The city of Staunton has reached a milestone in its efforts to protect the community from future flooding with the release of a first draft of the Staunton Flood Resilience Plan. WMRA's Meredith McCool reports.
[water flowing in Gum Spring Branch, a tributary of Lewis Creek]
History and hydrology are in constant tension in the Queen City.
WILLOW HUGHES: Nowadays, we would not build a city like this. It's really dangerous to have buildings that people are in constantly sitting – not only in the floodplain – but in the regulatory floodway.
Willow Hughes is the environmental programs administrator for the city of Staunton.
HUGHES: But if you are in the floodplain like that, it is probably going to flood. And the Wharf in particular is the lowest point for about a 12-square-mile drainage area. It's very large, and it is a very highly impervious area. We will see the streams rise very quickly on our sensors.
In an effort to ease this tension, the city of Staunton has developed a flood resilience plan, which is now available for public review. According to Katie Shoemaker of Wetland Studies and Solutions, Inc., who – along with architectural and engineering firm Wiley|Wilson – prepared the flood resilience plan –
KATIE SHOEMAKER: This is a planning-level document, and it's a living document, something that the city expects to come back to periodically and refresh to see how things have changed over time. In some ways, the main goal of this plan is to open up funding to actually implement these projects to improve resilience through the Community Flood Preparedness Fund, CFPF, which … opens up funding to localities to improve the resilience to flooding throughout the state of Virginia.
That's a grant program administered by the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation.
On Wednesday, April 15, the city hosted a community listening session to gather feedback and answer questions.
SHOEMAKER: Flooding can happen anywhere in the city where drainage isn't cooperating with rainfall, reflecting the importance of having the entire community involved in this process … because everyone can be affected by flooding.
Joanie Laird, a former city of Staunton employee, was among the small group of community members in attendance.
JOANIE LAIRD: We did the first comprehensive study in Staunton, and I became very familiar with what the issues were, one of which was storm drainage. … And now the city's changed its position from prevention to resilience, which is sort of counterintuitive.
McCOOL: How do you find those two to be different?
LAIRD: Well, preventing what happened in 2020 is very different than how you recover from it. If you don't have the problem in the first place, you don't have to worry about recovering from it. And I think being proactive is extremely important for the city at this juncture, because people can't afford to go through that on a regular basis. And I think it's been very damaging for a lot of people downtown. And I think we need to look at keeping businesses downtown, because that's the heart of the city.
I shared Laird’s comment with Katie Shoemaker and Nathan Staley, also with Wetland Studies and Solutions, Inc.
KATIE SHOEMAKER: You can't prevent the weather as a step one. You can build in certain ways to be able to manage it better, but it's always going to be a trade-off of what people are willing to do up front to prevent negative impacts. And that balance usually doesn't go so far as two 500-year storms in a row, because that is a significant amount of change for an area like this.
NATHAN STALEY: Yeah. And expense.
SHOEMAKER: Huge expense.
Hughes explained what hydrologists mean by the term "500-year flood."
HUGHES: That's really more so meant to express kind of the frequency at which a flood would statistically occur. It does not mean you see one every 500 years. It's a certain size storm or intensity storm, and the 500 years is just to express that's a really big one, a really intense one, one we would not expect to see all the time, but we did receive two in that August.
Wetland Studies and Solutions, Inc. provides consulting across the eastern United States. I asked them –
McCOOL: Is this the worst you've ever seen?
STALEY: I will put it this way: when Helene hit, and the damage happened, Staunton came to mind. Oh, man, if this had hit in Staunton, what would that look like? Because, why is it called the Wharf, right? Like, hmm, that's because where all the streams come together in the middle of town. And the age of the infrastructure, and yet its proximity to the stream systems. It's a big challenge.
HUGHES: We are doing a study to explore what it looks like to daylight the Wharf, meaning, kind of take the top off the tunnels there and make the streams flow straight through. But we found that that has very little benefit to flooding. It doesn't really increase the capacity. It doesn't really give the water anywhere else to go. So we are kind of limited especially in downtown, with with what we can do. And the study we did to show engineering solutions, almost all of them just weren't feasible. I mean, they were 10s of millions of dollars, and that's a really big ask. So I think part of what we came to with that conclusion was, if there aren't necessarily fixes for downtown, that is why we have our flood sensors, because they can at least provide that early warning for people to protect themselves and hopefully their property.
City environmental program representatives will be available to answer questions and take comments at Earth Day Staunton on Saturday, April 25, from 11:00 to 3:00 at the Gypsy Hill Park bandstand. The city is continuing to collect comments on the draft plan through May 2.
