Flood plain won’t deter some builders

A developer in Warwick has been relentless in trying to build on 10 acres along the shore of Narragansett Bay and squarely within a flood plain, says Mark Carruolo, the city’s planning director.
When told the area was too low, the developer proposed hauling in enough fill to raise the 10 acres by 14 inches. The city rejected the idea as altering the land to an unacceptable degree, but the developer, even after the recent flooding, is still attempting to find a way to build homes on the land.
About one-third of all structures, or roughly 11,500 buildings, in Warwick fall within a federal flood plain. And people still keep building or trying to build in areas city planners know will inevitably flood, laments Carruolo.
“Human nature takes over and if something is financially viable for someone they’ll do what they have to do to develop the property,” Carruolo said. Or in at least one case, to lower the cost of operating an existing property.
Carruolo has seen too many property owners with dismissive attitudes toward floods and with short memories. Even the record flooding will not deter people from building in flood plains, both he and his Cranston counterpart, Peter Lapolla, predict.
In both cities water from the Pawtuxet River flooded hundreds of homes and businesses, including the Warwick Mall. Weeks after the flooding, as business owners and homeowners were still picking up the pieces, applicants in both communities were moving forward with plans to build in flood plains, said the planners.
In Cranston, Stop & Shop remains on track to build a supermarket along Warwick Avenue and within a flood plain. Lapolla said store planners said they want to raise the store above the flood zone and lower the parking lot to create a bowl to catch floodwater. If it works, that would prevent floodwater from rushing downstream while protecting the market itself.
Given the choice, Lapolla, a planner for 33 years, would not locate his business there, saying it appeared inevitable damage would occur. But legally he cannot stop people from building in a flood plain as long as they follow federal guidelines, which Stop & Shop has said it will.
Courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have consistently ruled that cities cannot implement regulations that drastically devalue or limit options on private property. Lapolla and Carruolo said the best they can do is caution people about the risk. Plus, in many cases the development is already there. The Warwick Mall, for example, is not going to pick up and move to higher ground.
In neighboring Cranston alone there are about 900 residences and 200 commercial properties in areas with a 1 percent chance of flooding in any given year. Even more development falls within a flood plain with a 0.2 percent chance of flooding a year.
Not that planners haven’t tried. From 1982 to 1985, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers embarked on a $4 million project to move or tear down 61 homes in the Belmont Park section of Warwick that were routinely flooded by the nearby Pawtuxet River.
After the recent floods, Warwick Mayor Scott Avedisian broached the idea of the federal government buying out homeowners and removing development from consistently flooded areas, including the remaining homes in Belmont Park. All told, Avedisian said he is talking about fewer than 25 homes. Moving 25 homes is relatively small in a city with about 35,000 structures.
Planners say undertaking a large-scale move would be expensive, politically difficult and could take years to accomplish. But the opportunity to at least explore the idea is ripe, as the state is showered with federal attention, said Wenley Ferguson, restoration coordinator for Save The Bay.
By coincidence, the flooding came less than two weeks before the Natural Resources Conservation Service closed on a deal with Cranston to purchase development easements over three pieces of city property along the Pawtuxet. Lapolla said the federal government hoped the easements – totaling about 106 acres – would help protect the wetlands system bordering the river that plays a key part in controlling the river’s water level. The new easements purchased for $342,000 will by no means stop the flooding, but could help limit it to a very small degree, Lapolla said. The city will plow the proceeds from the sale into flood-reduction projects.
The purchase comes as the Federal Emergency Management Agency is updating its flood plain maps for Washington, Kent and Newport counties. Much of the underlying data remains unchanged, but a digitization of the maps allows local planners to locate flood plain boundaries within inches for the first time. Warwick planners discovered that FEMA’s “A” flood plain – those areas with a 1 percent annual chance of flooding – forms an almost perfect U around the Warwick Mall, which had opened about two years before the first flood maps of the area were released.
That distinction exempts the mall from the most rigorous federal flood plain requirements and potentially saves the mall on costs associated with federally mandated insurance for buildings within “A” zones, said David Mendelsohn, who is helping coordinate the map-modernization project for FEMA.
Mendelsohn said the maps were based on data collected by FEMA contractors and local engineers when the maps were initially drawn up.
But, even a slight elevation change can mean the difference between falling within the plain and not, as city planners found out when apartment complex Villa del Rio, located next to the mall, asked to be removed from the A-zone flood plain.
On Sept. 30, 2009, a consultant hired by the apartment owner asked Carruolo to certify the buildings did not lie in an A-zone flood plain. Flood Zone Correction Inc. of West Palm Beach, Fla., said the first habitable floors were above the base flood elevation, if only by a few inches, and that qualified the removal of the structure from the flood plain and the National Flood Insurance Program. Carruolo objected, telling Providence Business News one needed to only look at the river’s proximity to the buildings to see the potential for flooding. Carruolo said Flood Zone Correction staff also told him they had never visited the site, nor set foot in Rhode Island.
FEMA – agreeing with the consultant – granted the request over Carruolo’s objections. Six months later the apartment complex flooded.
Gregg Perry, a spokesman for apartment owner The Picerne Group said the company sought exemption from the “A” zone because it wanted to broaden its options for flood insurance. Removing the complex from the zone meant more insurance agencies would cover the property and The Picerne Group ultimately ended up with a better policy, Perry said.
Dan Freudenthal, president of Flood Zone Correction, said his company stood by its work and that out of the roughly 40,000 properties the firm has helped reclassify during the past nine years, fewer than 10 have later flooded. •