The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
State aims to restrain the tide
Shoreline preservation projects still in planning stages
As Hurricane Florence devastated the Carolinas late last week, its death toll rising as buildings were torn apart and people were stranded amid the floodwaters, Connecticut’s town, city and state officials have implemented some, but not all, of the measures that would preserve Connecticut’s coastline from destruction.
Planning, engineering and housing officials were sobered by Superstorm Sandy’s damage in 2012, but are anticipating the inevitable rise of the high-water mark as climate change increases sea levels. In most shoreline towns, new or renovated houses
will be shored up 12 or more feet above sea level to avoid water damage to living spaces and utilities such as furnaces.
But many of the major projects, such as raising University Avenue in Bridgeport’s South End to limit flooding to Seaside Park, are still in the planning stages, with myriad details to be worked out before work can begin.
The need is urgent because, as New Haven city Engineer Giovanni Zinn said, sea levels are expected to rise 20 inches by 2050, “which really gives you pause when you stop and think about it — and then you have your storm surge.”
In Guilford, Town Planner George Kral and others, working with the Nature Conservancy’s Connecticut chapter and Yale’s Urban Ecology and Design Laboratory to develop “one of the earliest coastal resiliency plans in Connecticut,” Kral said.
“One of the things that’s kind of new about coastal resilience is we’re looking at projecting flood hazards into the future based on the likelihood of sea level rise,” he said.
Several houses on Seaside Avenue near Jacobs Beach have been built so that the living space is above even what the Federal Emergency Management Agency requires to be eligible for national flood insurance, but “we can’t force people in existing homes to build up,” Kral said. Only new homes or those who are renovating to increase the value of their homes more than 50 percent in any year must adhere to the new requirements.
Gary Nuttall and his wife, Brenda, bought 74 Seaside Ave., an elevated house, in 2014 and doubled its size last year. “We wanted the house to look as if it had already been built that way rather than tacked onto,” Nuttall said. “It had a lot of steel added to the original structure as well as the addition.”
The house is designed with water detectors so if a flood occurs the garage door and 10 flood vents will open to let the water flow through the ground level without damaging the living quarters upstairs.
Nuttall said with marshland near his house and an offshore channel, he’s not too concerned about flooding, but Sandy would have left 30 inches of water in his garage.
Not every house on Seaside Avenue is elevated and, Kral said, “I think it’s going to be tragic and difficult for people if there is a major storm. There will be properties that will be abandoned,” he said.
“The second most important thing that the town of Guilford has done is infrastructure improvements, in particular roads,” Kral said. Old Quarry Road, Tuttle’s Point Road and Chaffinch Island Road, which typically flood during storms, have been raised.
“The third category, and it’s the most innovative thing that we’re doing and it’s directly related to mitigating the impact of sea level rise” is “a living shoreline … to reduce
the potential for erosion of tidal wetlands,” Kral said. A main feature is taking loose fill material, such as that removed in dredging, and “creating a soft structure out in the water,” perhaps 100 yards out, that would reduce the force of the waves against the shore, he said.
It would be a major project, however. “We’re looking for money to implement it,” Kral said. “It’s in the millions of dollars and it’s not something the town is likely to be willing to do itself. It’s an experimental approach” that would require assistance from the federal government, the Army Corps of Engineers and the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, he said.
Alex Felson, director of Yale’s Urban Ecology and Design Lab, has envisioned what the Seaside Avenue area will look like 50 or 75 years in the future.
“As that road floods, many of these houses are going to be flooded and their access is going to be flooded,” Kral said. “Instead of looking like a New England shoreline area, it looks like a Florida shoreline area. The point of his visioning in my opinion is it still shows a positive community. … It’s not devastation of historic neighborhoods; it’s transformation of them.
“Maybe it’s like an island where you can only get there by boat,” Kral said. Felson’s maps show “long-range images of how these communities might function in the distant future. None of us are going to be there. The desire to live by the shore is going to be there.”
