Luke Skywalker
Super Moderator
{vb:raw ozzmodz_postquote}:
Jose Delgado, 19, says that Country Meadows, a mobile home community near Mill Creek, is set up like an island and all the streets have Hawaiian names. During the flood in 2010, he helped his father salvage items and food before they fled their trailer.(Photo: John Partipilo / The Tennessean)
NASHVILLE -- Jose Delgado was 14 when he helped his stepfather stack up the family's valuables before the floodwaters came.
They didn't have time to do much else when police alerted them that Mill Creek was rising. The water went a foot high into their trailer at Country Meadows and deluged trailers at lower elevations across the street. Now, five years after Nashville's historic flood, new trailers are for sale in this designated floodplain.
Similar scenarios for repeat disasters exist across Nashville.
The 2010 flood was a 1,000-year epic event, which has a 0.1 percent likelihood of occurring, according to the National Weather Service.
But three years later, the northern part of Nashville received 7.8 inches of rain. More rain fell during a 12-hour period in the Gibson Creek watershed than did in 2010. People had to be rescued from their homes.
While the iconic images of the May 2010 flood show downtown buildings engulfed by muddy water, the city's 11 deaths and most of the lost homes occurred miles away in residential neighborhoods like Antioch and Bellevue.
Mayor Karl Dean has proposed a $100 million floodwall system for downtown. Solutions for flood protection elsewhere in Nashville remain elusive.
"Downtown Nashville has to be protected," U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., said. "The mayor's plan is wise. It is absolutely necessary. We cannot do this again. But we can't forget about these other tributaries."
USA TODAY
Judge: Companies can't sue government for flood damage
Mill Creek, Gibson Creek, Richland Creek, the Harpeth River and Whites Creek pose dangers to the people who live near them.
Cooper came up with a novel idea for protecting many of those neighborhoods while circling over Nashville in an airplane. He glanced down from his window and noticed the proximity of a quarry to one of the creeks. Then he started studying maps.
"It was almost like a miracle with all these quarries right there," he said. "Why not use them?"
Cooper pinpointed five quarries where floodwaters could be diverted — including one that Richland Creek overflowed into during the 2010 flood. He has proposed that emergency spillways be constructed between the tributaries and the quarries to alleviate flooding. The owners of the quarries would be compensated with storage fees until the water is pumped out, he said.
But there are problems. Vulcan Materials Company, which owns three of the quarries, doesn't like the idea. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers this year recommended an alternative plan for Mill Creek — building a retention pond on one of the streams that feeds into it. And there is no timetable for either proposal.
What to do about the Harpeth River and the other creeks remain open questions. An engineering solution may not exist, said Dodd Galbreath, professor of sustainability at Lipscomb University.
"We just transitioned from the easy-fix decade, where we could go to one big problem and fix it because it was the biggest source of the problem," Galbreath said. "Now, we are in this highly distributed type behavior that creates additive impacts — small impacts that add up to big impacts."
New permits, loopholes
Without a long-term solution, Mill Creek residents will continue to face the threat of devastating flooding when it rains.
Five years ago, for Delgado, it all happened so suddenly.
"I remember we were watching a soccer game on TV," he said. "Just about when it was finished, the power went out completely. Not just our trailer but all the trailers around us. Everybody was outside wondering what had happened. By 3 p.m., the police started evacuating everyone from the neighborhood, telling us we needed to go to higher ground."
Without flood insurance, his family had to take out all the wood, carpet, insulation and air ducts below the waterline at their own expense, he said. Neighbors had it worse.
"It has been a long process," he said.
But three months after the May 2010 flood, Country Meadows MHC LLC asked Metro government for permission to place 2,184 cubic yards of fill within the 100-year floodplain of Mill Creek. This tributary is more prone to flooding than others in the city. It previously reached flood stage at Antioch in March 1955 and May 1979.
The application was tied to the reconstruction of 20 mobile homes. Residents there can buy the trailers but they lease the land.
Delgado, who still lives in the family home, saw the dirt hauled in. Next came the new trailers, which sit on pads just large enough to accommodate them.
