Escape from flooding in Fleischmanns

A flood leaves a lot behind. Brand new channels carved through roads. Mud that’s too black to be dirt. Mountains of paperwork.

And stories.

Tropical Storms Irene and Lee flooded towns across the Northeast US last summer. In the Catskills region of upstate New York, four people died. Many more were cut off from the outside world without access to power, telephone, or clean water. Houses washed away. Roads and bridges vanished. Families lost track of each other.

Everyone in the Catskills has a flood story. Some of them made national -- even international -- news. But most didn’t.

There's the 21-year-old who led a string of abandoned horses to safety through rising floodwaters. The village trustee who thought his father was dead when he heard the dam-break sirens blast. The retired history teacher who had known for 25 years that a stream would carry his house away -- and then watched it happen.

The Watershed Post’s Faces of the Flood Project tells the untold stories of the 2011 Catskills floods.

The project pairs portrait photography by photographer Christopher Auger-Domínguez with journalism by the staff of the Watershed Post and staff and students from SUNY New Paltz’s journalism program.

The series will be published in installments this summer, leading up to the August 28 anniversary of the floods. You can see the list of stories on the righthand side of this page. Go to the project homepage to find subjects on a map.

We want to hear your flood stories, too. Email them to editor@watershedpost.comor call 845-481-0155.