Partly cloudy. High 78F. Winds light and variable..
Mainly cloudy. Low 57F. Winds light and variable.
Flood waters race across the yard and toward the home of Jena and Jarrett Grimes on Harbor-Edinburg Road on Friday evening.
Flood waters surround the home of Jarrett and Jena Grimes on Harbor-Edinburg Road during Friday's storm.
Mud and rocks deposited by flood waters during Friday's stone are strewn across the yard of the Harbor-Edinburg Road home of Jarrett and Jena Grimes.
A pile of mud, stone and other debris blocks a driveway belonging to Arwood Pinkerton on Old Youngstown Road. Pinkerton said PennDOT pushed the pile into the drive, leaving him unable to access it.
Flood waters race across the yard and toward the home of Jena and Jarrett Grimes on Harbor-Edinburg Road on Friday evening.
Flood waters surround the home of Jarrett and Jena Grimes on Harbor-Edinburg Road during Friday's storm.
Mud and rocks deposited by flood waters during Friday's stone are strewn across the yard of the Harbor-Edinburg Road home of Jarrett and Jena Grimes.
A pile of mud, stone and other debris blocks a driveway belonging to Arwood Pinkerton on Old Youngstown Road. Pinkerton said PennDOT pushed the pile into the drive, leaving him unable to access it.
Like many others around Lawrence County, residents of The Harbor area are still cleaning up from a reported four inches of rain that pounded the area Friday night.
For some, though, Mother Nature isn’t the only villain of the story. Frustration also is being vented toward the New Castle Airport and PennDOT.
Arwood Pinkerton, 82, of Old Youngstown Road, lives atop a hill, but he has wooded property near the bottom, which he accesses from a driveway near the intersection of Old Youngstown and Harbor-Edinburg roads. On Saturday, he found the drive closed off by a mound of debris.
“What PennDOT did when they cleaned up? They piled all that (mud and debris) in my driveway,” he said. “If I don’t have a four-wheeler or ATV, how do I get into my woods? I go in there and I mow. I knocked some of it down yesterday, but why should they leave it like that? I’m 82 years old and have cancer.”
Pinkerton believes that when a runway at the New Castle Airport was lengthened “years ago,” it changed the direction of stormwater runoff heading down the hill toward The Harbor.
Danny Leasure, 73, of Harbor-Edinburg Road shares Pinkerton’s thoughts.
“This happened years ago, when they did renovation at the airport,” he said Tuesday, one day after paying $400 to have a bulldozer clear out the debris he said PennDOT pushed into his driveway, leaving him unable to access it. “It shifted the water from where it was going down past the Old Youngstown Road.
“It comes down this hill (behind his home) now a lot more than it used to, and it just floods my whole basement. It came in like seven different places (Friday), but I didn’t lose anything because I don’t keep a lot down there, because I know it comes in.”
Still, he conceded that Friday night’s rain was worse than anything he’s experienced in the past.
“It came down like a river,” he said. “It was terrible. There was water all the way across the road. I’ve been here 47 years and I’ve never seen it rain that hard for that long.”
It’s been the clean-up that has frustrated him the most.
“They came down here with a bulldozer or a front-end loader and they just pushed (the debris), and it ended up my driveway was two feet high; blocked my whole driveway,” he said. “We called the township right away; they said, ‘that’s the state,’” he said. “We called the state and they said, ‘Nothing we can do.’
“I said, ‘Look, I don’t expect you to do anything with my driveway, but how about pushing that stuff back out so I can get in and out?’ ‘I’m sorry there’s nothing we can do, we can’t come in your driveway.’ So it cost me 400 bucks yesterday to get that done, and I may have to haul in some limestone or gravel on top of it.”
Jim Farris, chairman of the Lawrence County Airport Authority, said he sympathized with the residents’ problems, but denied the airport was behind them.
“We haven’t changed anything up there,” he said. “I think the last significant land-altering project was a tree-clearing project in the 1990s. We haven’t done anything different there in 30 years.
“We have an unbelievable storm water system on the property. You can see by the fact that no one has complained before this event about us causing problems that our infrastructure is excellent. I don’t believe in any way, shape or form that there was any contributing factor by the airport at all.”
Farris noted the storm impacted residents in various areas of the county, not just in the Harbor.
“My yard was a lake,” he said, “my daughter suffered severe flooding at her house. There were roads washed out in Neshannock. This was just an act of God, one of those hundred-year flood events.”
Jena Grimes, who lives across the road from Leasure with her husband, Jarrett, and their children, said she has had heard the airport story, too. However, the family has lived there since 2017 and never experienced flooding like they did Friday. Some neighbors who have lived on the road for more than 20 years told them the same.
“It was pretty much a river coming down the road,” she said. “It was coming through the parking lot (of a former church), and the parking lot is now in my yard. We called the non-emergency number, and it took them forever to get here. We had neighbors and people we know come out with their equipment and try to build a dam to stop the water from coming to our house.”
They ended up being overmatched. Grimes said there ended up being 18 inches of water in the basement, ruining their washer, dryer, children’s toys and anything that was down there.
“We haven’t even touched our furnace yet — who knows if it works?” she said. “We’re just trying to get the basement dried out right now.”
The Grimes also are struggling to clean up their yard, where a sea of mud and rocks remain while other items are gone.
“It went right through my chicken coop,” she said. “We have a little mini-hobby farm for the kids. Nothing major. But it went straight back through there. It flattened the fence, and we’re missing five chickens.
“And my garden was destroyed. I usually have a massive garden. We can and stuff in the fall, but there’s nothing valuable in it now — it’s gone.”
Like Pinkerton and Leasure, she said the family is not getting a lot in the way of official assistance.
“Nobody will help us,” she said. “Insurance won’t cover anything. I even called FEMA. They said, ‘too bad,’ pretty much. Nobody will help with anything.”
Dan Irwin is currently a reporter and page designer. He was most recently the editor. He started with The News in 1978 and spent 10 years as a sports writer. He's a '78 Slippery Rock University graduate with a B.A. in English.
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