March 29, 2010: A Watershed Moment
I tried to describe a watershed to my 13-year old son last week. It was a strange concept for him to wrap his head around. It seemed odd to him that anyone would bother to think about where a drop of water flows when it hits the ground; the name, size, and condition of a watershed has no bearing on our everyday lives. Until it does.
On March 29, 2010 Interstate-95 was underwater in Warwick, Rhode Island. So was the sewer plant, the mall, and hundreds of homes. The flood picked up cars, propane tanks, oil drums and anything else that wasn’t bolted down (and even some things that were). Neighborhoods were cut off by flood waters, isolated for days. The Pawtuxet River in Warwick established its “flood of record” during the week of March 28, 2010, rising up quickly and angrily to 16,250 cubic feet per second. That week, the Pawtuxet River cost the United States taxpayers $79 million in grants and loans to property owners.
That same week in Westerly, Rhode Island, the Pawcatuck River also rose to historic levels (10,010 cfs), but mostly stayed within its banks. Upstream, the river surged through swamps, wetlands and riverside forests, slowly rising over several days, then slowly receding.
The Pawtuxet and Pawcatuck rivers drain roughly same size area: 228 and 300 square miles, respectively. They are both fairly flat, dropping in elevation about 1.25 feet per mile. Even their names are similar.
The two rivers differ in one key aspect, however. The Pawtuxet is 19% paved, the Pawcatuck is 9% paved. They both do what they’re supposed to do well, one diverts water while the other absorbs water. The first functions like a gutter, the other like a sponge.
Of course, pavement is an indicator of people and economic activity. It is foolish to say “pavement bad.” Ask a 90-year-old what cities were like before pavement: foul and muddy. From 1950 to 1980 pavement enabled Warwick’s population to double to 87,000, creating a city with thousands of middle-class housing options. This pattern, by the City’s own admission, is also one with “limited open space and undeveloped land.” A pattern that today, functions like a gutter with each storm.
To keep the gutter water at bay, Warwick property owners carry 1,854 flood insurance policies and the City estimates it needs to purchase $6,400.000 worth of “severe repetitive loss properties.” Meanwhile, Warwick cut $6,400,000 from its school budget this year.
Where is the private capital to address these problems? It is mostly gone, having followed the demographics back into the cities that Warwick’s developers were fleeing in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Warwick has not gained population for 35 years. That leaves it to us, the public, to sort out the environmental mess we allowed private capital to create.
So I encourage us in places like Warwick (like its neighbors Cranston, West Warwick, and Coventry) to think about where the public is going to spend money anyways. Bridges need replacing. Schools need building. Town offices need upgrades. Airports need expansions. Parks need new equipment. And these investments have 10–50 year lifespans. So when we’re designing and building these public investments, let’s think about where the water will go in the next big flood and capture it onsite. Or even better, let’s build places that can capture floods that came downstream from other highly-developed suburbs
But exposure to flood risk in places like Warwick has a demonstrable cost that can’t be reduced by smart public investment alone. The private market and constitutionally granted land use policy have combined to fail in reducing the hazards we have created. Costs for pavement have been externalized downstream. So, how about we create a new market?
A stormwater utility district, currently under consideration by the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, and the six-city Providence metro region, could assign a price to pavement. Pavement owners would become ratepayers, with the rates providing the capital to reduce the impacts of the gutter water flooding and polluting downstream property owners. By creating this market, property owners will consider their pavement as the expense that it actually is to society, providing a wallet-based incentive to remove impervious surfaces. Over time a stormwater utility would generate tens of millions of dollars for removing portions of over-sized parking lots. It would capitalize a measurable retreat from the rivers edge, restoring the natural sponges that rivers need.
In an added benefit, by bringing nature back to our paved-over rivers, we’ll create the kinds of parks and open spaces that:
- Provide beautiful places to exercise and relax
- Clean our air
- Gets kids outside for unstructured play
- Attract new businesses and residents
Creating this market to fix our rivers seems like an equitable and leveraged way to prepare for the next memorable storm. Otherwise, I hope someone recruits a marine supply store to the mall.
