While others in Darien keep watching the skies, Eric Gidley checks the parking lot.
Gidley, assistant manager at Leary’s Discount Wines & Liquors on Heights Road, knows that when rainwater runoff begins to rise above the curb outside his store, it’s time to batten down the hatches and get the pricier wine to higher shelves. Of all the parts of town prone to flash flooding, the commercial district of Heights Road has been an epicenter as far back as 1955. A year ago came the topper, a raging grimy torrent on October 11, cresting above four feet, that poured through the front door, destroyed most of the store’s stock and trapped Gidley and others inside. “We didn’t even have time to move the cars,” he says. “We had to call 911 to get us out of here.”
In the last few years, and particularly in 2007, floodwaters have been a major problem throughout Darien. Over on Kelsey Street, Laura and Frank Giobbi have a ritual whenever a heavy rainfall begins: Lay a double wall of sandbags around the front door; stretch tarpaulin across the sandbags; then watch and hope the three-foot-high berm they built in their yard will be enough to keep rising waters away.
“I can’t even tell you the level of anxiety we have,” Laura says. “We were forced out of our home for two weeks’ total last year. We have neighbors who were totally devastated, and out of their homes for months.”
Mark McEwan, volunteer chief of the Noroton Heights Fire Department, talks of his own early-warning sign, a call from an older woman on Holly Lane whenever floodwaters get too high for her and her husband’s comfort.
“That’s how we know we have another situation on our hands,” he says.
“I do blame the town,” Leary’s owner Kevin Leary states flatly. “They’ve known about the problem since the 1970s, and they’ve done nothing about it.”
He stops a moment, brow knotted. Outside, a sign advertises Leary’s as “still the friendliest store around,” but at the moment the mood in here is anything but.
“No, actually, they did do something about it,” he continues. “You know what they did? Back in the 1970s, they put a four-inch sewage pipe inside the foot-wide drainage pipe that’s supposed to direct water away from here, so there’s that much less room for the water to flow through.”
For Leary, removing that long-shut-down sewage pipe would be a correct first step. Others see the retention pond as the more immediate need. Advocates for the pond include Evonne Klein, Darien’s first selectwoman, and Robert Steeger Jr., director of the town’s Department of Public Works.
If it were as easy a matter as removing an old sewage pipe, Steeger insists, it would have happened long ago. The problem, he says, is that the drainage pipe, obstructed or not, isn’t enough to handle the load. A wider drainage system is needed. As development increased, the town’s ability to absorb rainwater weakened. He likens the topography of the area around Baker Field, which includes Heights Road, to a basin.
“What seems to impact the Heights Road area is heavy rainfall over three, four, five hours,” Steeger says. “It’s like the bathtub fills and the water has no place to go.” The Baker Field retention pond would create such a place, at least for that part of town. Answers for other areas seriously impacted by ’07 flooding, like those along Crimmins Road, Renshaw Road and Wakemore Street, will have to follow.
Whether the Baker Field project can happen at all is an open question. In May Denise Ruzicka, director of the DEP’s Inland Water Resources Division, turned down the town’s initial application for the retention pond, citing inadequate documentation. Evonne Klein maintains that much of the documentation already exists on a computer disc the DEP was not able to open. Nevertheless, both state and local officials agree that a critical question remains unanswered: Will it be all right to compromise existing wetlands?
If the DEP says yes, it would be an unprecedented action, says Arthur Chris-tian, a supervising civil engineer with the DEP who has visited Darien and consulted with the town. For about fifteen years, the DEP has held to a policy of “zero wetlands removal,” specifically when those wetlands are seen as vital to the well-being of Long Island Sound, as is the case in Darien.
Currently the DEP is weighing a similar application in Meriden. “That hasn’t been resolved,” Christian says. “In other cases it has been decided against further wetland taking.”
In Darien he notes that a central problem is that the state is not satisfied the town has pursued all other possibilities for controlling the Heights Road runoff situation. “We wanted them to list out the options,” he says, meaning options other than the retention pond. “They listed a bunch, but we couldn’t get a handle on how many there were and why they discounted them.”
Klein counters that the Baker Field plan is the best option — perhaps the only workable one — in a town that is 98.5 percent developed. “Find another two-acre site where we can do this,” she says. “There isn’t one.”
Klein and Steeger call their proposal a balancing act that minimizes environmental impact while preserving property rights, and a critical first step towards rectifying the larger problem of Darien flooding.
Christian expresses sympathy for the “balancing act” idea, to a point. “There’s a tension here,” he says. “It’s not the wetlands’ fault. It’s society’s fault.”
You won’t get much of an argument that human habitation is at the root of the problem in Darien. It’s not just houses cropping up in places they weren’t forty or even twenty years ago, but how much the average house size has grown.
“Over the course of the last two decades, Darien has continued on a rapid pace of development,” says Flora Smith, a resident since 1987 and chairman of the Representative Town Meeting’s Public Works Committee. “As a result of not having in place proper regulations for flood mitigation connected to development, we find ourselves with inadequate infrastructure to deal with storm water mitigation. All of a sudden we’re having a fire drill.”
It’s not just about property damage, McEwan notes, but potential loss of life. “It’s a pretty dangerous situation,” he says. “If people become trapped inside the stores, and water rises to where we saw it last year, there’s the risk of drowning. You can be in danger from shelves falling or heavy items moving around inside the stores because of floodwater. That clearly happened last time [in October 2007]. And then there’s the risk from electricity and fire if there’s a short in the building.”
Darien is not the only town reporting problems. Norwalk has been hit by recent flooding concerns as well, while New Canaan hosted an informational session on the subject with the DEP in June at which homeowners spoke out about problems there.
