Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Passaic River Flooding - WCBSTV.com

New York News, Weather, Sports & Traffic - WCBSTV.com: "...expected to reach the 13-foot marker, just passing the modern-day high of 12.9 feet set in 1984." I recall I and another had just finished one archaeology survey of the Little Sprout Brook in Paramus, NJ when this job started in 1984, a flood-control survey for potential historic and prehistoric significant sites along about 100 miles of the Passaic River in New Jersey. It was using a new "GIS" (geographic information system) used at the Army Corps of Engineers that mapped pixels from a computer screen, i.e., 600'x900' feet, that were ranked "low-medium-high" potential for having either historic or prehistoric significance or both. The study pixels were randomly selected by the research designer and we mapped them on fairly recent maps scaled at 1"=200' feet from aerial survey, about 1 1/2 years old. We then went out to find the "pixel". We also found in a few cases the aerial survey was not recent enough, i.e., a "ranked" pixel "wetland" or other, had been filled and built on, or there was something wrong with the methods. As it was, the flood of 1984 had come and just barely, as I recall, about 50% of the to be shovel-tested "pixelated" areas were under flood-water at the time. Unfinished by Soil Systems, Inc., I heard it was later finished by another company located in New Jersey.

A series of levees had been proposed in different places but fought by each community as I recall up and down the river and a proposal for a flood-control tunnel the last to be approved project to control this flooding. Other surveys, more accurate are in progress that determine where, for example, land was made that is being used off the taxes and in those cases an amnesty drawn up with the resident or owner, or full property value will be charged I learned later on a survey of the Hackensack Meadowlands while at Grossman and Associates, Inc.

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