Bingo Is Under Water

First New Orleans and now Binghamton. All of my favorite cities are getting flooded these days. The NY Times has an article about how badly hit my alma mater's city is right now which I posted after the jump. I wonder if the Sports Bar is totally and utterly under water...

What to Do? For Now, Sit Back and Watch the Water Rise

By FERNANDA SANTOS

BINGHAMTON, N.Y., June 28 — As the muddy, turbulent waters of the Chenango River rushed toward this city's downtown, Anton Lucas knew exactly what to do: Move the furniture and tools from the cellar to the first floor, grab some wine and a lawn chair, and sit on a patch of grass some 50 yards away, watching the water rise.

Mr. Lucas, 54, left work early on Tuesday so he could prepare for the inevitable. His house, an elegant Tudor that sits just feet from where the Chenango and Susquehanna Rivers meet, had been flooded once before, he said, in April 2005, catching him by surprise. He lost $50,000 in clothes and furniture then. This time would be different.

"I've been partying all day," Mr. Lucas, a self-employed general contractor, said as night fell on Wednesday, still wearing the yellow T-shirt and shorts he had on the night before. "All I can do right now is wait. Then I'll go fix the damage, just like I did before."

Along the northern bank of the Susquehanna, from Binghamton to Johnson City and Endicott, two neighboring communities upriver, flooding spared hardly a home and thousands needed to be evacuated. In some cases, the water climbed front steps and flowed into kitchens and living rooms, looking like chocolate milk in a blender.

Outside an apartment building on Riverside Drive, a blue toy car bobbed in the water while a man in galoshes carried two boxes on his shoulder up the front steps of a tidy brick house across the street. At Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital to the west, two doctors wheeled a woman into an ambulance, which then whisked her away to a hospital on dry, higher ground.

Sharon Landon, 48, a nurse in the hospital's oncology hospice, said the river began to creep into the ground floor of Our Lady of Lourdes early in the morning and slowly inundated the cafeteria, pharmacy, lab and the hospital's power plant, which meant the electricity had to be shut down.

For hours, she said, doctors and nurses worked to discharge the patients who were well enough to go home and prepare those in need of care for a quick move. "I have water in my own cellar, three to four inches, I'm told," Ms. Landon said as she slogged out of work around 7 p.m. on Wednesday, her face glistening with sweat, and carrying a raincoat and galoshes in a ripped plastic bag.

There was, however, a certain festive feel in the air, with children and adults biking and skating downhill, toward the river, just because that was the thing to do. Some people carried cameras and posed for photographs by the Memorial Street Bridge across the Susquehanna, which sat partly under water late on Wednesday.

Lt. John P. Shea of the city's Police Department said that the city was no stranger to flooding, but that this was the worst he could remember. He predicted that the waters would rise until Thursday, and that more people might have to leave their homes.

Then, "just like last year, and in the years before that, the rivers will go back to their normal levels," Lieutenant Shea said, "as if nothing this bad ever really happened."