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2011 Top 10 Stories For Ossining

OSSINING, N.Y. – Our top 10 stories of the year feature the forces of Mother Nature which were felt strongly with a hurricane, an earthquake and an early snow storm all occurring within a few months. Ossining students and sewage leaks also made it onto the list:

1. Hurricane Irene stuck on a Sunday in the end of August, wreaking havoc with first its rain, and then its wind. More than 67,000 county residents lost power. In Ossining, water flooded the Metro North train tracks until it looked like a river and water rose up to three and a half feet in the Boathouse restaurant’s dining room.

2. Many lost power again when an early snowstorm on Oct. 29 caused many trees that still had leaves on them to fall down, in some cases onto power lines. Landscapers and horticulturalists at the New York Botanical Garden said the storm caused the most damage to trees that they had ever seen in 20 years.

3. Sewage leaks were a recurring theme in Ossining over the summer. First a fire in a waste water treatment plant in upper Manhattan in July caused millions of gallons of sewage to dump into the Hudson River. Then in August, a tree fell onto a sewer main in Ossining, breaking it and causing sewage to flow into the Killbrook Creek about a mile from the Hudson River.

4. A 5.9-magnitude earthquake that originated near Mineral, Va., was felt by some residents in Ossining and Briarcliff on Aug. 23. Other residents didn’t feel anything.

5. Eight Ossining High School students won Intel Science Talent Search awards and six students placed in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in 2011. All together, the students won more than $100,000 in science research prizes.

6. On election night on Nov. 8, unofficial results were too close to call for the town supervisor race and the village trustees race. Susanne Donnelly won by a narrow margin for town supervisor, and Robert Daraio and Manuel Quezada won for village trustees. 

7. The village of Ossining overrode the state-mandated tax cap to pass a $30.15 million 2012 budget with at 4.23 percent tax rate increase from 2011.

8. A proposal by a small number of residents in the unincorporated part of the Town of Ossining to have two election districts in Ossining annexed by Briarcliff generated heated discussions in September.

9. Former Ossining Town Supervisor John Chervokas, the inventor of the advertising slogan “Please Don’t Squeeze the Charmin,” died in July at the age of 74.

10. The county health department issued a good number of rabies alerts over the summer. One alert was issued after a rabid fox spent a night in the bedroom of a Briarcliff home.

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