A Heavy Rain And Infrastructure Issues

A heavy rain accompanied by gusting winds hit our peninsula beginning late Wednesday night and continued into Thursday morning. Since this occurred simultaneously with the full moon, when we had high tide on Thursday morning, once again Shore Road near Central Avenue found itself flooded, as well as did North Plandome Road around Leeds Pond.

Some of you may remember my blog written during our near-hurricane this past summer, and several people responded referring to me as cranky, etc. While I certainly may at times be cranky, there comes a time when we must examine how we address certain issues. This time around, the flooding of Shore Road caused the Port Washington Police Department to close off the road between Central Ave and Mill Pond. I would firstly like to applaud and compliment the police on their excellent work, yet at the same time address the impacts of these road closures.

1. The road closure caused re-routings, and the impact on especially Main Street, Central Avenue, and Sandy Hollow Road, were especially evident. Now, some will say that it's no big deal because we live on a peninsula, and flooding happens. However, I feel we need to be a little bit more creative than that and address our options for the future.

2. Since this flooding is obviously a recurrent issue, remedies and alternatives should be examined. Can this flooding be somehow minimized? Some have said that a seawall would not help, yet that doesn't really make sense to me. If at least some of the water is restrained, wouldn't there be less on the road? Saying a seawall wouldn't help is akin to saying a dam should not be restrained. Others have said that building a seawall would have to be approved, and it would be difficult to be approved, and/ or that it has been rejected sometime in the past. My response to that is that many things are difficult and meet resistance, but even our real estate tax bills are able to appealed, so if a concerted effort was made, I'm sure a way might be found.

3. Some have asked where the funding to do this would come from. That's always the question with anything we do, but if there's a need, there should be alternatives explored. Also, are we ignoring issues such as safety issues involved when there is significant flooding, property damages, infrastructure and road damage, the cost of police manpower to reroute this, and the interruption of concourse to businesses impacted by these natural events?

4. I have also heard that it only happens occasionally, and its not that big a deal. Following that reasoning, however, there are so many things we should never consider doing.

Communities in other parts of the country have confronted similar issues in varying ways. Some have changed road grade and/ or height, some built some sort of sea wall or restraint, and others have used other methods. Certainly, the issues in New Jersey around the Passaic River should alert us to the need to be proactive in our solution searching and resolution.

This has occurred twice in the last four months, while almost never occurring in the previous 16 years I have enjoyed this community. Port Washington is a great community with great natural resources. We should attempt to address infrastructure and planning issues in an open-minded, constructive and proactive manner.