May 3—Otsego County Rep. Jerry Madsen, R-Butternuts, Morris, Pittsfield, is concerned about erosion and a failing bridge in Gilbertsville. He's been trying to raise the alarm for nearly two months, but has not gotten traction on the issue.

The 30-foot-long Green Street bridge over Dunderberg Creek was built in the 1880s, Madsen said during a tour of the village of Gilbertsville on May 2. The steep creek drops 600 feet elevation over five miles, then flows through the center of the village, past the Presbyterian church, between the post office and the fire station, past the bakery and grange hall, behind barns and houses before it dumps into Butternut Creek.

The creek is channelized between old stone retaining walls for about a thousand feet from the church nearly to the grange. Then the wall ends and the serious erosion problems begin.

A heavy rain on March 10 flooded the creek, Madsen said. Floodwater undercut walls and stream banks, sending rocks and trees downstream, and eroded under a bridge abutment. A nearby fence and two gabion baskets — long steel mesh boxes enclosing gravel, used for erosion control — sat in the creek below the bridge where they'd washed off the bank.

In addition to weakening the bridge, eroding banks are getting close to seven or eight buildings in the village, Gilbertsville Village Trustee Glenn Foster said Monday. One old barn is now hanging 12 feet over the creek, and several other houses and garages are less than five feet from the loose bank.

Each major storm since March has worsened the damage, Madsen said, standing in the streambed looking up at the cantilevered barn.

"It cut six feet under the barn in March, and it's six more feet now. Those trees were up on the bank two weeks ago and are down now," he said.

Erosion damage was also visible upstream Monday along the older stone wall, which has washed out before. It was damaged in 2006 and rebuilt by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Foster said. In multiple locations water ran underneath the base of the wall.

"That wall will come down and then it'll stay in the creek cause there's no money to get it out," he predicted.

Madsen pointed out how some of the three-foot-long boulders used in the 2006 FEMA retaining wall had washed nearly 1,000 feet downstream to the barn. They caused a temporary dam in the creek that diverted more surging water under the barn supports.

Dunderberg Creek has caused floods in Gilbertsville repeatedly. In July 2021 the water overtopped State Route 51, flooding the firehouse across the street. It washed away a stone guardrail and damaged the water main attached underneath, Madsen said. Nearby residences and businesses had flooded basements. The village itself incurred an estimated $4 to $5 million worth of damage in 2021, former Mayor Mark Muller said at the time.

Muller started working last summer to procure a stream permit application for work on Dunderberg Creek. He has since left office, and ten months later Madsen is still trying to get a state Department of Environmental Conservation permit for the work, he said.

Gilbertsville is not alone in struggling with long delays for DEC stream permits, according to Madsen. The town of Unadilla has waited since August 2021 to get approval to install a new culvert under River Road in Rockdale. Morris went ahead with stream bank berm repair and then was fined by DEC for doing so, he said.

General DEC policy calls for stream work to be done in the summer when water levels are lower. However, "when a creek is doing this much damage, it seems like they should be able to make an exception," Madsen argued.

"It looked just like chocolate milk," Foster said. "There's more erosion from high water than there would be if we just fixed it." He has lived in Gilbertsville since the 1930s and remembers that until fifty years ago, the village just used to dig gravel, silt and trees out of the creek bed every year.

In addition to getting state approval, the other issue facing Gilbertsville is funding for the stream bank work and bridge repair. The Green Street bridge is the only bridge owned by the village, which has about 200 residents and does not have money to do the work. Madsen and Foster estimated the combined cost of repairs would exceed $350,000.

"They can look and they can talk, but they're going to have to find money and do it quick," Madsen said. "The governor keeps talking about infrastructure and we need it bad."

Mike Forster Rothbart, staff writer, can be reached at mforsterrothbart@thedailystar.com or 607-441-7213. Follow him at @DS_MikeFR on Twitter.

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