In fight against climate change, flood-prone Millvale takes steps to stay dry
The second of two parts.
In the next few decades, Zaheen Hussain’s hometown of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, could be underwater — victim to a rising sea.
Now he’s in Millvale to make sure the borough fronting the Allegheny River stays above water.
The 29-year-old has been the borough’s sustainability coordinator since late 2015, tasked with continuing its EcoDistrict plan — a community-wide collaboration to prepare for a more sustainable future. Mr. Hussain is on the front line of Millvale’s effort to be resilient against whatever the climate brings, a fight that started about 10 years ago after its second huge flood in a few years.
In August 2007, engineers descended into Girty’s Run — the 6mile stream that runs through the borough’s main business district on its way to the Allegheny River — to clear 20 years of debris and shore up the edges, restoring it to its original depth level. To borough officials, the effort was a few years too late.
In 2004, Hurricane Ivan ravaged Millvale, flooding hundreds of homes and drenching its central business district with enough water to rise above the parking meters on
North Avenue. It was only a matter of time before it would happen again, and it did. One week in 2007 brought back-to-back heavy rains to the town of about 3,700 residents, and another rush of stormwater to basements and businesses.
Since Millvale amped up its fight against the storms, its creek hasn’t flooded. Its business district, once damaged by flooding, is revitalized. While surrounding communities battle flooding, rain comes and goes in Millvale without incident, an immediate reward for the community’s effort to prepare for an uncertain future.
“In probably a dozen communities in Allegheny County — when there’s high volume rains in a short amount of time — the creeks that run through them start overflowing their banks and affecting their residents and business districts,” says James Machajewski, Millvale council president and deputy fire chief. “We would have been in the same boat.”
What was once a culpable fear of being at the end of the Girty’s Run watershed is now an opportunity. The borough installed rain gardens and bioswales, helping to absorb the runoff and slow the amount of rainwater that gets into the storm sewer system. It passed a floodplain ordinance tightening guidelines on construction. And it’s pursuing a grant to collect air quality data in town, with the goal of connecting it to a water tower as a public display of how safe it is to be outside. Allegheny County is in the top 2 percent nationally of instances of cancer caused by air pollutants from industry, energy production and diesel vehicles. Millvale has a higher cancer rate per 100,000 residents than Allegheny County. The library and community center are both 100 percent solar-powered. With 96 solar panels producing about 35,000 kilowatt hours of energy per year, the community center could serve as a safe haven during a catastrophic weather event.
“One day, we hope to be able to create a network in which there’s ever a disaster scenario, where the grid goes down, we’d be able to unplug from the grid,” Mr. Hussain says, “and from the community center, run fully off solar and provide basic shelter services and municipal operations.”
For Millvale officials, climate change isn’t the main motivator behind its sustainable practices — at least not publicly. Mr. Hussain said residents have bought into green infrastructure, renewable energy and sustainability because it is simply good for the economy and for public health. Businesses in the town’s main corridor — once fearful of flooding — are now prepared; Millvale has 17 sustainable businesses designated through the state’s Sustainable Business Designation Program, the second most of any municipality in Western Pennsylvania.
In connecting sustainability practices to the future of the economy, Millvale officials also aim to create jobs in a town that has a youth poverty rate of nearly 50 percent and 12.8 percent unemployment. When the borough installed the community center’s solar panels, it ran a fellowship program to teach teenagers about job opportunities in renewable energy. Mr. Hussain says he wants to run fellowships for all of Millvale’s environmental projects, and connect adults to jobs in the field.
“People think that growing out of previous industries, it’s an environment versus-jobs debate,” Mr. Hussain says, “when, really, it’s an environment and jobs debate. The more we can show that to people, the better it is for our community, our economy and our country.”
But in a town that is downstream like Millvale, collaboration with upstream communities is imperative. Astormwater study found 90 to 95 percent of water flowing through Girty’s Run into Millvale is from outside the town’s borders.
“It’s not just Millvale’s problem. It’s larger,” says Louise Comfort, director of the Center for Disaster Management at the University of Pittsburgh. “Right until that problem is recognized as such, whatever little steps Millvale does is just going to be trying to avoid the next major flood.”
But avoiding the next major flood has united the community and kick-started collaboration. A few years after the floods, the borough’s leadership council turned over, replacing members who were on the board for more than two decades. The new council formed better relationships with the North Hills Council of Governments, and collaboration with Ross and Shaler townships forged a better understanding of how Girty’s Run could be managed.
“People here, politically, are pretty conservative,” Mr. Hussain says. “But because there are so many people who suffered through the ’04 and ’07 floods, everyone understands the importance of sustainable development by virtue of the shared trauma everyone experienced back then.
“Here it’s not political. Here, sustainability is about the survival of the town.”