Huge flood-control cost, planning mess put Southwestern Pennsylvania in bind
Broken tree trunks and branches clutter the shady hillside behind Keith Jones' print shop in Wilkins, reminders of last June's thunderstorm that flooded Saw Mill Run below and caused $1 million in damage to the business.
"Maybe this year will be OK," Jones said. "But there's going to come a point where a storm will come that will do the exact same thing. We'll have the exact conversation again, only next time I won't be lucky."
Like other communities in the Turtle Creek Valley, Wilkins has not cleared debris from Saw Mill Run, which swelled with 4 inches of rain in two hours. The Army Corps of Engineers has a $200,000 to $500,000 improvement project scheduled, but it won't begin before August.
In the meantime, Jones and thousands of others living and working along the region's 1,400 creeks wonder what's next. Record creek floods during three of the last six flood seasons caused at least $114 million of damage in Southwestern Pennsylvania, from Carnegie to Millvale to Turtle Creek.
Although flooding on the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio rivers is rare because of federal flood control efforts, experts believe it could cost as much as $50 billion to protect homes and businesses along the region's creeks. The Corps and other agencies working to solve the problem lack authority and resources to complete the job.
"It's nobody's fault," said John Schombert, executive director of 3 Rivers Wet Weather, a nonprofit that advises Allegheny County on water management. "There's just no money to do a regional flood control project. ... You've got years and years of mismanagement and design problems that you've got to make up for."
Congress gave the Corps $660,000 to make emergency repairs this spring — stabilizing stream walls and removing sediment — for Turtle Creek and tributary Thompson Run. But some residents are angry that the government reacts only after disasters.
"We've gone to every level of local government, and none of them can do anything," said Neal Harrison, who pressured Wilkins officials to clean Chalfont Run to protect his family's metal-spinning business, EH Schwab Co. "They can't fix it. You can't fix it yourself. If somebody could tell us what the answer is, we've got a whole valley full of people waiting to hear it."
Eastern suburbs hit hard
The problem is acute in the eastern suburbs, especially in Wilkins, Turtle Creek and Pitcairn — the towns downstream of Monroeville.
In Pitcairn, the state Department of Environmental Protection spent 14 years planning an $8 million project to correct Dirty Camp Run. The money is allocated, but 19 boreholes drilled into the streambed for surveying are the only work completed since 1996, said Pitcairn Council President Orelio Vecchio.
Rep. Joe Markosek, D-Monroeville, said everyone had good intentions.
"But it has also been a textbook case of how difficult it is to get big projects like this accomplished," Markosek said.
In the meantime, Dirty Camp Run flooded three times, including a 1997 deluge that damaged more than a fourth of Pitcairn's 1,400 homes, said Mayor Betsy Stevick. The project is under review by lawyers at the state Department of General Services, which oversees its funding, said Joe Capasso, chief of project development at the DEP's Bureau of Waterways Engineering.
"We've had political people call up, and they guaranteed us (the review) will be done by June," Vecchio said. "Now I have to wait. And if it don't happen by June, then I have to raise heck. This is how things work. It's frustrating; I know it is. I would have liked to have seen shovels going outside the office two years ago, but it doesn't work that way."
The Pitcairn project is one of the longest-lasting in the DEP's 70 years of flood-control work, Capasso said. It typically takes five to seven years for DEP to start construction after it gets a project, he said.
But construction is unlikely to begin before fall 2011, said Andy Malene, a DEP senior project designer. The Pitcairn project was completely redesigned once, because borough officials objected to razing or altering Pitcairn Elementary School, which is built over the creek. Then DEP and Pitcairn — which must share the project's costs — needed to raise another $3 million.
The new plan is to bury the stream in a culvert under Wall Avenue, a main road. That set off a complex, four-year effort to do final studies and get construction easements from property owners. And that process stalled in 2008 — nothing happened for a year — because the borough fired its engineer, Capasso said.
"If Pitcairn wasn't moving, something else moved ahead of it," he said. "If our project would have been constructed, we don't think there would have been any flooding. That's the goal of the project."
June's storm caused $1 million of damage to public property and damaged 200 homes, including Jennifer Williams' house on East Wall Avenue. Crumbled parts of the creek's concrete retaining walls lie in the stream across the street, she said.
She and her husband bought their home in 2002 for $48,500. But, she said, "We couldn't sell it right now to save our lives."
"We always knew that (another flood) was a possibility. But we were told when we bought the house that steps were taken for it to never happen again," Williams said. "But here we go, it stormed and over it came. ... There was just nothing there to stop it. There was just nothing."
Outdated data
The Corps and DEP tried to address creek flooding in Southwestern Pennsylvania by spending $127 million on flood-control projects, built mostly in the 1960s and 1970s. The studies used to design the projects were conducted in the 1950s, before a population shift and resulting suburban development.
The county and Corps are trying to ramp up prevention methods.
County officials hired a planner last year to create a stormwater plan for the entire county, said Bob Hurley, deputy director of the county's Economic Development Department. But before that, the county failed to take a lead role in flood protection because of staff cuts in the planning department, Hurley said.
State law required the county to have management plans for its 25 major watersheds by 1989. Only nine watersheds have such plans.
The problem is especially complicated in Allegheny County, where major watersheds often start in neighboring counties and cover dozens of towns.
"Not much has been done," said Barry Newman, chief of stormwater planning at DEP. "In any of these watersheds, you just have a huge number of municipalities involved. When I've met with the county planning office, the biggest issue confronting us was how to begin."
County planning in general languished since the 1980s, County Executive Dan Onorato said. One of his goals was to finish the county's master plan, and when the 2004 flooding from the remnants of Hurricane Ivan happened just nine months into his first term, watershed management became a big part of that effort, he said.
"We've got more done in the last six years than we probably had done in the last 15," Onorato said. "It is a priority, but a lot of it comes down to money. Money is going to dictate how this goes."
Any watershed plan likely will recommend relocating some homeowners and businesses in vulnerable flood plains and ending development, experts said.
"For some of these communities, these properties aren't worth very much at all," said David Dzombak, a professor of environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. "So it's kind of crazy to have people living there taking hit after hit after hit. To talk about widening a creek when you have a $20,000 property sitting along it, that's a little crazy."
After Ivan caused more than $160 million in damages across the state, the Federal Emergency Management Agency offered to buy endangered homes. It had $14 million to spend and received $40 million in requests for buyouts — a third from Western Pennsylvania.
But buyouts aren't enough in areas such as Carnegie and Millvale, where the town centers sit at the ends of creeks, vulnerable to the brunt of any flash flood. There would need to be more infrastructure projects, such as ponds to hold water upstream and expansions to the channels downstream, several experts said.
The Corps' Pittsburgh District suggests that the region's federal legislators create a regional watershed authority, which experts call a crucial step. A new authority, or an existing government agency, could be empowered to take direct responsibility for flooding, prioritize the neediest projects, direct limited resources and raise money for the work, experts said.
"One of the biggest things that happens in Pennsylvania are floods, but no one is really paying attention to it," said Rebecca Bradley, Wilkins' manager. "We have a group of municipalities saying, 'Please help us. We're getting hit every time it rains.' But we cannot get any movement."
