VILLAGE OF FAYETTEVILLE – Partway through its Oct. 18 meeting, the Village of Fayetteville Board of Trustees stopped to thank local crews for their work in response to the previous Saturday’s rainstorm.
Mayor Mark Olson said that sometime around 7 a.m. on Oct. 16, he received a call from a man residing near the intersection of Mechanic Street and Brooklea Drive who had flooding in his front yard.
At that point, different entities from around the village were called upon to lend assistance.
The Department of Public Works soon placed down sand bags to divert the water.
Village engineering firm Barton & Loguidice stopped by the site to detail possible causes of and solutions to the problem while also monitoring the progressing Limestone Creek project to see how well it could weather the storm. At the same time, Town of Manlius police officers were helping with traffic control and pointing out where other flooding concerns were arising.
Alongside the four DPW workers, members of the Fayetteville Fire Department worked to clean out catch basins and pump out basements.
“When you get a rain event like that one on Saturday, it’s really just manpower to get those catch basins opened up, and then if they clog, we have equipment like rodders to get in there,” Olson said. “The ground is so saturated after 37-plus inches of rain this year, so these catch basins just filled up and overflowed.”
Olson said that over three and a half inches of rain accumulated throughout a 14-hour period just that given day last weekend.
However, according to him, the mayors of the villages of Manlius and Minoa did not quite experience the same amount of rainfall.
“It seemed like the rain cell just hovered over Fayetteville for some odd reason,” Olson said.
He said the mitigation of flooding issues will need to be better figured out in Fayetteville but that the removal of the dam in the lower part of the village behind the town hall changes the nature of such predicaments.
“Ten years ago, if the dam was up and we had three and a half inches of rain, we would’ve had to evacuate parts of the village,” Olson said. “With the dam coming up and water going down, we’re able to handle that type of rain now at Limestone Creek, so now the issue is other things like roads, catch basins and flooding in people’s yards.”
The recording of the Oct. 18 meeting can be found under the “Livestream Links” section on fayettevilleny.gov.
In other news
The village will be implementing two crosswalks: one in front of the post office on Route 5 and another at Redfield Avenue and Salt Springs Road.
The board reiterated that the DPW will only plan to pick up leaves, garbage and recyclable materials during the month of November, meaning that brush and construction debris will not be collected.
The livestream of the Comprehensive Plan Steering Committee’s inaugural meeting appears for viewing on the village website as well. The next meetings are scheduled for Nov. 18 and Dec. 19.
