The houses on the west side of Hueg Place in Pine Bush are currently facing an intractable drainage problem, which is soaking residents. The problem is intermittent, but it has gotten worse recently.

The afflicted area is a neat little street of modest houses in the heart of Pine Bush, a development dating back to the late 1960s. On the west side of Hueg Place, the houses back onto an area that once carried a spur of the old railroad to a turntable where locomotives were turned around.

During those bygone days of the train's regular dairy-supply trips from what was once a farm-town with a population of 1000, structures were built without site plans and there was no planning board. Inevitably, legacy problems turn up today that stem from times past in the shape of structures and roads set atop what were once streams and ponds.

Bob Groth has lived at 49 Hueg Place since 1976, and is a reliable source for information about this issue. "The water problem comes and goes," says Groth. "We get water in our basement here, and we've had to use a sump pump most years to take it out. Sometimes, depending on the rains, we've gone for two years without a problem, but this year was very wet and it was probably the worst we've had in a long time."

Meanwhile his neighbor next door, Don Johnson, a Korean War Veteran, has even more of a problem and is pushing for the Town of Crawford to come up with a solution.

"This goes back to 1967, when they built these houses," says Johnson. "They filled in the land, but they never put in a drainage system, or not much of one. So now we're getting all this water and it just piles up in our backyards."

Johnson believes that there may have been a small stream that ran intermittently down the line separating Hueg Place's backyards from the slightly higher ground to the west. The fact that there is a residual patch of wetland just down the street, where Hueg Place joins Depot Street, adds some weight to Johnson's belief.

Part of the problem is that just to the west of Hueg Place sits the Agway store with its large, blacktop parking lot. As a general rule, blacktop means water runoff — to someplace else.

Nick Fitzpatrick, the owner of the Agway Property says, "When we purchased the Pine Bush Agway store in 2006, the neighbors came to me and voiced their concern about the drain issue. What we found was that on the back side of our property there was an area (the lowest point around the neighboring properties) where water was collecting under some weeds. We found that garbage had been dumped in that low area and covered, so we took all the garbage and put 450 tons of drainage rock in there. Our goal was to create a drain basin where water could collect and seep in to the ground.

"The problem is that the ground under this area is saturated and the water does not seep in like it should," continues Fitzpatrick. "There is a town drain system about twenty-five feet from the basin, however it's not on our property and we can't access it without everyone working together. We also feel that this should be done by the town. We did bring this to the attention of the building inspector who directed up to the highway department, who told us to ask the water and sewer department. There was not much action from any of the town departments on this matter so far."

Over at the town planning board, Chairman Phil Jamison is sympathetic, but only to a point.

"The bottom line here is that all this is happening on private property. If the town had to step in to help every homeowner who has water seeping into his basement, then the department would have to be at least twice the size it is."

Jamison explains that the ground underneath Pine Bush is complicated.

"When the glacier withdrew it dropped sand here, clay there, boulders everywhere," he says. "We have layers of sand under clay, and sometimes there's a lot of water in the sand. If you puncture that clay on top of the sand, you can get a gusher. On top of that we have development going back a hundred years, no site plans, no maps to show what drains were ever put in, and no way to know if, for instance, an old drain made of tile has recently collapsed. Which, by the way, might be part of the problem at Hueg Place, because that seems to have gotten worse recently."

Hopefully, the homeowners on the west side of Hueg Place will come together with Mr. Fitzpatrick of the Agway and devise a plan that the town might be able to assist them with.

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