Flood Action Program still unproven

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Flood Action Program still unproven
(Graphic/Jessica Kim)
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To the editor:

I agree with John Hill in his Sept. 5 Alexandria Times letter to the editor, “Early Flood Action Program results,” regarding the need for Alexandria to invest in stormwater infrastructure. It is a travesty the city only recently began maintaining this crucial infrastructure after at least 25 years of neglect and inaction.

While the lower Hooff’s Run area has flooded since at least 1922, according to newspapers at the time, it stopped serious flooding, for the most part, after the Hooff’s Run culvert was constructed – likely in the 1950s. The area started flooding again in recent years because the city failed to remove 50,000 cubic yards of rock from the city’s storm sewers, with nearly 6,000 tons alone just from the last few blocks of the Hooff’s Run culvert. It also took some ill-advised actions, like filling in essential drainage outflows in the culvert that had served us well for decades.

Despite Hill’s assertions, the city’s Flood Action Program remains untested.

The recent “improvements” to which Hill refers are a tiny step. This project only added access doors and reopened three or four of 30 wrongly filled-in outflows, which, incidentally, were filled in without the appropriate permits. Meaning that Army Corps of Engineers experts did not have the opportunity to review that action as they should have done. That is a long way from success with flooding at the culvert.

No flooding when we only got 1.16 inches of rain in 45 minutes does not remotely mean the program is succeeding. Even before the city removed nearly 6,000 tons of rock in 2021, the culvert never overflowed until we received at least 1.8 inches of rain in an hour. It has not recently rained enough in an hour to determine whether the Hooff’s Run culvert will overflow when challenged to design capacity and above.

But the lack of flooding after we got more than two inches of rain on Aug. 15, 2021, four months after the city cleaned the last few blocks of the Hooff’s Run culvert, does suggest that removing rock helps prevent flooding.

Now, more than three years later, it’s time to clean the culvert again. Recent inspections show significant rock buildup has recurred in the area cleaned in 2021.

That’s where the Flood Action Program comes in. The routine maintenance program is an essential complement to the inspection program. Because, every four years, at least since 1997, the city applied for and received permits from the Army Corps of Engineers to remove 50,000 cubic yards of rock from all these structures. Despite these approvals, city officials did not remove a pebble until 2021. And city inspections, done every four years, showed the Hooff’s Run culvert 40% choked with rock in 2019 – and still the city did not act. Inspections are great, but you have to fix what you find.

This recent rain of 1.16 inches was no test, and the city must keep up with maintenance, not just inspections, if we are to have any hope of staving off future flooding.

-Marla Brin, Alexandria

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