YOUNGSVILLE – In an all too familiar scene, many of Sullivan County’s small brooks and streams have become filled in as heavy rainstorms washed silt, gravel and rocks downstream, depositing them under bridges and also into what  was once larger pools of water.

Last week, the New York State Dept. of Transportation  (DOT) Liberty Bridge Crew addressed this very situation at two of its bridges – one in Jeffersonville and the other in Youngsville.

“We had to wait until the right time of year [to complete the work],” a DOT supervisor on the scene in Youngsville said. “It’s been a wet summer and we wanted to wait until the water was a little lower.”

To help lower the water level, the DOT pumped water out of the brook upstream from the Panther Rock Brook Bridge to help with the removal of the tons of silt that had accumulated under the bridge, thus preventing the free flow of water.

“We are addressing bridges of concern,” the DOT spokesman said. “We want to take out enough silt so we can get a skid steer under there [the bridge].”

The Bobcat skid steer is approximately six feet tall and was able to maneuver under the bridge and pull out the sediment so an excavator could grab it and get it out of the brook and put it into a dumptruck for removal.

“In addition to this bridge, we also worked under the Laundry Brook Bridge in Jeffersonville,” he said.

The Supervisor said that weirs were built above the bridge to try and address the silt build up.

A weir is a small barrier built across a stream or river to control and raise the water level slightly on the upstream side, essentially a small-scale dam.

The supervisor said that the purpose of the weir was to increase the velocity of the water as it traveled under the bridges, to hopefully push all the debris through.

Unfortunately, he said, the weir didn’t work well enough, as some of the rocks in the weir were actually rolled downstream.

Heavy rains from Hurricane Debby hit Sullivan County last month, causing extensive damage to many roads in the Towns of Rockland and Fremont. 

Officials in those towns were hoping to be able to “clean out their brooks” to alleviate such flooding in the future.