Jay Fink, disc jockey at WRIP-FM 97.9, spent the night of Aug. 27, 2011, at the Windham radio station after being told a storm was coming. He didn’t know he’d be on the air for 13 hours the next day. 

“I had no idea the severity of it, but I said, ‘Okay, I’ll hunker down at the station,’” said Fink, 69. “It’s a good thing I did.”

Calls began rolling in early the next morning. Hurricane Irene had reached Windham, and the Batavia Kill, a 21 mile-long tributary of the Schoharie Creek, was rising fast. Fink, then 54, interrupted the scheduled programming.

“I did the best I could to describe the situation based on some firsthand reports from the phone,” he said. “We kept a landline open, and that was our saving grace, the fact that we could continue to receive phone calls when cell service went down, when electric went down.” 

“We were it,” Fink said. 

As calls mounted at WRIP, fellow host Joe Loverro joined Fink. They abandoned all regularly scheduled programming and instead spent much of the day speaking with residents, first responders, and government officials. Their broadcast became a critical lifeline for the thousands affected by the storm in Greene County.

“We spoke with not only people stranded in their homes, but also a lot of first responders and government officials,” he said. “At one point, because the 911 system was down, they had to use our radio station to relay to their people up here as far as what to do.”

Fink, a Windham resident, continued sharing emergency information and fielding calls for much of the next week. Many calls came from residents near the Batavia Kill, including along Main Street in Windham. The worst reports came from nearby Prattsville, just 15 minutes west of Windham at the confluence of the Batavia Kill and Schoharie Creek. 

“The two huge streams collided and just plowed into Prattsville,” he said. “There were all kinds of stories—people on the roof of their mobile homes, people hanging onto trees. I thought the best thing to do was just to let people talk and we would just relay emergency information.”

Friday, Aug. 28 marks 15 years since Fink’s 13-hour broadcast. 

Over the past decade and a half, the storm has persisted in collective memory. In Prattsville, a new museum exhibit documents the devastation and recovery. Meanwhile, programs created in the storm’s aftermath work to protect flood-prone properties as a changing climate brings heavier rain.

Irene was the first hurricane of the 2011 Atlantic season. The storm developed east of the Lesser Antilles and moved through the Caribbean before traveling up the East Coast. 

After making landfall in New York City on Aug. 28 as a tropical storm, Irene moved north over the Catskills, carrying heavy rain and winds of up to 65 mph.

The first reports of Irene-related flooding in the region Sunday morning came from Woodstock, according to National Weather Service data. Flash flooding was reported around Zena Road at 7:26 a.m. By 8 a.m., roads were closing across the Catskills, including portions of state Route 23, a vital route through Windham, Ashland, and Prattsville. 

Rainfall totaled 8 to 12 inches across much of the Catskills, with localized amounts of 12 to 18 inches reported, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). A National Weather Service gauge in Tannersville recorded 11.6 inches on Aug. 28, setting a state record for rainfall over 24 hours. A weather spotter in Maplecrest reported an unofficial total of 18.2 inches, according to the agency.

A 79-year-old woman drowned in Maplecrest when the house she was in was swept away by water from the Batavia Kill on Maplecrest Road, according to the agency’s Storm Events Database. 

In Lanesville, a 70-year-old man drowned when the embankment he was standing on a bridge near Ostrander Road gave way and swept him into the Stony Clove Creek. He was reported helping another person move a car across the bridge.

Damage was widespread. In Windham, four homes and three businesses were destroyed, according to the town’s 2014 New York Rising Community Reconstruction Plan. Parts of the town lost power for up to two weeks. All three flood-control structures in the town were forced to use their emergency spillways, resulting in about $2 million in damage. 

Prattsville was hit hardest. Every structure along its Main Street commercial strip was partially or completely destroyed, according to town data. All 22 businesses in the central hamlet were destroyed. Eleven houses collapsed. Fifteen were condemned and demolished. And more than 100 homes were damaged so badly that residents couldn’t return. 

Schoharie Creek was estimated to be carrying more than 120,000 cubic feet per second as it tore through Main Street, according to Prattsville’s 2012 Long-Term Community Recovery Plan.

Shandaken recorded Irene as its largest storm on record, according to a 2014 New York Rising Community Reconstruction Plan developed jointly with neighboring Hardenburgh. More than 200 people were evacuated from both Shandaken and Hardenburgh, with displaced residents directed to an overnight shelter at Belleayre Mountain in Highmount. 

Statewide, 861 residences were affected, according to NOAA. Sixty-six were destroyed, 673 sustained major damage, 37 sustained minor damage, and 85 remained habitable despite damage to the structures or their contents. 

Flooding worsened days later as Tropical Storm Lee reached the Catskills during the first week of September. 

Major precipitation events, including severe thunderstorms, can create “high-energy” streams. When moisture-laden air collides with the Catskills’ high peaks, clouds are wrung out, dumping heavy rain into narrow valleys.

“Although hurricanes are the big flashy word, it’s really those large and intense precipitation events that cause these issues,” said Sally Rodgers, education program manager at Cornell Cooperative Extension of Ulster County.

