DRAINAGE FIXES COMING FOR NORTH FLAGLER DR.
Flow way, pond could help but a schooner may be on the site.
After seven
WEST PALM BEACH — floods in 15 years and countless months spent with contractors on repairs, you don’t want to
know what Sumner Kaye pays for flood insurance.
Kaye, who bought the West
Palm Beach house at 208 34th St.
in 2003 for $300,000, recently had a contract to sell it for $500,000 — until he disclosed the problem. The buyer said, “Are you kidding me?”
Residents of the leafy Northwood Shores neighborhood a
mile north of downtown say they’ve tried to get the city to fix the flooding for more than 20 years. In storms and even seasonal downpours, the main north-south road, North Flagler Drive, and side streets as far as 3 blocks west of the Lake Worth Lagoon, fill like a bathtub, flooding homes and stalling cars.
The good news is, the city is about to undertake a series of drainage fixes in the neighborhood. “It’s a fairly sizable project,” Assistant City Administrator Scott Kelly said Wednesday.
The city bought the Holly Woods waterfront home site at 3336 N. Flagler in 2015 for $2.95 million, anticipating the project. The site is the lowest in the area and the city plans to demolish the house and turn the yard into a flow way to channel stormwater from the neighborhood onto the property.
The next step would be to study the buckled drainage pipe that flows through the property to the Lake Worth Lagoon, to see whether it can be fixed without building a new outfall and triggering a costly seagrass study. The city then plans to dig out a section of the yard to create a retention pond, Kelly said.
Finally, the city plans several improvements in the neighborhood and will study the sizing of the pipes, he said. “We’re methodically going through this, step by step.”
The bad news, according to the president of the Northwood Shores Neighborhood Association, urban planner Carl Flick: The plan won’t work.
He pointed to photos of the area’s last major flood, on Sunday, July 22, and said the area inundated on one street alone was bigger than the size of the proposed retention pond.
“The pond will not hold the flooding that occurred on 34th Street alone, let alone the flooding on eight residential streets,” Flick said.
In Flick’s view, the source of the problem is easy to grasp: One square mile of runoff drains into a 5- to 6-foot-wide collector pipe. That pipe, as it flows toward the waterfront, funnels into a 4-foot-wide pipe that’s partially buckled.
There’s one more complication.
When city workers dig the retention pond, they likely will come across a buried 100-foot schooner or sloop from the 1800s. It was partially unearthed in 1972 when the homeowner at the time was excavating a swimming pool.
Don Rich, 59, a former resident of the neighborhood, was a boy of 13 in 1972 when homeowner Derek Brock made the discovery in the backyard, site of a boatyard in the 1890s. First, rum bottles came up. “Then the guy hit something large and metallic,” Rich recalled. That turned out to be a two-cylinder steam engine with footwide pistons.
After the pool went in, workers covered the ship back over. The rusted hulk of its steam engine still can be seen poking through the overgrowth in the front yard, hauled up and placed there as a historic relic.
The wooden ship was a coastal freighter, one that would carry lumber and other building materials from Stuart and other parts to the north, and haul produce on the return trip, Rich said.
“You could see the whole massive frame of this boat in the ground,” said Greg Albritton, a friend of Rich’s who was with him that day in 1972. Albritton figured that kind of ship could have dated from the early 1800s.
“They’re going to have a real surprise when they go digging in the back,” Rich said. “Who knows that they’re going to find?”
The city has not confirmed the ship is still there but if city workers do come across it, they’ll have historians assess it, Kelly said.
Despite Flick’s concerns, the city projects will ease the flooding, said Kelly, an engineer. The house will be torn down and the flow way graded by October, at a cost of about $80,000, he said.
Then the city can see whether restoration or replacement of the 66-inch diameter outfall line is needed. That would cost about $350,000 and would take 10 to 12 months, he estimated. If more outflow work and a seagrass study are required, that could only be done between the months of June and August, delaying the project, he said.
For residents, the fix can’t come soon enough.
“It’s frustrating,” said Olga Soto, of 3500 N. Flagler Drive.
Two or three times a year, rain fills the street and it’s hard to get in or out, she said. “We have small cars.”
The house has watermarks 3 feet high and the stucco is damaged, she added. Her 6-month-old pavers look like antiques already, she said.
When it rains, her daughter immediately leaves because she’s afraid she’ll be trapped and miss business appointments. When it floods on garbage days and people have their cans out, the water washes garbage all over the yards and against the houses.
“It looks like we’re in a different country,” Soto said. “I’m from Venezuela but I didn’t live like that. It’s disgusting.”