Story Circles.
Story circles are an excellent way of engaging and building community through the long standing tradition of story telling. They allow people to share their thoughts and personal experiences, receive feedback and learn from one another, and explore the many challenges communities face, along with how these challenges can differ across different demographic groups. We hoped to get a wide variety of perspectives by hosting story circles in different areas across the city, including VINES Garden, Broome County Public Library, Binghamton University Downtown Center, Cenetery-Chenango St. Methodist Church, The Binghamton Housing Authority, The First Ward Senior Center, and the home of the City of Binghamton Director of Economic Development, Bob Murphy. We allowed for a broad conversation, asking people to share any memory, thought, or experience they had related to the 2006 and 2011 floods.
Here are some of the stories:
"I was working at Binghamton Price Chopper, the old store of 2006 and I remember my manager, grocery manager came to me and said 'oh Gloria, be careful going home tonight’ and I, see we work in a windowless building and we have no idea what the weather is outside so coming home uh many roads were blocked off, no lights, I’m coming down Riverside Drive and all of a sudden I see this fence. I almost went through it. Had I gone through it, I would have went right into the water um but I stopped and I thought how am I going to get home"
"It rained for eight straight days without stopping.
Torrential downpour every day. It didn’t slow down, it didn’t pick up, it just kept on coming down, down, down. So the whole area, the whole Broome County was just about flooded and the water was going into the ground and the way I described it and it continued for about eight days 2 and it didn’t recede for nine, ten days after that. It had gone into the ground and would not go out into the tributaries like the rivers and the, all the little creeks and everything else, it was just overflowed everything. The banks overflowed the city of Binghamton. MacArthur School got flooded out, which usually during flood times it always got flooded out anyhow. So now they built that school back up because it’s brand new, millions of dollars to build that school back up again. They raised it off the ground, I don’t know how many feet off the ground it is but it looks like something from Mars. It’s a beautiful school if you think modernistically, architectural
the school is above the ground and I think the kids have to go over like a little bridge or a little entrance way, elevated entrance way. But the whole area has been redeveloped now since the flood."
Torrential downpour every day. It didn’t slow down, it didn’t pick up, it just kept on coming down, down, down. So the whole area, the whole Broome County was just about flooded and the water was going into the ground and the way I described it and it continued for about eight days 2 and it didn’t recede for nine, ten days after that. It had gone into the ground and would not go out into the tributaries like the rivers and the, all the little creeks and everything else, it was just overflowed everything. The banks overflowed the city of Binghamton. MacArthur School got flooded out, which usually during flood times it always got flooded out anyhow. So now they built that school back up because it’s brand new, millions of dollars to build that school back up again. They raised it off the ground, I don’t know how many feet off the ground it is but it looks like something from Mars. It’s a beautiful school if you think modernistically, architectural
the school is above the ground and I think the kids have to go over like a little bridge or a little entrance way, elevated entrance way. But the whole area has been redeveloped now since the flood."
"I wasn’t here in the flood but I know that my building, the downtown center, was very flooded. And in terms of people coming together, apparently thexc xp[;l[ staff from all over the campus came down that day and just basically packed up cars, like their own cars and like lugged books back up to main campus. They really had to come together to get that stuff out fast so that it wouldn’t be ruined."
"My neighbor next door lost his fence, and that went down into the creek and is no doubt in Chesapeake Bay or someplace (chuckle). So I remember during the height of the storm I went back there, and it was surreal, in a sense that you could hear trees being uprooted all along the creek bed. And there was, I mean there was, there was giant trees."
View our full story mapThe story map uses the power of visual representation and geography to narrate the floods, through the perspective of community members.
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