Chatham at sunset
Photo by Deirdre Haber Malfatto
Photo by Deirdre Haber Malfatto
About Town
Buy Local!
Shopping locally is good for all of us: keeps money in our community, and allows our stores to remain healthy. A thriving community attracts people to visit, shop, and possibly stay. Shopping locally also reduces your carbon footprint - plus saving you precious dollars on gas. It’s a real win-win situation!
Recycling: the skinny on what goes where
Here are a good link guaranteed to get you recycling more than you ever thought you could, from the motherlode of recycling information, Real Simple’s A-to-Z Guide to recycling.
In Chatham village, Main Street offers two shops where you can recycle your unwanted clothing: ReWraps will take your donations, and Melinda’s looks for nice garments in good shape on consignment. And they both have great buys!
On Route 66, heading towards Hudson, Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore stocks a huge and ever-changing line of appliances, paint, hardware, cabinets, doors, windows - you have to see it! They accept donations, but have guidelines that omit some kinds of things, so check before you try to donate. Their FaceBook page is truly A Good Thing: you can browse the inventory from there, ask about what you see or what you’re looking for, and sigh over the great score someone else just made.
Roads & Bridges
Columbia County has a lot of bridges, and a look at the bridge safety report for Columbia County, produced by the NYS Department of Transportation, is disturbing.
It turns out that that our safest bridge is a County controlled bridge on White Mills Road over the Stony Kill. It has a rating of 6.78. That is very high.
Down the road is the closed White Mills Road bridge, a CSX/Amtrac bridge scheduled for repair by the Town. That bridge has a rating of 3.69. Pretty low.
But here's the really scary stuff: the Albany Turnpike Bridge in East Chatham, a CSX/Amtrac bridge, is rated 3.47. The bridge on Loomis Road, controlled by Columbia County, is rated 3.51. Finally, watch yourself as you travel over the bridge spanning Indian Creek, another County bridge, as it is rated at 3.27!
Obviously we need a plan regarding our infrastructure! If we do nothing, as we have been, we are going to get blasted when these bridges — rated lower than the closed bridge on White Mills Road — need emergency repair, and we haven’t put anything aside to take care of it!
Given the bad rating these bridges have gotten, if you see another car coming, especially a truck, you might want to let them go first....
Alisa Costa has looked into the bridge issue, and here’s what she sent us:
When the state came out with its bridge ratings after the collapse of the bridge in Minnesota and the Dunn Memorial ramp, it was reported that a large number (38%) of bridges in NYS were rated under 5, which the DOT calls unsafe. This is a statewide issue. As a comparison, the Crowne Pointe bridge was closed and demolished with a rating of a 3.38. In fact there are 110 bridges statewide that are rated at or below 3.38.
There was a good YNN piece on this last year which sums all of this up.
Another Times Union article highlights the region's bridges.
I don't feel unsafe going across bridges, especially the small ones in this county, but I guess that is for each individual to decide.
DOT put together a >$25 billion plan to restore bridges but Governor Paterson rejected it saying it was too much and would raise taxes.
Note: nearly all of Chatham's bridges are below the 5 rating!