Babylon, Huntington towns make fixes to flood-prone Yukon Court

When torrential rains swept across Long Island on the night of Aug. 18, the situation became dire along Yukon Court, a flood-prone cul-de-sac in Melville that sits on the Babylon-Huntington border.

Heoeeun Kwon, who lives on the court, said her family had to be evacuated by firefighters that night. "It was life-threatening," Kwon told the Babylon Town Board in September, adding that the water level rose to her chin.

Sisters Nivi and Prathi Pinnamaneni, whose parents live on the court, told the board how “terrifying” that night was for them as they had to get their father, who has congestive heart failure, out of the home. “We had to wade with him in water that came up to my chest at 2:30 a.m.,” Nivi said.

Kwon and the Pinnamaneni sisters were among residents who complained at the board meeting that on Yukon Court, flooding had been a problem for 20 years. 

Four months later, those who live on the court are hoping the repairs that have been made since the storm, with more targeted for the new year, will alleviate flooding and the worries that come with it.

There have been both physical and logistical hurdles to solving the problem.

Yukon Court is about a 600-foot-long stretch, lined with houses, that gradually descends from Chateau Drive to the north, to the cul-de-sac to the south. The court's position at the bottom of a hill presents a specific problem for drainage, Vincent Piccoli, commissioner of Babylon’s public works department, told Newsday.

The court is also crossed by the border that separates the two towns: Huntington is to the north and Babylon to the south. 

“That area is a fishbowl and they’re in the bottom of the fishbowl,” Piccoli said of the Babylon Town residents. “Any type of physics you can imagine works against that particular location.”

Some of the residents at the Babylon meeting in September said they had complained numerous times about flooding but little was done to address it.

Piccoli, the commissioner since 2021, said he’d only heard complaints from residents in April, and that was when the town began to look at the drainage system there.

Huntington Highway Superintendent Andre Sorrentino said he only heard about the persistent flooding there after the August storm. When he did, he said, he reached out to the Town of Babylon and residents to see what could be done. “Their stories were really upsetting,” he said. “Some of their homes were under water … we had to see what we could do to get it resolved.”

Drainage overwhelmed

Piccoli said the August storm dumped more than 8 inches of water within a few hours in that community and it “overwhelmed the drainage system and the drainage basin.”

“The drainage systems on Long Island are designed to handle roughly 2, 2½ inches of stormwater an hour, and in this particular case we had much more than that,” he said.

Piccoli said that after the storm, the town cleaned up a sump nearby — on Hadley Drive, south of the cul-de-sac — and added three more curb inlet drains to Yukon Court. He said the town used video cameras to inspect piping that runs from the court to the sump, checking for any collapses or obstructions, but the pipes were clear. 

Sorrentino said part of the issue is that a recharge basin, located on Bagatelle Road at Chateau Drive, just east of the court, needs more capacity.

The ground beneath Yukon Court contains a natural spring, contributing to consistent standing water in the recharge basin and surrounding drains, according to the Huntington official. “You need to hit sand in order for it to drain,” he said. “Sometimes you have to dig really far to get to it, but it was backed up.”

Three weeks after storm, Sorrentino said, he and his crew brought a crane to the corner of Chateau Drive and the court to dig 25 to 30 feet deep to install another drain. The crew then connected the new drain to three existing drains with new pipes.

“This will help grab a lot the water coming down the hill,” Sorrentino said. “We went down really deep because if you don’t hit good sand it’s never going to drain.”

He said the fixes cost about $5,000, a savings of $15,000 had they used outside contractors.

More repairs on tap in '25

But the fixes are only one step. Sorrentino said that next year, there is a plan to dig 50 feet deeper than the Bagatelle Road recharge basin’s current depth and install a cement drainage structure. “This will help prevent some of the water from reaching the intersection and flowing down Yukon Court,” he said. “The new measures will increase the basin's capacity to manage and absorb more water during heavy rainfall.”

Sorrentino said that when he first started, it quickly became clear that “our small budget and limited staff were significant challenges."

But, he said, the department was able to secure grants to purchase equipment, train the staff to take on tasks usually handled by contractors, and offered overtime opportunities to make it all happen more economically.

“It was money well spent,” Sorrentino said.