PA officials seeking more flood aid

By TOM KANE

MILFORD, PA – U. S. Senator Rick Santorum and Congressman Donald Sherwood are asking Congress to appropriate an additional $200,000 for repairs to damaged dams in Pike and neighboring counties.

Pike County Commissioner chair Harry Forbes made the announcement on August 2.

The money will supplement the federal Public Assistance Program, which aims to help municipalities and not private individuals. The assistance program provides cost reimbursement aid to local governments and certain private non-profit agencies, educational institutions, utilities, emergency services, medical facilities and custodial care facilities that provide health and safety services of a governmental nature, Forbes said.

“Governor Rendell has pledged that the Commonwealth will pay the full 25 percent non-federal public assistance share, saving municipal governments anywhere from $two million to $five million while the federal dollars cover 75 percent,” Forbes said.

Hazardous Mitigation Plan

Because of the severity of the recent flood and the response by the county’s various agencies, Pike County must prepare, in conjunction with the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA), a county-wide Hazardous Mitigation Plan that will coordinate disaster recovery activities in the county, Forbes said. The county, like many other counties, does not have such plan at this time.

“We have assigned the task to our planning staff and the county Emergency Management Agency (EMA) director to secure some experts from the federal government to help expedite this process,” Forbes said.

The document is expected to be as formidable as the county’s comprehensive plan.

Conservancy responds to PPL’s report

In other matters, Lackawaxen River Conservancy Director Gordon Wildermuth summarized for the Pike commissioners his letter of complaint to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) concerning PPL’s recent report to FERC on the spills and releases during the recent storm.

“PPL has taken no apparent action to improve their performance [during a storm],” Wildermuth said. “We feel that many of their public statements and submissions to authorities concerning the events of the last two years to be self-serving and disingenuous.”

In his letter, Wildermuth proceeded to contradict several statements in the report, concluding that “the company has made no significant improvement in their operations to protect the public safety [during storms].”

PPL does not agree

“We are committed to working with the conservancy and local groups, as well as government officials, to solve some of these problems caused by unusual rainfall events,” said Bradley Piatt, Manager of Peaking Power, a division of PPL. “We operate within our license and observe the lake level targets as reached by settlement with the many groups who participated in our licensing process before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). These level targets cannot be changed unilaterally by us. It is distressing that many were hurt by such an unpredicted storm of this magnitude. But in all honesty, we held a great deal of water away from the river and helped people downstream, even if some don’t recognize it.”

FERC response

“PPL’s operation of the dam has multiple purposes — the generation of electricity, flood control, drought control and the recreational uses of the lake. We’re looking at all the factors that go into the determination of those levels to see what can be done in the on-going discussions we have with the company,” said Peter Valeri, regional deputy engineer for FERC. “We will not have any role in the planned taskforce that will be formed soon,” he said.