In the Reservation column
South Orange-Maplewood News Record and West Orange Chronicle,
Published December 5, 2013
by Dennis Percher, Chair, SMC Board of Trustees
In Essex County, the Rahway River has two branches. Both flow south from West Orange. The shorter, east branch flows by South Orange’s Floods Hill and through Maplewood’s Memorial Park and golf course towards Millburn. The west branch feeds the Orange Reservoir off Northfield Avenue, and courses down the center of the South Mountain Reservation exiting at Glen Avenue. It continues through Millburn’s downtown and Taylor Park and further south, near the border with Springfield and I-78, merges with its eastern counterpart.
Over the years, severe storms, the last three notably Tropical Storm Floyd in September 1999, the April 2007 Nor’easter, and Hurricane Irene in 2011, have caused damaging flooding in Millburn and downstream in Cranford and elsewhere. (Superstorm Sandy does not fit into this category as the pursuant destruction was due to winds and the storm surge along the coast; the heavy rains that were anticipated did not materialize and towns like Millburn were not flooded.)
In the last year, two principal efforts have gathered momentum to study and undertake flood abatement in the Rahway River watershed. The first is a Flood Risk Management Feasibility Study being undertaken by the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) in partnership with the NJ Department of Environmental Protection. The second is a campaign mounted by the Mayors’ Council, an informal body of nine township officials in the watershed led by the former mayor of Cranford. USACE is currently evaluating the costs and benefits of seven abatement alternatives. If you would like more information on these options please contact the Conservancy.
Of these alternatives, two involve constructing an 880-foot long, 70-foot high dam across the southern end of the Reservation’s valley. It would create an extensive South Mountain Reservoir, a dry detention basin that would flood up to 80 acres in times of extreme rainfall, such as the storms noted above, and a lesser area, 23 acres, during heavy annual storms. The basin would then drain over a period of up to 3 ½ days. While the Corps’ assessments are not complete, the Mayors’ Council seems in favor of those options that include the dam to the neglect of less destructive alternatives.
The South Mountain Conservancy and a number of local environmental leaders strongly feel that the construction of a large dam in the Reservation is misguided, and that an alternative perspective is needed to champion a more balanced, equitable approach to flood abatement. To this end, we have formed RAFSA, the Rahway Alternative Flood Solutions Alliance. In a position statement posted this week on the Conservancy’s website, RAFSA contends that “the pursuit of such a massive construction project would be environmentally destructive and socially unfair, and may not provide the needed flood abatement.”
The founding members of RAFSA are: Václav E. (Vic) Beneš, Millburn; Jennifer Duckworth, Millburn; Katalin Gordon, Orange; Robert McCoy, Maplewood; James McGowan, South Orange; Dennis Percher, Maplewood, with the unanimous support of the SMC Board of Trustees.
A 70-foot deep South Mountain Reservoir, even if dry most of the time, would destroy vegetation, and many trails and roads in a treasured, century-old park, one of the few large, natural open spaces in central New Jersey. Essex County is already challenged by proportionately less open space than neighboring counties, so any acreage lost would be keenly felt. This loss would be especially tragic considering that this new reservoir, damming only the upper part of the west branch of the Rahway river, would likely affect too little of the total river flow to prevent the most serious flooding downstream. The damage to the Reservation would be irreparable without solving the flooding problem.
RAFSA hopes to champion a more balanced approach involving best management practices founded on a preference for low-level, low-cost, environmentally-sound designs and methods. It requests the Corps to consider seriously the many distributed abatement solutions possible along the length of the Rahway and its tributaries. As explained in their Position Statement, the idea would be to modify the waterway channel where beneficial, especially at choke points, and to establish multiple, distributed water detention flood zones. Their program would also call for substantial local action by the municipalities in flood-prone areas themselves.
We are committed to working with the Corps and the Mayors’ Council to study the river and identify a broader range of solutions. The idea is to solve the flood problems with long-term, holistic designs, avoiding “Band-Aids” that preserve grandfathered bottleneck features, and not relying heavily on one or two centralized detention basins. RAFSA maintains that large-scale disruption upstream cannot, and should not, be a substitute solution for historically poor planning decisions that have made certain areas prone to flood.
RAFSA approach is based on the following principles and premises:
1. Distributed Responsibility. Every township in the watershed should be involved in planning for, and contributing to, overall flood abatement.
2. Historical Development Causes. Most of the Rahway River watershed’s flooding problems are due to increasing impermeable surfaces that speed runoff, reduced breadth of the river channel itself through short-sighted construction in historic flood plains, and long-established choke points behind which the flood levels rise. All these causes need to be examined.
3. Fair, Open Planning. An open, transparent planning process is needed that engages stakeholders and informs the public throughout the watershed.
4. City of Orange Water Needs. Any abatement plan must take into consideration emerging water quality and capacity problems of the City of Orange which has wells in the Reservation.
5. Integrated Planning. Planning for abatement should be carried out in an overall watershed approach and in concert with municipal redevelopment and Greenway completion along a restored flood plain, from the Arthur Kill to the Watchungs.
To find out more about developments focused on Rahway River flood abatement and RAFSA activities, interested members of the public are encouraged to contact individual members noted above, e-mail RAFSA@somocon.org, or sign up on the somocon.org website and indicate an interest in RAFSA.