By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
The frequency of severe storms like the one two weeks ago that brought nearly half a foot of rain in two to three hours has led Princeton officials to begin considering how best to combat the flooding those storms cause.
Princeton and parts of the area were the epicenter of a storm July 30 that overwhelmed the sewer system in a short a time, municipal land use engineer Jack West told Mayor Liz Lempert and the Princeton Council on Monday.
Princeton endured the brunt. Streets were flooded, properties sustained water damage and some people needed to be rescued from their cars.
“And it was worse than Irene,” Councilman Patrick Simon said in reference to the hurricane of August 2011 that devastated the East Coast.
In the aftermath of the most recent storm, Mr. West said the town needs to start considering if and then how best to address the flooding, what the solution might be and how to pay for it.
“But I think that’s something we want to look to in the future,” he said.
Mayor Liz Lempert said that as part of the town’s climate action plan for the environment, officials need to figure out how the municipality is going to handle more water.
“And I think that we have to acknowledge what’s happening. And then I think we have to ask what are we gonna do, given that the climate’s changing,” she said.
In his remarks, Mr. West said the intensity and the frequency of storms are increasing. “It seems to be every year we’re getting one of these storms where there’s flooding,” he said.
“And the question we have to ask ourselves,” town administrator Marc D. Dashield added, “is what do we do, if anything, about that moving forward?”
He posed whether the town should try to engineer toward these more frequent 100-year-storms or is the town’s current approach adequate.
“And at this point,” he said, “I think we are.”
