Published: August 25, 2008 12:06 am      

TONAWANDA: Area soaked again; one of the wettest summers on record

It was raining cats and dogs when a city man’s car became bogged down in traffic Sunday afternoon on Wheeler Street, then refused to start.

“I went to start going and it started (sputtering) and it stopped,” said City of Tonawanda resident Mike Andrzejewski, who lives just a few blocks from the site of flash flood conditions that disabled his car.

“And then the water started running from over there where the train tracks are. I just saw a wall of water just coming and coming and not stopping,” he said.

An hour later, Andrzejewski, 22, was still holed up in the flooded vehicle, trying to stay dry despite several inches of water sloshing around on the floor.

About two inches of rain in an hour can cause an almost infinite number of problems, and cell service throughout the area was temporarily disabled by a spike in calls clogging the circuits, City of Tonawanda Police Lt. Bill Strassburgh said.

As a result, Andrzejewski was unable to use his cell phone to call his uncle, who runs a nearby towing service, or to call home for a pair of waders he uses for fishing.

Strassburgh said flooding on Wheeler Street is common with similar rains.

“You see it all the time on this street, it’s brutal.”

Throughout the Twin Cities, near record rainfalls caused everything from serious “puddles” on River Road, to unusual reports of people taking short canoe trips on William Street.

“I was sitting in a line of traffic,” Andrzejewski said. “The guy in front of me was stopped. We were sitting there probably two minutes and the water was so high it stalled my car out. The other guys got away.”

Police then closed off the street in both directions and called a towing service used to handle city jobs.

That set into motion the impounding of his vehicle, the unfortunate result of a police policy to tow the car, which Andrzejewski said they deemed a “road hazard.”

Once the tow truck, with the words “Dan Walter & Son” painted on the cab, arrived, Andrzejewski argued briefly with police standing near the Main Street roadblock about 50 yards away.

He was upset, saying no one could give him a price for the mandatory hook up, and today anticipates having to pay again to have the disabled vehicle towed home from the impound lot.

“They wouldn’t tell me how much it was going to cost me ... the police gave me an ultimatum — either let him tow it or they’re going to make me let them tow it. (Later, my uncle) said he would have picked me up for a few bucks for gas, and he would have towed me to my house not the impound yard.”

Dave Sage, meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Buffalo office, said the amount of rain reported between 3:45 and 5:10 p.m. was about two inches — twice as much as it takes to cause heavy flooding in an urban environment where there are aged drainage systems.

“My wife called me and said our Verizon cell phones were down,” Sage said. “Some areas have had a lot of rain over the last month — it’s mainly the frequency — before we had this several-day dry period it was pretty frequent.”

In fact, he provided data that showed this summer is probably among the top 14 wettest summers on record, with 12.74 inches of accumulated rainfall since June.

The heaviest rains came in 1885, with 20.65 inches for the three month period. Last year saw only about 6.26 inches for the same period.