To the Editor:
After reading your story about issues dealing with flooding in Five Corners and elsewhere (“An Island inundated,” Oct. 1), I thought I would extend and sharpen my comments from last week.
It appears from your reporting that nothing much is being done about current flooding because any proposed mitigation efforts need to also include long-term solutions for supposed sea level rise in the future, and that is making everything complicated and expensive and delayed.
So the question then becomes, Why not just come up with a cheaper simpler solution focused on the current street flooding due to rainfall, and let the longer-term solutions addressing rising seas follow their own course? What is this need to overthink and overcomplicate the issue?
How about this:
- Locate lowpoints where water pools up
- Make small catch basins near each
- Put a sump pump in a plastic filtering barrel in each catch basin, with a backwash hose leading over the ground (not underground) to the harbor. The hoses can be rolled up and removed when not in use.
Everything is accessible.
Cannot MEMA (Mass Emergency Management Agency) or Servpro or anyone who empties a swimming pool or a flooded basement not figure out how to set this up?
Also, why not divert some of the large amount of water coming downhill on State Road off the road? This requires study, and maybe a direct underground pipe to the ocean. But no pump is required — water pressure due to the elevation will force the water through the pipe.
It seems we have come to think that flooding at Five Corners and near the hospital due to rain events is simply a problem we have to live with. But as I said last week, I would think any Third World community should be able to rig up pumps and hoses to deal with these kinds of problems.
Not to be able to deal with this is starting to seem kind of pathetic to many people.
Allan Dutton
Oak Bluffs
