Been running some calls and making sure my parent’s and brother’s houses are ok. Lots of people with water in the basements, and a lot of my friend’s from Owego, their parents houses are under water where it breached there. Going back over to the fire department later today to run some more calls now that my place is all set.
Good luck. My wife is from Endwell but her family all live up in the hills. If they flood it would mean the areas near the river are several hundred feet under water.
I have a friend on facebook who MUST be down there somewhere. He’s been updating his status every few hours…The latest was that his house had been washed away and the cat was missing.
On a serious note… WOW. This really sucks for those people. I have several branches that have been shut down and lots of employees affected. Hopefully it gets sorted soon and insurance steps up and handles this properly.
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Unless you have proper emergency training they often prefer that you do not. The best thing that I can think of is to figure out what it would cost you to go there and help and make a cash donation to the city/town in that amount.
yeah, the water is receeding now, and now is the mounds of garbage. You would not believe the piles of debris by the roads and such here.
I would like to thank Upper Mountain Fire Department in Lewiston. They sent a Ladder truck and crew thursday and they stayed through yesterday, helping us handle calls and filling in when needed. They were not the only crew, but they stayed the longest. We also had crews from Long Island, Youngstown, Phelps, and Rochester come down and help us out specifically, and I know I saw more that were helping other departments.
So my father in law’s place did get messed up because of the floods, despite being way up on a hill in Endwell. I guess the sewer treatment plant shut down, causing a massive backup that pushed up the hills and it flooded raw sewage into his downstairs. He was working from home sitting at the computer in his finished basement when suddenly his feet were wet. He opened the door to their downstairs bathroom and brown water was blasting out of the toilet like a geyser. He called the insurance company and I guess they had a water backup exclusion buried in the policy somewhere so he’s pretty pissed right now.
Wow, I’m sorry to hear that. The main Sewer plant in vestal, although they won’t tell you if you ask, was down and under water from thursday on (I believe it is still down.) We spent one night monitoring pumps that pumped out the basement of the plant that had their electric panel and some pumps so they could start getting back online. I can’t really even describe the smell there.
On a side note, even though there was a travel ban on thursday and part of friday, I apparently have to take vacation time for not coming in to work. Does anyone know if this is legal or correct? Many of the employees didn’t come in because of it and we were told it was either vacation or lost time if we weren’t here. I planned to take it off anyways, but still would like to know for future reference.
My guess is they can’t punish you for not breaking the law to get to work during a travel ban, but they also aren’t required to pay you since you’re not at work. So either take vacation time and get paid, or be docked for missing the time. This is a guess, not based on finding any specific laws after a quick search.
I can do some of the programming from home, but I don’t have a driving position to test stuff on, and we don’t have external access to the office network to be able to move files over to work on them. Besides, i was busy with fire department most of the time…
