List of Closed Clarkstown Roads, Highway Works for 24 Hours

Update as of 5 p.m. Sunday night:

Saturday's snow storm brought down multiple trees and branches blocking roads and falling onto wires causing . Emergency officials are residents to limit travel to help with the storm clean up efforts. 

"Last night we had 105 roads that awere closed," said Wayne Ballard, Highway Superintendent. "Now we're down to 27 closed roads." Clarkstown has a total of 1,500 named streets.

"And all of these roads were waiting for O&R because of downed wires," he added. The roads are closed because of downed trees that have wires in them, downed wires and/or large trees that are blocking the road that "we haven't gotten to yet. All over town there are trees on the side of the road because we just pushed them off for emergency services to get through." Highway workers went home at 5 p.m. after a 24-hour shift

"We’re going to start again tomorrow. It’s going to be a lot of work," said Ballard. "We had more trees that came down in this storm than Hurricane Irene. The heavy snow was really tough."

Ballard said he had never seen a snow storm so early and "devastating" like this in his life. Street lights were also out and/or blinking.

"State lights had problems," said Ballard. "(Clarks)town had one light on flash on Pascack Road."

---Original Story---

As of 11 p.m. Saturday night, an Update from Wayne Ballard, Clarkstown Superintendent of Highways:

Downed Trees

"The situation right now is that we have 225 downed trees that we know of. But we’re suspecting at least 800 that have fallen into streams and with 225 miles of stream, I haven’t been back there yet to see what’s going on."

Ballard added that of the 225 downed trees, "we have 122 trees involved with the wires. Every street has a branch in the roadway." The branches and trees that fell onto wires, the highway department cannot touch those until O&R comes to shut off power to the wires.

Closed Roads

"We have 1,500 named roads in Clarkstown. 108 are still closed because of trees blocking them. There are 270 roads that are difficult to pass because you have to go around a tree. For those trees, we have to wait for O&R or we didn’t get there yet."

Progress

"We’re coming in for a quick break right now, but the guys will be working through the night and into tomorrow. We'll work all day tomorrow with O&R to get everything ready for Monday morning’s commute."