First Posted: 2/27/2014

West Pittston Tomorrow needs our help today.

The group is asking residents of West Pittston and neighbors in surrounding communities to sign a petition to federal and state officials urging that the borough get the flood protection that most other West Side residents already receive.

And we support them whole heartedly.

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The petition, in the form of a paid advertisement, appears on page 21 of today’s paper. We encourage everyone to sign it.

Actually, it is a shame that it’s come down to West Pittston needing to summon community support to get public officials to do the right thing. And the right thing is to fill in the 1.4-mile gap remaining in the Wyoming Valley Levee System.

The problem is that the U.S. Army Corps of engineers disagrees. It’s not cost effective, they maintain.

But West Pittston Tomorrow questions — and rightly so — why a separate benefit to cost ratio for West Pittston was used to make this decision.

The group points out that West Pittston was originally included in the levee raising plans from 20 years ago, but West Pittston was left out to free up $24 million for the other stages. And when West Pittston was excluded from the project, the Army Corps predicted that 3 to 4 feet of upstream induced flooding would result, which is what happened in September of 2001.

“We’re the spill basin of the Wyoming Valley,” said Judy Aita, a member of West Pittston Tomorrow and it’s hard to argue that this is not the case.

“We’re just looking for what everyone else has,” Aita is quoted as saying in an article on page 18 of today’s paper. “There’s a levee below us and there’s a levee above us. They left West Pittston hanging unfairly.”

She pointed out West Pittston remains the only densely populated riverside community in Wyoming Valley without flood protection.

West Pittston Tomorrow has scheduled its annual meeting at 7 p.m. on March 6 in the community room of the West Pittston Borough Building. We encourage all borough residents as well as residents of other local communities to attend as a show of support.