N.H. city taking fight to flooding
Keene is both model of progress and warning sign
KEENE, N.H. — When the rain comes downheavy in Keene, N.H., auto mechanic TomStevens knows what to do: Drive the cars to the top of the hill near his garage and get everything else up onto shelves before floodwater starts seeping up through the floor drains.
Variations on this drill are second nature to residents of a city that has dealt repeatedly with the Ashuelot River and Beaver Brook overflowing banks, bringing three floods considered to be 100-year events in the past decade alone.
Recent efforts by the city’s 23,000 residents to combat flooding — and wrestle with the potential effects of climate change— have in many ways made Keene a model for municipalities across the country.
A White House report on climate change earlier this month praised Keene for its “innovative community engagement methods,” as the first U.S. city to develop a climate adaptation plan with ICLEI, an international organization of local governments concerned with sustainability.
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But Keene also stands as an example of the enormous costs of coping with extreme weather as the local government wrestles with federal agencies over how to pay for the replacement of infrastructure.
“The city’s working pretty hard on it, but it’s hard to keep up with the water,” said Michael Kiser, owner of a prosthetics business, which has been flooded five times in the past seven years.
The last major flood came in May 2012, when about 6 inches of rain fell over five hours. The city responded by clearing vegetation and debris fromthe concrete channels the Beaver Brook runs through in townand shoring up a local dam. It has also required newbusinesses andhomes, aswell as substantially ren- ovated buildings, to move key utilities at least a foot above projected 100-year flood levels. “They are a poster child for how to do this,” said Joe Casola, director of science and impacts at the nonpartisan Center for Climate and Energy Solutions.
One problem the city is grappling with is how Federal Emergency Management Agency funds flooddamaged infrastructure. FEMA pays up to 75 percent of the cost of returning a road or culvert to its pre-flood state, but it typically will not pay to raise a road or widen a culvert to prepare it tohandle heavier flooding, Lamb said.
“Part of the problem is that the 100-year flood is based on what’s happened over the past hundred years,” said City PlannerW. RhettLamb.“We shouldbe anticipating what’s going to be happening 50 years from now.”
“I knew the history of this place when I bought it,” said Stevens, whose Tom’s Auto Service has been badly flooded twice in the past nine years. “The history was it got flooded once every 20 years or so.”
While he said he has no regrets about buying the site, he would feel differently if it were his home being inundated. “Would I want to live here?” he said as a light rain fell. “No.”