By MICHAEL GORMLEY
ALBANY, N.Y. — Mounting wind and flood damage from Tropical Storm Irene isn't even calculated in upstate New York, but officials and residents surprised by the storm's devastation are confronted with a haunting new concern: They may not be able to do anything more or different to prepare if it happens again.
"There are preventive measures for flooding, and you know where the likelihood is," said Don Jaquish, director of the Essex County Office of Emergency Services in the Adirondacks. "If anything, we underestimated the force of the water. But could we have done anything by knowing it? No."
That force was still being felt Tuesday in the Hudson, Schoharie and Mohawk valleys and in the Adirondacks, two days after Irene hit. It was expected to mostly pummel New York City and its suburbs but largely spared the metropolitan area.
Mountain roads were shredded, bridges washed away, buildings ripped from their foundations and trees torn from the sodden ground.
It's difficult to say whether upstate New York could have been better prepared for Irene, said Mike Lindell, director of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center in College Station, Texas.
Hurricane forecasting is less reliable when it comes to rainfall totals — it's easier to predict wind speed and storm surge, Lindell said. He said, however, more deaths result from inland flooding than wind or surge of the surf.
The geography upstate, and the old communities that traditionally have been built close to water in flood plains, are at the core of the problem.
"Flood plains in mountainous areas are very small and the rivers run straight instead of meandering," said Tracy Allen, associate professor of geography and environmental sciences at the State University of New York at Oneonta.
"When you get a big flood of it, there's going to be torrential floods and it's going to be flashing, exactly what we got," Allen said. "We occupy those flood-prone zones and we are inherently taking the place of where the water would like to store itself. We are living in harm's way."
He said levees and other structures don't work for huge flooding and may even make matters worse when waters rush over them toward homes. The best use of these flood plains is parks and farmlands, something unlikely to change in upstate communities that are more than a century old.
The rugged Adirondack mountain area about 300 miles from the Atlantic Ocean was assumed to be immune from hurricanes and tropical storms.
"These are the High Peaks, huge mountains," Jaquish said Tuesday in an interview. "I've never seen that much water ... It's going to come down here. It's going to find a way."
He sees two lessons learned: First, the state Department of Environmental Conservation took the rare step to encourage and escort campers and tourists out of the woods.
"Everyone was guffawing at that," Jaquish said. "But that was the smartest thing they did, because if they hadn't I think we would have seen some deaths."
The second lesson: "Don't believe the forecast," he said. His area was forecast to get 2 to 3 inches of rain. It got at least 7 inches, far more in some places.
Two hundred miles south in the low-lying farmland of the Schoharie Valley, Richard Ball sees the land he's tilled for 40 years under 4- to 18-feet of water.
"It was just far worse than anyone could have imagined," said Ball, 58, who planted produce including carrots, cabbage and tomatoes at his Schoharie Valley Farms. The soil there is rich and regularly gets some flooding, but now he's looking at damage of more than $100,000 from Irene.
"I can't complain," Ball said Tuesday. "I don't think any government agency could have changed my situation at all. I don't think the weatherman could have warned us anymore. We were ready."
Irene destroyed 500 to 600 homes and thousands of acres of farmland and left six people dead upstate. As of Tuesday afternoon, about 470,000 customers were without power statewide.
"I don't know what you can do, even in retrospect, about record rainfall and record floods that are going to fill creeks," Cuomo told reporters Monday. "It could have been a lot, lot worse."
On Tuesday, he grouped state agency heads to form an Upstate Storm and Flooding Recovery Task Force to provide rapid response to countless New Yorkers.
"Mother Nature wins at the end of the day," Cuomo said.
Associated Press writers Meghan Barr in New York City and George M. Walsh and Rik Stevens in Albany contributed to this report.