Town eyeing flood fixes

Township Council will continue to work with residents affected by flooding

By: Lacey Korevec
   The township is considering ways to deal with flooding.
   The Township Committee met with residents Monday to discuss flooding that occurred during an April nor’easter that brought 7 inches of rain to the area and flooded township homes and roadways, as well as flooding and drainage issues that have been recurring problems for as long as 12 years.
   Committee members said they would continue to work with residents on areas the township can help with, including considering the addition of a larger spillway to Brainerd Lake.
   North Main Street resident Frank Marlowe presented a PowerPoint slideshow detailing the township’s need for a wider gate, or spillway, to allow excess water to flow from Brainerd Lake into Cranbury Brook on the west side of Main Street.
   He said his home and his neighbors’ homes were damaged by flooding when Brainerd Lake overflowed during the nor’easter.
   Mr. Marlowe said the current spillway is 30 feet wide and that it should be 60 feet wide to prevent the flooding of North Main Street if a similar storm hits.
   But township Engineer Cathy Marcelli said a larger spillway may not be the answer and that studies are needed to see where the water would go and what it would affect.
   "It’s a much larger and more complicated hydraulic analysis that needs to be done," she said. "If you send more water downstream, obviously someone else is going to be impacted, so to do that we have to make sure the hydraulic analysis, upstream and downstream, is done before we can say that a larger spillway will resolve the problems."
   Mayor David Stout said the township is not in a position to pay for enlarging the spillway and Ms. Marcelli said the township could not do so without state approval.
   "I appreciate what you’re saying and the math and the homework that you did," Mayor Stout said. "But I think the solution is more complicated."
   Committeewoman Pari Stave said enlarging the spillway could result in aesthetic changes to North Main Street that would compromise the township’s historic look.
   "Be careful what you wish for," she said. "The minute that we start looking into it, it could lead to a reviewing of the entire structure and a reconstruction of the entire structure and we don’t know what it would mean for Cranbury."
   Petty Road resident Bill Bauder said drainage on that street has been a problem since 1995, when he first brought it to the township’s attention. He said a fiber fabric used to help the problem was not installed properly and has caused silt contamination to damage storm drains on the road, which has resulted in poor drainage and occasional flooding on his property.
   Mr. Bauder presented a letter he had delivered to Township Administrator Chris Smeltzer in September of 1995 detailing his concerns, as well as old newspaper clippings in which he was quoted as telling Township Committee members that the attempts to alleviate the drainage problems on his road had failed.
   "This reflects the inaction of the Township Committee to deal with this issue," he said. "My concern is that the same drainage problem has not been resolved and has been exacerbated."
   On Thursday, Ms. Marcelli said she had no response to Mr. Bauder’s comments because the township has already addressed the issue on a number of occasions over the last 12 years.
   "The township has made attempts to satisfy the conditions on Petty Road and it’s been my opinion that they have satisfied the flooding conditions," she said.
   Ms. Marcelli said there is little the township can do to help Plainsboro Road residents other than to clean clogged storm drains. While Plainsboro Road residents have complained about drainage in the past, saying that a house on Wheatfield Road is causing flooding on their properties. Ms. Marcelli said Monday that she has examined the area and believes the new house is not the reason for the flooding.
   "We went out to take a look at it to see if any of the drainage patterns have changed since the construction of that house and they have not," she said.
   The problem, she said, is a result of all of the storm drains on Plainsboro Road being clogged with leaves. Public Works has already cleaned a number of them and is still in the process of clearing them out. Once it’s done, she said, residents should notice a difference.
   Mayor Stout said Thursday that the meeting was a step in the right direction and that an open forum for residents to express their concerns on the topic is the most efficient way for the township to organize and address the issues.
   "I think the intent of Monday night was to try and get a picture of the issues and concerns that residents have around the town and to then basically look at these collectively and try to identify solutions and their feasibility," he said. "This is much the same approach we took with the traffic concerns last quarter."
   Ms. Marcelli said that it’s important for residents to remember that the spring nor’easter brought more rain than a typical storm would.
   "I think that people have to understand that the storm that occurred in April was a hundred-year storm that no piping system in the state is designed to handle," she said. "That’s why the area was declared a disaster area by the federal government."