OBSERVER Photo by Andrew David Kuczkowski. Prospect Street in Perrysburg has eroded, as it is at the base of two hills. The worn-down area has come to a point where concrete barriers are needed to prevent drivers from rolling down the hill into Cattaraugus Creek.

PERRYSBURG — Erosion has gotten the best of Prospect Street.

The street just past Gowanda High School is now patched with more rocks than it is road.

What elevates the risk to drivers is that just south of Prospect Street is an ascending hill; to its north is Cattaraugus Creek. The half of a road surface makes drivers slow down to minimal speeds, but that isn’t so easy.

Prospect Street is also Indian Hill Road, but the divide comes at the barrier of the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation, just a minute drive from the eroded road site. Indian Hill Road lives up to its name as a normal sedan going the speed of 35 miles per hour would pick up speeds into the low 50s if brakes weren’t applied.

Thus, the situation heightens as a speeding car goes from the hill to the uneven, rocky and dangerous Prospect Street.

“The thing that I’ve noticed is that a lot of the land is washed away,” Perrysburg Town Supervisor Dennis Stopen said. “Things have got to be done and got to be done really quickly.”

As of last month, the project is making strides to be finished; however, this is coming from governments, and governments usually are not fast.

“Prospect Street is moving along,” Perrysburg Highway Supervisor Daniel Stang said. “It’s in FEMA’s hands. I know there has been a lot of controversy about it and people talking, but they OK’d the preliminary numbers, (Army) Corps of Engineers OK’d the prints. Now it’s on FEMA’s desk to OK the dollar signs.”

The project has been in the works for months. It had an original date line to be finished before schools started, before school buses became involved over Prospect Street. The deadline for that is long gone and the community is still hesitant to drive over a road that merges Gowanda and the Indian reservation.

“It’s really funny, I mean, nobody said anything when we missed the date when school started,” Stopen said. “Nobody said a word. All of a sudden, within the last week and a half, rumors still exist within the government and first of all, I got a call from Senator (Cathy) Young’s office, a call from the state, I got a call from the county and somebody else… They said, ‘Can we help you?’ I really wanted to say, ‘Give us about a million and a half dollars and all of our problems are going to go away.’ But I didn’t have the heart to do that.”

Young’s office told Stopen that it would send a letter to FEMA to assist the speed of the process, but nothing is known as of now. The project has no estimates for time.

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