiest things to fix, still show scars in many cases.
People often complain there’s too much new development gobbling farmland in our local area, and there is, no doubt about it. Some like to complain we are paying more and more for the same, or in some cases, reduced public services, and sometimes that’s a true assertion. But at least we usually bite the bullet and pay what needs to be paid for and work when work needs to be done and generally plan when planning needs to be done. We pay for studies, and most the time, eventually, their recommendations are acted upon.
The sad, cumulative results of failing to do all of those things are painfully and shockingly obvious just a few miles to the south. Out southern neighbors may be, on average, a lot richer than we are, but that’s not going to help a lot unless they’ve got boats tied to their front porches and happen to all be great swimmers.
(Originally published in The Easton News, Novembewr 2, 2006)
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