Klein concurs that overdevelopment is one of “a number of factors,” noting it consists not only of new-home construction but add-ons to existing homes.
“There are standards in place along the lines of what is called LID, low-impact development,” she says. “But when you look at a town that’s been developed for quite a while, these standards are only being applied to new development. Most of the homes are here already.”
For the last few years, Darien has enjoyed a bumper crop in real estate values, and with every new extension or resurfaced patio, there’s that much less ground surface to soak up rainwater. Laura Giobbi is one of several pointing to a house on Holly Lane that was built on a flood plain, where basements are not normally permitted. In this instance, Laura says, the developer was able to install a nine-foot basement that stays dry by pumping out thousands of gallons of groundwater every day.
“Smaller homes are purchased, bigger homes are built, and no surface is available,” she says. “Rather than build the right infrastructure fifty years ago, the town made the decision to rely on the culverts and streams. They took another look at it in the 1970s, and again decided it was too expensive. If you go down Cherry Road right now, you will see homes that are abandoned because of flooding.”
Crimmins Road resident Vanessa Wood is so exercised by what she calls the overdevelopment problem that she is pushing for a townwide moratorium on new-home construction until October 2009, when Darien’s new topographical survey is scheduled to be completed. Then, she says, the town will be in a better position to know where its rainwater goes and plan appropriately.
“My own situation is we bought a 2,000-square-foot house and right now we can only use about 700 square feet of it,” she says. The first floor may be dry for now, but she still keeps a plastic patio table in her family dining room rather than risk more valued furnishings.
Vanessa is also the acting president of an advocacy group, Save Darien’s Wetlands, urging both the moratorium and wider action, including removing sediment and halting what she calls the illegal damming of creeks and rivers. Despite its name the organization also supports the Baker Field retention pond.
“It’s low-grade wetlands and they have to start somewhere,” she says. “The town has to be able to show it has some follow-through.”
There has been an undercurrent of discontent directed toward town leaders by flood-issue advocates. Darien’s flooding may be an inherited situation, they say, but precious little has been done to rectify the problem as flooding has worsened, even after last year’s triple whammy.
“Things sort of limp along and limp along,” the RTM’s Flora Smith says. “In February we submitted an application to the state and no one followed up on it. Lo and behold, in May it was rejected.”
Does Smith blame the town for that? “In my mind’s eye, when one makes an application, it’s up to the applicant to make sure due diligence is completed on the applicant’s end. If you apply to a college, it’s not up to the college to nag you about things you didn’t complete in your application.”
Klein insists that the town is doing all it can to see that something is done about flooding. While she criticizes the DEP for failing to get in touch about the computer disc problem, she talks of maintaining a cooperative approach.
“Our approach is to form a partnership,” she says. “That means a partnership with the state and with residents who have experienced flooding on their properties.” Klein points to several meetings held by Darien over the past two years as evidence of continuing commitment. “Something that’s been repeated is that there are no overnight fixes,” she says. “This is a long-term process, and we will never be able to guarantee total success.”
In fact, at the moment there’s no guarantee the Baker Field retention pond will even be built, not with the DEP’s commitment to wetland protection. (The Army Corps of Engineers and the federal Environmental Protection Agency must also agree to the plan.) At a meeting last June, much was made of a comment by the DEP’s Christian that he was “optimistic” something could be worked out. For his part, Christian acknowledges a DEP commitment to flood mitigation as well as wetlands retention, but when pressed on what he meant by the word optimistic, if it was about the Baker Field plan’s approval or simply the town’s finding some other alternative, Christian declined to say.
Some are not waiting for government to act. Scott Bennett owns the Compleat Angler, a fly-fishing equipper also hit by the October flood. Instead of staying in its old Heights Road location, last March the Compleat Angler moved to another Darien location, 555 Post Road.
Bennett doubts that anything will ever be done. “There are too many people involved,” he says. “As soon as a plan is in place, someone shoots it down. It’s frustrating to see politicians pointing fingers. It doesn’t appear to be a priority until something happens. Then after a week, you don’t see them again.”
Damages sustained at the Compleat Angler included the loss of $300,000– $400,000 in property and merchandise; nearly all paper and computer files, and the store’s original owner, who decided he had had enough and sold out to Bennett, a ten-year employee. Since the reopening at the new location, business has been on the mend.
Sanda Chun, co-owner with husband Moon of Sanda’s Cleaners, is another Heights Road merchant recovering from last October’s flood. She shows photographs taken for their insurance claims of debris-blackened walls and wrecked pressing equipment and sewing machines. “I never, ever imagined it would be like that,” she says.
During that flood, while storm water poured into their building, Sanda, Moon and their employees struggled successfully to get their customers’ clothes out of harm’s way. The clothes were all saved, but the sum total of thirty years’ labor was largely lost.
Like Leary’s, the Chuns have bounced back, and today Sanda’s Cleaners enjoys a busy, steady trade. Sanda notes an upside to the ordeal, in the way customers rallied around the establishment and kept it in operation. “People have been encouraging us, coming by, giving us hugs, bringing us sandwiches,” she says. Eric Gidley mentions a similar phenomenon, of people simply walking into the liquor store to ask what they could buy in order to help Leary’s stay in business.
The continued impasse at the state and local level has Sanda frustrated, but she is hopeful too, now more than ever. “I think now it is better,” she says. “The town is more aware of what it wants and the state is more aware of the problem.”
She pauses to look through a picture window at a row of petunias waving in the breeze outside her store, drinking in the gorgeous sunlight, and shrugs.