‘A PERFECT STORM’
Miles of county trails damaged; clean-up continues a month later
NORRISTOWN » More than a month after Hurricane Ida wreaked havoc in Montgomery County, the effects are still being assessed. One area hit hard were the trails used by thousands of recreation enthusiasts in the county.
“It was a perfect storm. I mean you never anticipate the amount of damage after these record breaking storms and these flood level storms. We anticipated some damage, but not to this extent,” said David Clifford, head of parks, trails and historic sites for Montgomery County.
Clifford estimated that approximately three miles of county trails were damaged, which could result in hundreds of thousands of dollars in clean-up costs.
“Some of it is removing all of the debris and sediment; that’s kind of what impedes progress for people to use the trail,” he said. “But then areas where actual trail materials were lost and washed away, we have to bring in contractors who have to fill those spaces with earth and then stone and then it has to be repaved.
“In some cases we had to replace drainage pipes that go under the trail or clean out drainage pipes that were clogged from too much debris.”
Clifford said most of the county trail system that includes both the Perkiomen Trail and Schuylkill River Trail was closed while crews surveyed damage and made necessary repairs.
“Within about a week we opened a majority of the Perkiomen Tail and … within the last two weeks we’ve opened a majority of the Schuylkill River Trail,” Clifford said. “There is still a section of both the Perkiomen and Schuylkill River trail that are currently closed.”
Both trails follow waterways — the Perkiomen Creek and Schuylkill River — that flooded at record levels in the heavy rains that accompanied Ida.
According to the National Weather
Service, the Schuylkill River in Norristown crested at 26.85 feet on Sept. 2, 13 feet above flood stage. The Perkiomen Creek in Graterford crested at 20.62 feet. Both were the highest levels ever recorded.
“Those two waterways really inflicted a lot of damage on those two regional trails,” Clifford said.
Wissahickon Trails
The Wissahickon Creek also flooded during last month’s storm, washing out a swath of the popular Green Ribbon Trail maintained by the Wissahickon Trails association. Executive Director Gail Farmer said at the peak of Ida, the water level gauge was just under 18 feet, which is “pretty significant.”
Wissahickon Trails maintains roughly 10.5 miles of the Green Ribbon Trail, which runs along the Wissahickon Creek, from Upper Gwynedd to Stenton Avenue near Erdenheim, according to Madalyn Neff, a communications specialist for Wissahickon Trails. A portion of the pathway is also within Fort Washington State Park.
Farmer and Director of Conservation John Ferro evaluated damage after the storm.
It took a few days for representatives to walk the length of the Green Ribbon Trail due to storm-related road closures, according to Ferro. The entire trail was then closed, along with three preserves, as they identified areas of concern. It took about three weeks to reopen the entire trail, Ferro said.
“The trail is opened up, but there are sections that have changed and are definitely different, and there’s work that needs to be done to get them to a more userfriendly condition,” Ferro said.
“Every storm is different because the stream is very dynamic, and one thing that really affects what happens in terms of flooding is when you have infrastructure that crosses the creek, and then you have debris being moved by the creek,” Farmer said.
She added that a “big tree was carried downstream by the flooding … and it got sort of jammed underneath” the Rotary Bridge, located along the creek past Butler Avenue in Ambler.
Wind damage was also a factor. An EF-2 tornado touched down on Sept. 1 and inflicted damage for eight miles in Upper Dublin and Horsham townships.
County equipment destroyed
In the county system, Clifford said trail points in Conshohocken, Norristown and Whitemarsh Township sustained damage.
“The Perkiomen Trail is a combination of asphalt, and crushed stone, or cinder. So some areas just completely washed out, some were blown out, some actually remained intact so there was a variety of different what I’ll call impacts to these trails,” he said.
Clifford identified a portion of the Pennypack Trail, through Lorimer Park in Huntingdon Valley, as another pathway that was damaged as a result of the storm.
“It was really more just for the volume of rainfall and that that area is so densely developed,” he said. “So I’ll contribute it more to stormwater runoff, but due to Hurricane Ida.”
As clean-up efforts got underway, Clifford noted a serious roadblock. Several pieces of equipment for Region 1 headquartered in Lower Perkiomen Valley Park in Oaks were destroyed when the Perkiomen flooded the park.
“A bigger part of the problem or why it was exacerbated was because Region 1 then didn’t have the equipment, tools or vehicles to go out and handle the clean-up,” he said. Montgomery County Commissioners last week approved purchases to replace mowers, gaters and other items destroyed in the flooding.
As Ida’s remnants inflicted damage upon trail systems across Montgomery County, Farmer and Clifford stressed that safety is key.
“I think it’s important that people understand … when we have a storm and we have to close the trails, and it’s very helpful when the community can help us by not going out on the trails when the trails are in fact closed,” Farmer said. “We do see a lot of activity on the trails even when they’ve been closed, and it concerns us because we don’t want anybody getting hurt … when we have them closed it’s because we have a concern about safety conditions.”