LYNN — Heavy rains brought nearly 2 inches of rain and more flooding to West Lynn on Tuesday morning, leaving several streets impassable and once again putting the city’s outdated drainage system in the spotlight.
The rain, from remnants of Hurricane Florence, which battered the Carolinas over the weekend, comes about a month after a storm that dumped 8 inches of rain on the city within a few hours and caused widespread flooding and structural damage. Similar flooding crippled the same areas last September.
In the downtown, businesses on Munroe Street prepared for possible flooding from a forecast of heavy rains by piling sandbags in their storefronts to keep the water from once again seeping in.
But the downtown was spared from flooding this time around. Perhaps coincidentally, the city cleaned out storm basins on Munroe Street last week. The damage was in other areas that usually see flooding during rain events, with most occurring along Commercial, Boston and Bennett streets, and the Lynnway.
Finding a new plan
Lynn Fire Lt. Paul Ricchi, the city’s emergency management director, said the flooding was not nearly as bad as in August, but still caused road closures.
“Basically, we know the rain is coming,” said Ricchi. “We know the streets that are most prone to flooding and we try to get the equipment out there to get the streets blocked off as quickly as possible.”
Ricchi said the city is putting together a hazard mitigation plan, which will study how to address high priority areas.
“We want to move forward with mitigation measures so we can stop this from happening where it happens. Some of these are multimillion dollar projects that could take years to accomplish,” Ricchi said.
Mayor Thomas M. McGee said the city has already been approved for a Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness grant through the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, which helps communities plan for climate change resilience, and officials can apply for hazard mitigation dollars based on that grant.
One upcoming endeavor to address flooding in West Lynn and the downtown is a 13-year, $200 million sewer replacement, or combined sewer outflows (CSO) project, which is in the design phase.
“We need millions of dollars that has to be invested in our infrastructure,” McGee said. “It’s been something we’ve been dealing with, both for drainage and roads. There’s millions of dollars it’s going to take to alleviate these problems.
“We need to get a plan in place. We’re also working with the state delegation to fund a study of the city’s infrastructure related to the city’s flooding issue above and beyond what’s going on with the CSO project.”
100-year storm event
Some of the infrastructure in the city’s sewer system is more than 100 years old, according to Daniel O’Neill, executive director of the Lynn Water and Sewer Commission, but he said the older system wasn’t to blame for the flooding from the storm on Aug. 12.
“It’s a 100-year storm event,” O’Neill said. “Is the system able to handle 8 inches in three hours? No system is able to handle that … The system is certainly getting older, (but) to replace 200 miles of piping, the cost is exorbitant and I think the 8 inches of rain over a three-hour time period was the problem.”
O’Neill’s contention that the city got more than eight inches in about three hours means the August downpours qualify as a “100-year storm.” The term “100-year storm,” or “100-year flood,” is used in an attempt to simplify the definition of a flood that statistically has a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year. Using a storm calculating tool, it’s defined as at least 5.75 inches over a 12-hour period.
McGee said climate change has to be brought into the discussion with these major storms occurring more frequently.
“To have two (over the past year) and then today’s, which was pretty heavy rain — clearly, we’re dealing with something that is impacting us in a way that we haven’t been impacted before,” McGee said.
Project could lessen flooding
The Lynn Water and Sewer Commission is in the design phase of its 13-year, $200 million sewer replacement, or combined sewer outflows (CSO) project, with work expected to begin next year. The work will include 15 miles of new piping between West Lynn and the downtown areas, O’Neill said.
There are four main overflow areas in the city: Summer Street at the GE field, which flows into the Saugus River; King’s Beach in East Lynn at the Lynn/Swampscott line; Market Street; and Broad Street, which both discharge into Lynn Harbor.
The CSO project will focus on West Lynn for the first six years before addressing problems in the downtown. Both areas saw major flooding in August, and parts of West Lynn were underwater again on Tuesday.
In addition to flood relief, the planned CSO project will separate sewer and rainwater systems, protecting the oceans and other bodies of water from improper discharge.
Massachusetts Clean Water Act
The city’s sewer system has a long history of being in violation of the state’s Clean Water Act. The Lynn Water and Sewer Commission was first sued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1976 for discharging sewage mixed with stormwater into the ocean or other bodies of water.
The city was required to build a wastewater facility, which it did.
After a second consent decree from 2001, the city spent $90 million over a three-year period to coordinate 100,000 feet of piping to clean up King’s Beach and stop sewage from discharging into the ocean.
But the EPA said the city failed to comply with other portions of the decree, which included cleaning up West Lynn and doing work in the downtown, at Market and Broad streets.
That led to a third decree, filed last year, which ordered Lynn to pay $125,000 in a civil penalty for failure to comply with the Massachusetts Clean Water Act.
O’Neill said the city sent a sewer replacement plan to the EPA in 2004 to target those two areas outlined in the 2001 decree, which he claims the federal agency didn’t act on.
“We submitted a plan. The ball was in their court and they didn’t respond,” O’Neill said. “The plan was in the federal and state government’s hands and they didn’t act on it, so we didn’t chase them down.”
O’Neill claims the EPA didn’t comment on that 2004 plan until 2014, and the city submitted another similar plan targeting the same areas.
But the EPA pushed back on that assessment.
“For decades, EPA has worked closely with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and the Lynn Water & Sewer Commission to address sewage overflows from Lynn’s sewage collection system,” EPA spokesman Doug Gutro said in a statement. “From 2004-2014, work included efforts to mitigate sewage overflows at specific outfalls in Lynn and work toward a revised systemwide long term control plan.”
Problems with Strawberry Brook
Still, the CSO won’t solve all of Lynn’s flooding problems. Ward 7 City Councilor Jay Walsh told The Item in a previous interview that homes in West Lynn neighborhoods, such as the collapsed home at Ainsworth Place from the August storm, get flooded even during regular rain events.
He said the culverts in the area can’t handle the amount of water from heavy rainfall, which is why Boston Street flooded. The area is part of the Strawberry Brook system that runs through Flax Pond, so all of the water that was a problem farther upstream makes it into those neighborhoods.
O’Neill said work has already been done in the past to improve the Strawberry Brook system. A culvert investigation was done in 2001, with improvements made based on that report. A 36-inch pipe through the Lynngate Plaza on Boston Street, identified as a problem area in the report, was replaced with 2,000 feet of 48-inch piping.
Downtown flooding
In the downtown, part of the issue is that it’s topographically similar to a punch bowl, making it more vulnerable to flooding. If everything from Oxford Street to Essex Street flows to the Munroe Street bowl and can’t get into the system, it’s going to flood into the street, O’Neill said.
Catch basins are cleaned once a year throughout the city, but at Munroe Street, they’re cleaned twice a year.
O’Neill said there’s not a storm system in much of the downtown, but work was done 10 to 15 years ago with the Washington Street drain project. The CSO project will address the Munroe Street area.