Published: May 07, 2008 01:58 am            

TOWN OF LOCKPORT: Town faces hard choice in handling flooding

TOWN OF LOCKPORT — The town’s engineer is recommending a course of relatively modest actions to hold flooding of Donner Creek at current levels.

Wendel Duchscherer engineer Robert Klavoon turned over his long-awaited “Donner Creek watershed analysis report” to the town board Monday. The report lays out several ways of approaching the creek flooding that has had residents of Hamm Road so upset for so long.

Klavoon said the alternatives are: do nothing; do just enough to ensure flooding is not worsened as silt continues collecting in the creek bottom; or undertake significant construction to ease flooding and ensure the creek can handle a significant storm.

Klavoon recommended the mid-level option, holding flooding to its current levels, as a matter of cost-benefit analysis. Significant work to stop flooding carries an approximate price tag of up to $1.4 million and directly aids about 20 affected property owners, according to his report.

Board members had few comments after Klavoon summarized the report’s contents. They are each to read it at home and meet at a later date to pick an option, Supervisor Marc Smith said.

The report was ordered ahead of the town’s next application to the state Department of Environmental Conservation for permission to work in or around the creek. Residents have complained for years about flooding, especially in the Hamm Road area, but DEC turned back the town’s previous multiple requests for permission to dredge the creek and clear obstructions that officials thought might be provoking the flooding. DEC suggested the town approach improvement work with an eye on what would help it handle a 10-year storm event instead — and how its proposed work would affect other points along the creek.

Klavoon’s recommended option would have the town undertake annual maintenance — non-mechanical removal of debris, brush and other materials in the creek — and clean and improve existing retention ponds at Southview Gardens and Wellington Heights subdivisions. Also, an existing 42-inch culvert upstream of the Wellington Heights pond would be replaced with a 60-inch culvert.

The price of this work, between $335,000 and $360,000, assumes all construction work is hired out, not done by town crews. The estimate does not include the cost of obtaining easements or access rights to replace the Wellington Heights culvert or clean the creek. If town crews were used, the cost would come down, the report said.

The work would stop flooding from worsening but would not lessen what’s occurring now and would not enable the creek to handle a 10-year or larger storm, Klavoon said.

To do that, Klavoon said, the town would have to undertake annual maintenance, the Southview Gardens and Wellington Heights pond improvements and three more steps: channel modifications between Hamm Road and Locust Street, construction of a new detention pond in the Locust Street area and channel modification downstream of the new pond. Land acquisition would be required.

All that work, at $1 million plus, would improve conditions in the Town of Lockport, Klavoon said, but also would increase flow downstream into Pendleton. The effect was not plotted out by hydraulic analysis, but he said an additional detention pond would have to be installed in Pendleton to stop possible increased flooding there.

Hamm Road homeowner Ed Quinones, who has sharply criticized the town’s inaction on the Donner Creek flooding problem, hadn’t read the full report yet, but said he sensed, from Klavoon’s presentation, “it’s a step in the right direction. ... They’re finally acknowledging they have to do something to contain that rain as soon as it hits the ground.”

He and fellow Hamm Road homeowner Joe Kurtz did question Klavoon’s implied suggestion that “only” 20 homeowners would get a direct benefit from the full-scale improvement option, though. Kurtz suggested property owners in the stalled Cedar Creek subdivision, a proposed, 140-plus unit development off Beattie Avenue, would benefit, as well.

        

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