John Kennedy, deputy director of Metro Water Services, which oversees city flood control measures, said elevating the trailer lots gave the property owner the legal right to bring the trailers back in.
New housing developments have also occurred in other floodplains since May 2010.
One is a 90-unit development behind the Hill Center at Green Hills that Metro government approved in August. A portion of the four-story apartment building will cantilever over a floodway, but ground level parking still could be inundated with three to six feet of water during a 100-year flood event, according to permit documents issued by the Metro Stormwater Management Committee.
Another developer received approval last year to build a multistory apartment building in a floodplain near the bank of the Cumberland River. Permits have also been approved for new single family residences in floodplains.
But not all the developments in floodplains over the past five years have gone before the Stormwater Management Committee, said Galbreath, who serves on that permitting board.
"It happens because people who are advising or consulting in the development are either savvy about where these loopholes exist or are bold enough to push the margins of awareness and understanding of what's possible," Galbreath said.
He said he didn't know until he read in the newspaper that Saint Thomas Health had applied to rezone property in the 100-year floodplain of Richland Creek for a mixed-use development.
The staff report for the Metro Planning Commission spelled out the reason. The site had been previously developed for a since-abandoned apartment building.
"Because the site has been disturbed, the Zoning Code exempts it from the stormwater buffer requirements along Richland Creek," the report stated. "Because of this a majority of the site, regardless of flood issues, could be redeveloped."
The Planning Commission in March recommended approval for the rezoning. The application spurred Galbreath to make an inquiry.
He said he asked staff about why one Metro policy requires proposals to go before the stormwater board while another policy allows some projects to be grandfathered in under older rules.
"The word I got back is that's a loophole that needs to be addressed and legal was going to look at it."
Buyout program
While new developments were being built in floodplains during the past five years, Metro was offering to buy the houses in the most dangerous spots, and then tear them down.
A total of 225 houses have been removed through this program at a cost of $32.7 million. But 80 more houses were identified for removal, Kennedy said. The city has spent the federal grant money.
"It's a voluntary program," Kennedy said. "We decided we weren't going to condemn anybody and force them out of their home. If they wanted to sell, we would buy."
Additionally, 30 houses in Madison along Gibson Creek, where flooding took place in August 2013, have been identified for a possible buyout, he said.
Scott Potter, director of Metro Water, said buyouts are the best option for flood control in residential neighborhoods.
"The fundamental and best way we solve stormwater problems is through home buyouts," he said. "It does two things. It eliminates the structures. This has eliminated the need to go rescue someone. It also eliminates the need for the National Flood Insurance Program to go rebuild those structures."
Besides buyouts, Metro government works to alleviate flooding through drainage improvement projects, which prevent water from backing up and flooding neighborhoods. About $10 million is budgeted a year toward that work, he said.
Coping with major disasters
But those are individual neighborhood projects — not a massive citywide endeavor that can prevent a major disaster like a 100-year, 500-year or 1,000-year flood.
Cooper said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been slow to address that bigger danger. He said he worries about weak dams upstream from Nashville on the Cumberland River and the Corps' sluggish pace toward finishing studies on trouble spots.
The Mill Creek study, released in February, was commissioned by Congress 20 years ago. Studies for the Harpeth River watershed, Metro Nashville, the Cumberland River, Richland Creek and Whites Creek were also commissioned decades ago, but they have not been completed.
Those studies, which did not receive federal and local funding until after the 2010 flood, are scheduled to be made public in 2016 and 2017, said Amanda Burt, the study manager for the Corps' Nashville district.
The Corps recommended building a retention basin on Seven Mile Creek near the Ellington Agricultural Center, making modifications to the Briley Parkway bridge over Mill Creek, clearing creek channels and buying out 89 homes for a total estimated cost of $28.5 million.
Cooper proposed the idea about using the quarries for flood control soon after the 2010 disaster — years before the Corps of Engineers study for Mill Creek. The Corps has yet to take a comprehensive look at his idea.
Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed