BLACKSTONE, Mass. -- In the 1950s,
Woonsocket was ravaged by a flood that swamped the Social Street area. The
federal, state and local response was to spend $14 million over a decade on a
dam and four flood gates at Market Square, pump stations and concrete-lined
channels.
But after the October 2005 flooding
of the Blackstone, an array of environmentalists and planners gathered here
yesterday said the 21st-century response should be improved wetlands and
subdivision regulations.
An audience of about 70 people from
municipalities and organizations in Rhode Island and Massachusetts convened at
the public library here to assess how communities along the Blackstone River
might mitigate the effects of future severe rainstorms.
Several speakers said the rains of
Oct. 12 to 15 -- when nearly 10 inches fell on Providence and 14 inches on Woonsocket
-- were so heavy that there was nothing that could have been done to prevent
flooding. Donna Williams, of MassAudubon, one of the event's sponsoring
organizations, cited measurements in Woonsocket that showed the river's flow
going from 180 cubic feet per second to 18,000 cubic feet during the flooding.
How much fell from the sky was the
responsibility of Mother Nature, she said, but for where it went after that,
people shared the blame.
"Would that volume have been
in the river if we weren't so highly developed?" she said.
That was the crux of the various
presentations throughout the morning-long conference: How increasing
development along the river has covered up the land and impaired nature's
mechanisms for absorbing storm runoff before it can flood streets and homes.
And the consensus was that the best
type of modern-day flood prevention was new building regulations encouraging
housing developments that bend to fit their settings rather than leveling and
paving those settings to suit the development.
Andrea Cooper, smart growth
coordinator for the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management, said it's
a little unfair to put all the blame on developers. She said they only bring in
the types of projects that a town's zoning allows. Change the development
rules, she said, and you can change the landscape.
Kim Wiegand, Lincoln town engineer
and one of the speakers, said that the $14-million down-by-the-river flood
control approach of the 1950s has evolved into a solution that is targeted more
broadly.
She gave an example of drywells her
town required be installed in a housing development along Old River Road. She
said she had been concerned that rain runoff might have flooded an area
downhill from the project, but it didn't happen.
Drywells are structures built
underground for houses in flood-prone areas. The house's gutters that carry
water off the roof are all channeled into them, so the roof runoff is piped
directly underground rather than wearing channels in the ground by the
downspouts. It can reduce runoff by 10 percent, she said.
"In the 1950s, you could do
big projects," Wiegand said. "Now permitting is difficult, more
difficult."
Richard Claytor Jr., a principal
engineer with the firm of Horsley Whitten, said that even if such structures are
built, rains like those in October were so severe that they'd have overwhelmed
anything. He said it made more sense to come up with solutions for the smaller
storms that happen more often and, over the long term, can cause serious damage
as well. "It's appropriate to understand the limit of what we can do as
planners and engineers," he said.
"We're not looking at the end
of the pipeline," Wiegand said, "we're looking at the
beginning."