ALBANY - New York has endured nine floods since 2004 that were declared federal disasters - including a deluge that ripped a crater through a highway north of Binghamton and another that scattered buildings and cars in the Catskills.

The spate of severe flooding has been so damaging and costly - more than $500 million spent for response and repairs - that the state will hold a flooding “summit” in flood-prone Binghamton on Thursday. Among the questions that will be raised at the summit is this:

Is there anything the government can do to ease the damage caused by flooding?

Experts say there are indeed steps that public officials can take, though they caution there are no “silver bullets” and that many solutions are costly or politically complex.

“There's no simple answer,” said James Curatolo, watershed coordinator for Upper Susquehanna Coalition, “and there's got to be a lot of little answers.”

Flooding is common around New York, though the last few years have been especially harsh, particularly in the Southern Tier and around the Catskills. Most severe was a historic flood in June 2006 that swept away homes and cars from Binghamton to the Mohawk Valley and cut a chasm across Interstate 88. Four people died. Last June, a flash flood strong enough to rip homes from their foundations washed through the Catskills. Witnesses described a rushing wall of water. Four people were swept away; three bodies have been recovered.

“The last few years seem to be pretty bad years,” said Jim Tierney, assistant commissioner for water resources at the state Department of Environmental Conservation. Tierney is working with communities in New York to figure out ways to mitigate the “peak flow” of water during heavy rains.

Tierney and other experts said the old solution of straightening out streams with riprap or constructing concrete sluices tends to just shoot the water - and the flooding problem - elsewhere. Better to utilize dry wells or catchment ponds that can hold excess water, they say. Catchment ponds are especially useful next to commercial developments the feature acres of parking lots, Tierney said.

“You put pavement all over the place and it rains, then a stream that used to get a maybe a thousand cubic feet per second during a high-precipitation event gets two or three or five thousand cubic feet per second,” he said. “That water moving through the stream rips the stream apart ... and starts to flood things.”

Wetlands also play an important role in flood control, acting like sponges for surface water during heavy rains, Curatolo said.

Gary Firda, a surface water specialist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Troy, said flood-control reservoirs also work, mentioning Whitney Point Lake on the Otselic River north of Binghamton and Mount Morris Dam on the Genesee River, south of Rochester.

One of the larger water bodies in the state, Great Sacandaga Lake in the southern Adirondacks, was created to control flooding downstream along the Sacandaga and Hudson rivers.

But Firda notes that big public works reservoirs might be more difficult to build given stringent environmental reviews and the problem of purchasing the necessary land.

“I think it would be very difficult,” Firda said.

A number of experts stressed that tinkering with nature can only be part of the solution.

If homes are getting flooded out, they note, it often makes sense for people to move beyond flood plains to higher ground. The federal government has already been trying to encourage this, to mixed reviews, through a property buyout program for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

“You can't live everywhere,” Curatolo said. “You can't always live in the flood plain.”