Evacuations, rescues, outages in the aftermath of massive Long Island rainstorm

STONY BROOK, Long Island (PIX11) — A month’s worth of rain in one night can be devastating, and while people all over the tri-state region experienced it, few know that fact better than residents of the North Shore of Long Island.

Stony Brook, Hauppague, Setauket, Port Jefferson, Smithtown, and other communities were inundated Sunday night. On Monday morning, the intense damage was apparent, and it was so great that the Suffolk County executive declared a state of emergency.

The strength of the rains’ effect was apparent at Mill Pond in Stony Brook, or at least what had been Mill Pond. In the early morning hours of Monday, the dam that had created the pond in the 1600s gave way for the fourth time in its nearly 350-year history and for the first time since 1910.

A roadway, Harbor Road, had been built on top of the dam. It and the dam are entirely washed out.

Martin Buchman lived in the house closest to the dam from 2014 until about eight months ago. His reaction to the dam breach was similar to that of the thousands of people who stopped by on Monday to see the damage, but it was even more personal in Buchman’s case.

“Sadness,” he said. “I can’t believe the level of destruction.”

“The bedroom is gone,” he said, pointing to his former home.

County authorities condemned it after part of the house collapsed into the water that rose to it, even though it’s on a hilly embankment.

“We slept where that side of the hillside is,” he said, pointing to a part of the home that had been washed away. “The bedroom is in the creek.”

About six inches of rainfall in one night caused just some of the damage in the area. To put it in perspective, the average rainfall for August in Stony Brook is seven inches. According to the National Weather Service, about 10 inches of rain have fallen in the area since Sunday morning.

All the rainfall’s effects led to electrical and other problems on the North Shore.

Gloria Rocchio, who owns and lives at the Three Village Inn in Stony Brook, described uneasy, dangerous conditions overnight Sunday into Monday.

“Transformer popping, exploding,” she said, describing the scene where firefighters appeared. “And they said, ‘You have to get out,'” she continued, “‘With the gas leak, there could be an explosion. So all the houses were evacuated along here.”

She was on Main Street in Stony Brook Village, where at least a half dozen homes had been evacuated.

Dozens more had to be cleared out in communities across Suffolk County.

David Butler, who lives in Hauppague, stayed with his 90-year-old grandmother during the worst storm. On Monday, her sunken driveway was completely underwater, and the flood rose into the family’s home.

“It’s starting to reach like the electrical circuits of the washer, the refrigerator, the dryer,” Butler said. “The Fire Department shut off the electricity.”

He’d been lucky enough to find an industrial pumping crew to help. Work crews across the county had plenty of jobs to take care of.

In the Mills Pond community near the Flowerfield wedding venue, the body of water from which the community gets its name severely overflowed its banks, stranding cars on Mills Pond Road. On Monday afternoon, a New York State Department of Transportation crew was occupied trying to pump out the road so that tow trucks could come in and do their work.

Suffolk County Executive Ed Romaine declared a state of emergency because of all the issues. The declaration helps to open a pathway for state funds to assist with cleanup and restoration, which will take days in some cases and years in others.

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