Rodgers and Bobby Taylor, Catskill Streams Buffer Initiative program coordinator for the Ulster County Soil and Water Conservation District, compared stream channels to a multistage box. The bottom “cup” contains water from smaller, more frequent storms. A larger storm fills the next level, while floodwaters from the most severe storms spread onto the flat floodplains beside the streambed.

Those flat, flood-prone areas have also historically been attractive places to build. 

Rodgers said climate change is expected to bring more intense storms, greater precipitation, and expanding river channels needed to accommodate heavier rainfall.

“Rivers need to flood,” Taylor said. “The more water you keep in the channel, the more energy it has. Rivers need to have access to those broad floodplains to reduce energy. Unfortunately, we also want to live on those nice flat broad areas.”

Olive and Shandaken contain many of the Catskills’ high peaks, creating high-energy mountain streams alongside historic communities such as Phoenicia and Boiceville.

Before Irene, the watershed lacked the flood-mitigation programs it has today. Local flood analyses grew from a meeting convened during Irene by the Catskill Watershed Corporation and attended by watershed stakeholders, including New York City and state officials. The analyses identify potential solutions tailored to each town.

The corporation offers grants to elevate or relocate homes, administers a voluntary buyout program for flood-prone properties, and helps secure propane tanks, which firefighters feared could explode during Irene.

“You could hear the tanks as they came down, they were hissing as they released the propane,” said Timothy Cox, Catskill Watershed Corporation’s corporate counsel. “I still remember my jeans covered in mud and smelling of home heating oil. It’s a smell you don’t forget.”

As Fink broadcast reports of the rising Batavia Kill from Windham, Robert Burke Warren placed a stick in the ground outside his home along the Esopus Creek in Phoenicia.

“I stood here on my porch and I watched it happen,” Warren said. 

Warren, a musician, promised himself that if the water reached the stick, he’d pack up his family and stay with a friend five houses down the road. When the rain stopped and the next day came, the Esopus was still rising. 

The water came within six feet of his house, stopping just short of the stick. Warren soon saw people he had never seen before and hasn’t seen since. Neighbors came to his door asking whether his family needed food or help shoveling silt, as many businesses in Phoenicia did.

Warren’s family most remembers the unity among neighbors and the sound of boulders crashing against one another, the bridge, and trees in the Esopus.

Warren compared the experience to living in the 19th century for a week, without electricity and with news coming only from neighbors, taken with a grain of salt.

He approached the Phoenicia Fire Station one dark night to ask about a friend who lived in Oliverea, a hamlet of Shandaken. Warren recalled seeing a group of men sitting around a burn barrel.

“He says, ‘Oliverea?’” Warren recalled. “‘There is no more Oliverea. It’s gone.’”

This was a common misconception at the time of Irene, said Aaron Bennett, an Oliverea native who recently gave a presentation at Phoenicia Library through the Ashokan Watershed Conference. Bennett is also the flood hazard mitigation coordinator for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection.

“One of the biggest things is trying to keep things like this in people’s minds, in memory so they don’t forget. Too often people forget as the years go by, four or five years after a flood,” Bennett said.

“Nobody remembers it or there’s new property owners and you sort of go back to square one. You have to keep hitting people over the head with this stuff.”

In Prattsville, preserving the memory of Irene remains a priority. The Zadock Pratt Museum, the historic home of town founder Zadock Pratt, will open an exhibit Saturday, Aug. 29, marking the 15th anniversary of the storm that crippled the community.

The exhibit, “Remembering Irene,” includes dozens of photographs taken during and after the floods. Some are arranged in a before-and-after format showing the restoration of homes and businesses. One wall focuses on the damage sustained by the museum itself.

“We lost an awful lot of documents,” said Stephen Birnbaum, a Prattsville native and president of the museum’s board of directors. “We used to have a grandfather clock. It’s now upstairs, it’s not working. A lot of stuff has been cleaned.”

Photographs show the ground floor of the building, originally built in 1828, caked in mud. 

“The water comes in with its silt and it just drops down,” said Birnbaum, 68. “There was mud everywhere.”

Another photo shows a collection of houses that once stood near the town hall. 

“They’re all gone,” Birnbaum said. “They’ve all washed away.”

Flood prevention infrastructure is also showcased in the exhibit. Birnbaum said many Prattsville residents have taken to raising their homes to mitigate future flooding. Some residents, he said, have done so using federal funding administered by FEMA funding, which covers 75% of the cost of elevating a home.

“You only have to come up with 25%, but 25% is still a lot of money,” he said. “If you ever want to sell your house now, it almost has to be raised.”

The exhibit will be on display for at least a month, Birnbaum said. It opens in conjunction with the town’s Prattsville Day, an event featuring a parade, live music, and an opportunity for locals to put items into a time capsule which will be opened again in 50 years. 

While the exhibit may stir up difficult memories for some, those memories are important, Birnbaum said. 

“Maybe some people are not going to want to come back and look at it again, but some might,” Birnbaum said. “Fifteen years is a long time.”

Connor Greco is a staff reporter for The Overlook covering Windham, Hunter, and surrounding Greene County communities. Send correspondence to connor@theoverlooknews.com.

Mia Quick is an editorial assistant at The Overlook. Send correspondence to mia@theoverlooknews.com.