As record rain floods Texas, distant Waterford confronts similar future

Authors of study on town’s preparedness for higher seas,fiercer storms hosted meeting

Waterford — Many parts of southeastern Texas, and most of Houston, are underwater this week. An unprecedented storm surge and unrelenting rain have led to flooded highways and crowded shelters, killed more than a dozen people and driven tens of thousands from their homes.

Nearly 2,000 miles away, at a public meeting hosted by the authors of a study on Waterford’s preparedness for a future with higher sea levels and fiercer storms, computer-generated images of flooding predictions for Waterford in 20 years looked eerily familiar.

Andre Martecchini, a project manager at the architecture, engineering and science consulting firm Kleinfelder, presented a preview Tuesday of a grant-funded report that will outline ways Waterford can protect itself in a flood-filled future.

In front of a small audience Tuesday, he pressed play on an animated image projected on a screen in the Town Hall auditorium. Digital water flooded over a map of the town, blue pixels covering roads and houses in the Oil Mill Road, Stony Brook and Mago Point areas.

The simulations, part of a town-commissioned report that was paid for with a 2016 $175,000 Community Development Block Grant, weren’t meant to alarm, Martecchini said.

“But it’s something to consider as you’re thinking about, what can you do for long-term flooding?” he said.

Towns like Waterford — surrounded by rivers and marshes and filled with low-lying areas — can benefit from new zoning regulations, infrastructure investments and emergency planning, Martecchini said.

Nothing, he said, will prevent floods from broaching Waterford’s marshes and shores.

But small changes — like installing gauges that measure tidal levels, or bigger ones, like raising roads and buildings up off the ground — can prevent some of the worst damage that flooding can do.

Some of the proposals, like zoning changes and new emergency evacuation routes, are already part of what town officials are thinking about when they plan for the future, Planning Director Abby Piersall said Tuesday.

But the report, similar to one a different firm developed for Stonington last year, will give the town’s planning and emergency management departments guidance for how they should be readying themselves for a time when Waterford looks like Houston does this week.

Waterford will share the results of the report, of which a draft version will be published on the town’s website within two weeks, with New London and East Lyme officials, and will incorporate the results in its long- and shortterm planning, Piersall said.

Waterford’s flood zones are relatively well mapped, and officials are informed about how flooding will affect the town decades from now, she said. But the report’s suggestions, which include plans for protecting the town’s sewer pump stations, raising roads above the projected flood line and developing new emergency evacuation routes, will provide guidelines for starting to prepare.

“We know where the flood areas are, but (this is) how to plan for it,” Piersall said.