Dear Rockland County Business Journal,
My wife and I lived up on Tweed Boulevard from 2012 to 2020, when we moved down to Upper Nyack. We were there when that brushfire started on Clausland Mountain, and watched the firefighters battle it for several days. It actually stopped about 30 yards from our house.
One of the scariest things about that situation is something that most people don’t realize: there are absolutely no fire hydrants on the main part of Tweed Boulevard. There is one down on South Mountain Rd., and there’s another one down at about 167 Tweed, which is far down the lower mountain in Piermont.
In order to battle the blaze, the fire department had to use pump trucks, lumbering up and down the hillside. (There is a small block building at the top of the mountain that acts as a reservoir, but it really doesn’t hold very much water, and certainly not enough to battle an entire blaze.)
The houses up there get their water one of two ways: they either drill a well, or they’re part of a water collective, most of which was put together in the middle of the last century, when houses started to be built up there. There are two or three pump houses along 9W that pump water from the main trunk line, up the hill to whichever collective—linked by a pipe alongside Tweed—is pulling from them.
My wife and I were actively involved in the water situation in our collective, because we lived there during a time when the workings of our pump house needed to be redone.
During that project, I started working with another resident, on talking with whomever we could talk to about the fact that there are no fire hydrants up there. We wanted to know what it would take to get them.
In typical Rockland County fashion, it turned into a finger pointing exercise. The county pointed at the town, the town pointed at the water company and the villages, etc., etc. You know the drill.
At every turn, it always came down to the difficulty of constructing the waterline to run across that mountain.
Their final answer always came down to “why don’t the residents put them in?”
(Oddly enough, the residents are already paying for those fire hydrants, even though they don’t exist. All property owners on Tweed have two additional taxes that they have to pay: tax for fire hydrants, and tax for sewage, even though all the houses up there are on septic. These are taxes that, as I understand, are part of property owners tax bills throughout the area.)
At every turn, it always came down to the difficulty of constructing the waterline to run across that mountain top.
Here’s what always scared me about this: the park that takes up most of the top of Clausland mountain is not maintained. If a tree falls, it just stays there until it turns into nice dry tinder. The fire roads are not kept clear. One of the fire chiefs told me, during the brushfire, that we all were just lucky that there was no wind at that time. Had the fire been caught by the wind it would’ve gotten right up to the trees—and most of what we know of the river villages would be toast.
That fire would’ve raced right down the hillside, consuming every old dried out contemporary home along with the trees in its way, never stopping until it hit the river.
It is a tragedy just waiting to happen, and in the increasing temperatures that we are experiencing, I fear that it’s a tragedy that may happen sooner than later.
Why I’m writing at this moment: I’ve just become aware of an announcement shared by O&R that they will be putting in new gas lines up on Tweed in the very near future. (You’ve probably noticed the work they’ve been doing all over the area this year, digging ditches and dropping new pipes in.)
My question is, if there’s ditches being dug up there for gas lines, why not get a waterline in there at the same time? And fire hydrants!
Well, I don’t live on Tweed anymore. I live down here in the village, and I’m just as terrified that this might happen as I was when I lived right across the street from the park.
One of the challenges is this: it’s hard to get enough people’s attention about this problem. It’s even harder when you’re a Tweed resident, and everybody just assumes that you’re trying to get a waterline instead of having to pump it up from 9W.
