It was front page news last Friday.
Orange And Rockland was going to be ripping up a stretch on Route 59 to relocate a natural gas distribution line.
The state Department of Transportation was thinking that the pipeline was getting in the way of the flow through a culvert which runs across Route 59.
That was causing flooding, so the pipeline had to be relocated.
It was going to take two to three weeks, causing traffic in Central Nyack to be squeezed down to just two lanes.
work at the spot was supposed to stretch from before the morning rush into early evening, as in, after the evening rush.
But now, you can almost hear the voice of Emily Latella, the Saturday Night Live character who would vent on some topic for a few minutes only to find she was totally mistaken. Once informed, she’d peer into the camera and announce, “Never mind!”
Well, that’s basically what O&R got to tell the DOT this week.
Turns out, O&R’s line didn’t got through the culvert, but over it—which was the intended fix.
There’s another pipe running through there, but it’s not O&R’s.
Actually, in a county that’s been built and rebuilt over and over, like so much of the suburbs—getting transformed from farm community to hub village to the busy suburban county we know today, it’s surprising this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often.
Homeowners know that before you dig, you have to have utilities come and “mark out” the area, showing where pipes and wires are located.
But I guess it doesn’t always work, even when the lines belong to them.