On Monday, April 20, a flooding incident involving the brook near Brewster Road occurred for the second time this school year. As water overflowed the brook and flooded the parking lot, many students and faculty were asked to move their cars to higher ground. After school, the entrance from Brewster Road into the traffic circle was blocked due to flooding in the circle.

The flood caused school wide inconvenience. Students and teachers were compelled to move their cars immediately during classes, and parents experienced difficulty in picking up their children after school, as the Brewster entrance was closed. “A pickup truck was blocking the entrance to the traffic circle in the high school. There was several inches of water on the parking lot and on the Brewster circle entrance. It was impossible to enter,” recalled Wei Wang, a Scarsdale parent. The school district has a distinct procedure on how to handle flooding incidents like the one on Monday. “If there are reports of heavy rain, we monitor the brook. We have custodians and administrators who watch the parking lots carefully, and when it appears that cars could be damaged as a result of the water, we communicate to students and faculty that they need to move their cars,” explained Dr. Christopher Griffin, assistant principal at SHS. While moving cars from the parking lot during the school day can be somewhat of an inconvenience, the school does not plan on implementing any solutions to the problem. “First, the north end of the gravel lot is not school property; it’s village property. The second thing is, you would need to construct a pretty elaborate berm to prevent this kind of flooding. It would be an enormous cost. If you do the risk-reward analysis, it would be difficult to justify that extraordinary expense when we can just ask people to move their vehicles,” stated Griffin.

By Emily Wang