Felson said his lab based its work on the town’s transitoriented development plan, since it’s close to the railroad station. “We showed a transition strategy for Seaside Avenue,” he said. “We developed a cut-fill strategy to create raised areas where they could have community septic” and “enhance the recreational value of the area.
… You increase the size of the beach as a public amenity.”
The Yale lab’s work was done “in order to get homeowners and others talking about it and recognizing that change is coming,” Felson said.
Some of the planning work is dry, getting town zoning laws, building codes and flood-management ordinances in agreement to “try to get those three permitting systems on the same page so homeowners know what they can do and are required to do … to make sure everybody’s on the same page as to what the permit requirements are,” Kral said.
“What has been nice, actually, is the building code has actually integrated what is required by FEMA into the Connecticut building code,” rather than into insurance policies, said Russ Campaigne of Campaigne Kestner Architects in Guilford, who designed Nuttall’s addition. “Connecticut has actually been proactive over and above the FEMA requirements.”
Guilford has exceeded FEMA requirements, as have other towns, by adding 1 foot of elevation to FEMA’s rules, which vary depending on location. The extra space above what would be expected in a 100-year flood (one expected only once every 100 years) is known as freeboard.
“That additional height is actually reflected in your (flood) insurance,” with as much as a 20 percent premium discount, Campaigne said.
In Bridgeport, the project to create a berm by raising University Avenue and to do something similar in a northsouth direction “is in early stages of design,” according to Rebecca French, director of resiliency for the state Department of Housing. The city will use $48 million of $54.2 million the state received in 2016 as part of the National Disaster Resiliency Competition.
Dan Roach, Bridgeport’s director of government operations, said, “They’re finishing up or tying up loose ends as far as the planning stage is concerned and as far as the exact locations [it] hasn’t been completely finished. There’s a lot of property that the project needs to go through, in some cases private property, so certain things need to be worked out.”
The city also will create a “storm water park” in the South End near Marina Village, French said. “That area is prone to frequent chronic floods during heavy rainstorms,” she said.
Harry Smith, Branford’s town planner, said a threetown
study with Guilford and Madison “identified many, many, many projects would be required” to make the town less flood-prone “and the trick is how we would accomplish that, designating a board or commission” to oversee work.
Until now, Smith said, “some of the works has been repair from Sandy and (Tropical Storm) Irene in terms of coastal roads that were damaged.” The town’s community center is being renovated in a way that will make it floodproof, he said because part of it is in a low-lying area.
Another idea is to install a “removable closure” on the frequently flooded railroad underpass, known as the “cattle crossing,” between Indian Neck Avenue and Meadow Street that would “seal the underpass during a storm,” Smith said. “We have a conceptual design for that. … We need to triage how we’re going to approach the whole project.”
To hold back the tide, New Haven plans off-shore structures similar to the one in Guilford off Long Wharf and East Shore Park, Zinn said. The city is “building a long shoreline sand berm kind of thing” off Morris Cove, near the beach beside Anthony’s Ocean View, Zinn said. “It looks more like a beach than a berm, but it’s an engineered placement of sand.”
With more frequent rainstorms possible during climate change, New Haven is concerned about overloading its storm drainage system, which is partially connected to its sewage system. The city has created 50 of a planned 200 bioswales — 5-foot by 15-foot structures built between the sidewalk and the street that have a rock base, covered with two feet of soil and topped with river rock to make them attractive and easy to keep clean, Zinn said.
They can be found on Chapel, Howe, High and George streets downtown as well as Clinton, West Park, Edgewood and Yale avenues and Daisy Street, he said.
“We use them to both solve drainage problems when we see them and downtown in particular it’s to divert as much water out of our existing storm system,” Zinn said. “It basically allows us to take water out of the downtown drainage system.” It also slows the time water will take to drain into the storm pipes.
“We really bake resiliency into everything we do,” including how to repair the aged Grand Avenue bridge,” Zinn said. “Resiliency really touches every infrastructure decision that we make in a meaningful way. We have the responsibility to do that.”