BEAT's Blog

Pittsfield has suffered from an unusual amount of flooding over the course of the past year. Of course nobody is blaming the City for the recent heavy rainfall. But the kind of extreme storms we have been experiencing lately may become more common in the future. Global climate-change models have been saying for years now that climate change in our area will mean more rainfall and more extreme and intense rain storms. (1)

Although nobody is saying that Pittsfield caused all the recent flooding, I believe that the decisions made by the Pittsfield Conservation Commission have made the flooding worse than it otherwise would have been. For example, take their decisions regarding the reconstruction of Wahconah Park.

Every Pittsfield resident knows that the parking lot at Wahconah Park floods every year. Nature considers that parking lot to be part of the river. Every river has its natural cycles, rising and falling with the seasons. During periods of high water, the bank of the Housatonic River is somewhere in the middle of the Wahconah Park parking lot.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t have a ballfield there, or that we can’t do work at Wahconah Park or even in the parking lot. What it means is that we first have to make certain that such work is necessary, and if it is, we have to follow practices that best protect the environment.

Protection of the wetlands at Wahconah Park is in the hands of the Pittsfield Conservation Commission. BEAT feels that the commission’s oversight of the reconstruction project has been completely inadequate. I’ve written recently about many of the environmental issues surrounding Wahconah Park (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8). But here are two issues I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet.

The First is permeability. As I said in an earlier post,

“The Pittsfield Conservation Commission has also been allowing the paving of large areas, such as parking lots, without insisting on adequate storm drains. Most paving material is impervious. This means that storm water can’t get through to the soil. Instead of being soaked up by the ground, it runs off immediately into storm drains if they are adequate, or into the streets if they’re not. If we keep paving without giving the water a place to go, the water will make its own choices about where to go.”

The more permeable the ground, the faster the water soaks in. This is why the approved plans for the Wahconah Park parking lot called for the gravel to be hand-tamped, not rolled. Here is a photo of what actually happened.

Again, this parking lot is always going to flood in a severe rainfall, but the City seems to be going out of its way to make flooding even worse.

Another issue is the storm drain that carries water from the surrounding area into Wahconah Park. I mentioned in an earlier post that much of the new pavement and grass at Wahconah Park will soon have to be torn up to accommodate a new pipe. Well that new pipe will be bringing stormwater from not only the area immediately around the park, but also from about 60 acres up the hill towards Springside Park. BEAT and others have suggested that maybe there should be some retention areas created further up-slope from the parking lot so that water had a place to collect and be released more slowly during storms. Instead, we collect water and send it as quickly as possible into the floodplain at Wahconah Park.

There probably isn’t any way to prevent flooding at Wahconah Park. There are some things we can do to minimize the flooding. And amazingly, we’re finding new ways all the time to make the flooding worse. (Actually, BEAT has suggested a solution to the flooding in the Wahconah Park area. We’ll save that for another time.)

One Response to “Pittsfield: We don’t make the floods; we make them worse.”

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