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Situation at Seeley Lake under scrutiny of residents and officials

UPPER DEERFIELD TWP. — Joseph Santoro and Dr. David Friel, residents at 3 Seeley Road, watched helplessly on Sunday as Seeley Lake overflowed over their yard and into their basement.

They and local, county and state officials now want to know what happened and what should be done moving forward.

“I think we got blindsided by a very bad rain storm, and nobody knew what to do,” Friel said. “My feeling is that this was mishandled.”

Friel alleged that a comparable, hurricane-related storm several years back was battled successfully through management of the Seeley Lake floodgates, preventing a breach of its dam and the surrounding road.

However, local officials have deemed the catastrophic rainfall as unprecedented in recent memory, and Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) spokesperson Larry Ragonese said that Sunday’s devastation at Seeley Lake could not have been alleviated by this type of emergency action.

“Our engineers say that whether the gates were open or not — for this type of weather event, with the enormous amount of rain we received that wasn’t really predicted — would have had zero impact on passing flows,” Ragonese said. “It’s actually not a factor here because of the severity of the event. It’s really a moot point.”

Upper Deerfield Township Committeeman John Daddario was on the scene at Seeley, Bostwick and Sunset lakes on Sunday and agreed with the preliminary DEP assessments.

“The amount of water that came from the north end of Upper Deerfield just overwhelmed the lake and every roadway in between,” Daddario said.

“Center District Road was a river which fed into the stream at the head of Seeley; Bostwick’s at the far head of it, but Harrow Run flows into Seeley. The little tributary was probably 40 feet wide at the peak of the storm. It was just way too much water.

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