FROM TODAYS NY TIMES: COUNTY STARTING TO ADDRESS FLOODING

In Westchester, Cleaning Up After One Flood While Planning for the Next
LISA W. FODERARO
Published: November 13, 2007
GREENBURGH, N.Y. — At the First Unitarian Society of Westchester, at the foot of a dead-end road here, there are signs that the congregation is finally patching itself up after a devastating flood in April, one that ravaged parts of the East Coast and was one of the worst in the county’s history.
Inside, the Rev. David M. Bryce, the minister, worked at his computer in a freshly painted office with new floors and baseboards that had replaced waterlogged ones. Outside, red nylon straps secured an oil tank to a concrete slab, and newly sown grass seed was starting to sprout. The tank had floated around the property during the flood, spilling its contents and causing soil contamination that cost tens of thousands of dollars to repair.
Mr. Bryce is not sanguine about the future, however. The church had to use most of a $100,000 fund earmarked for a major expansion to pay for the repairs, which were not covered by insurance. The expansion is now on hold.
“The issue it raised was, do we want to stay here and can we stay here, and if not, where do we go?” he said. “Frankly, I’m a believer in global warming, and I think floods are going to be more common. We’re in a valley here.”
Across Westchester County, as throughout much of the New York City region, residents and business owners in recent years have come to worry about flood damage every year.
County officials said the April flood caused damage to homes, businesses and public infrastructure that easily amounted to tens of millions of dollars. Local governments applied to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for more than $26 million in disaster aid, said David Novich, a spokesman for the county’s Department of Emergency Services.
Most of the businesses that were forced to close after the storm have reopened, and houses have long since dried out. Officials in Westchester are trying to get ahead of the problem, and have included a $50 million reserve fund in the proposed county budget to help communities pay for flood-mitigation projects over the next five years.
In the meantime, a flood task force appointed by the county executive, Andrew J. Spano, has been meeting to devise criteria to determine how and where the money will be spent.
He said the combination of new construction and increased precipitation in the last several years posed challenges for Westchester, which is laced with rivers and flanked by the Long Island Sound and the Hudson.
“No one has a single solution for all this,” Mr. Spano said in a phone interview. “Because of development, a lot of the sponges, or areas that normally would absorb water, have been taken away. What I wanted to do was get this on a more scientific basis and get some reality into doing something.”
The New York region has been awash in recent years. The rainfall total at Central Park for the year, through Sunday, was 54.07 inches; the 30-year average total for the same period is 42.95 inches. “The past few years have been slightly wet to a lot wet,” said Jeff Warner, a meteorologist at Pennsylvania State University.
Kathleen A. Miller, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said flood damage had been on the rise worldwide as a result of population growth and development on flood plains. In recent years, the intensity of the rainfall in the United States has increased as well.
“We have already seen warming,” Dr. Miller said, “and as that warming ramps up in the future, we’ll see an increase in this pattern of heavier precipitation. If the storm track is coming your way, it’s likely to be carrying more moisture.”
Westchester County has not tracked flooding levels across the decades, but some local officials said that they have noticed drastic increases in floodwater in recent years. “I moved here in 1950, and I live right near the Sheldrake River,” said Valerie M. O’Keeffe, the Mamaroneck town supervisor. “It has never flooded like this — never, never, never. We had to take people out with Payloaders.”
Paul J. Feiner, supervisor of the town of Greenburgh, agreed. Along East Hartsdale Avenue in Greenburgh, the flooding was so severe in April that some businesses and houses were inundated with eight or nine feet of water. A few businesses, including a laundry and a Chinese restaurant, closed for good.
“I grew up in the area, and they’ve always had little floods, but nothing major,” Mr. Feiner said. “The problem is these hundred-year storms are happening every 5 or 10 years.”
Jennifer von Eiff and her husband, Warren, who live near the convergence of the Mamaroneck and Sheldrake Rivers in the village of Mamaroneck, frantically bailed oil-contaminated water from their basement during the flood.
The water had seeped up from the ground, Mrs. von Eiff said, and once it receded, the couple had to replace some wallboard and part of a staircase.
Mrs. von Eiff, a legal assistant, has lived in the pea-green split-level house on Jefferson Avenue for 50 years. She said that the April flood marked the first time that water had ever entered the house. She has since purchased four life jackets for the couple’s dachshund and three cocker spaniels. She said she wanted to be prepared for the possibility of an even worse flood that could force her family to evacuate.
"It’s very stressful," she said. "You really never get a comfort level back again."
Jerry Mulligan, commissioner of the county’s Department of Planning, said that the new flood-mitigation money, which is subject to approval by the Board of Legislators, is not intended to “repair or restore” buildings that have been damaged by floods.
“The objective of the county spending is to reduce flooding problems and the impacts they have on people and property throughout Westchester,” he said. “We’re past the point where we can solve the flooding problem. What the task force is wrestling with right now is to define clearly the kinds of things the county will get involved in.”
Westchester officials said they want to make sure that the communities that are awarded the money for a specific project are doing their part to curb flooding through land-use regulations and storm-water management. Ideally, Mr. Mulligan said, a flood-prevention project like the creation of a detention basin would have an impact beyond a single town or village.
“Flooding cannot be looked at on the basis of a street or neighborhood or municipality, because you need to understand where the water is coming from,” Mr. Mulligan said. “We want to know what benefit a project would have on a watershed basis.”
Ms. O’Keeffe, the Mamaroneck supervisor and a member of the flood task force, praised the county for providing the money. “People are very frustrated,” she said. “They want it fixed now. But unfortunately, local government doesn’t have the money to solve the problem. Once you get the Army Corps of Engineers involved, it can take years. The county money is unique in that it can be used quickly to do something practical.”
Others, however, believe the flooding problem is so extensive that the $50 million is just a starting point.
“If we could leverage money from the federal government and Albany, then the $50 million could become $200 million or more, and then we could really make a difference,” Mr. Feiner said. “Even in a residential neighborhood, to address any flooding you’re talking in the millions of dollars for a small project."