New stream is natural fix to flooding woe
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The flash flood that killed four people along Washington Boulevard last Friday has been called the result of a 100-year storm, a misleading term if ever there was one.
"I'm 63 years old, and I've seen a dozen of them," John Schombert, director of 3 Rivers Wet Weather, said of those designations.
I know something of the terror of such events. Almost 32 years ago, I was swept through a culvert during a flash flood in Danville, Va., and spent a couple of early morning hours perched as high as I could get in a fallen tree that didn't quite cross a storm-swollen creek.
I had gone from my car to the edge of my life in a minute's time, but what made my experience different is that both I and the water had an escape route. Once swept through the pipe that crossed beneath a two-lane road, I was in an open, fast-flowing stream that fed the Dan River, not a massive, covered pipe like the ones that are buried on each side of Washington Boulevard.
Some countless number of Western Pennsylvania creeks have been covered in this way, and Mr. Schombert believes that we can better manage our storms if we open them up.
Washington Boulevard -- "that's a stream valley, and there's no natural stream there," he said. If a creek were allowed to run beside the road, a microburst like Friday's would less likely lead to 50-pound manhole covers being shot into the air from the pressure of water pouring down into large pipes from surrounding hills.
Pittsburgh Councilman Patrick Dowd, a Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority board member, sees it much the same way. Mr. Dowd suggests raising Allegheny River Boulevard, which currently slopes down to Washington Boulevard from the east and west and acts as an unnatural dam when there's flooding.
Only about three quarters of a mile south of that intersection, Washington Boulevard begins a gentle rise to Frankstown Avenue. Because steep hills flank the boulevard, rainfall from a 3,000-acre area can swiftly make it a narrow, man-made lagoon roughly three-quarters of a mile long.
Mr. Dowd concedes he's no engineer, but he believes we need to stream that water underneath Allegheny River Boulevard and let it flow naturally into the river.
"We can't leave the dam as it is," Mr. Dowd said. "We'll always have flooding. We can't solve this problem with a bigger pipe."
First Published August 25, 2011 12:00 am
