With thaw, flood-prone rivers get new attention

With thaw, officials monitoring rivers

Last April, landscaper Dan Edmonds put sandbags in place at Horseshoe Pond condominiums in Merrimack, N.H. The pond is behind him with rising waters. (Mark Wilson/Globe Staff/FILE 2007)

Like legs of a mighty octopus, tributaries of the Merrimack River are once again threatening rain-soaked communities in the region. And it's not just the Merrimack.

A National Weather Service flood warning from heavy rains and melting snowpack last week conjured up images of the widespread devastation from raging tributaries of the Parker, North, and other flood-prone rivers the past two springs.

"It has our attention," said Peter Judge, spokesman for the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency. "The concern, on top of where we stand right now, is in the next four to six weeks. If you keep saturating the grounds and the temperatures are rising, as we get the snow melt near tributaries across the state, from a long-term perspective, it's a legitimate concern."

Last April's Patriots Day storm bat tered dozens of communities for several days and left millions of dollars in damage and cleanup costs across eight counties, including Essex and parts of Middlesex. A year earlier, a four-day deluge known as the Mother's Day storm swamped thousands of area homes, washed out many roads and bridges, and spurred pledges of roughly $80 million in federal aid and loans for rebuilding. The double whammy prompted many rebuilding projects and studies that community leaders hope will lessen future flood damage.

Now, officials in Amesbury, Andover, Lowell, Peabody, and Salisbury are watching the skies and hoping for a dry spring.

In Andover, the town has stockpiled 2,000 sandbags to hold back flood waters after the Shawsheen River last April flooded two large condominium complexes, the Balmoral and Washington Park, and forced several rescues by boat.

"That storm made a lot of people believers," said Jack Petkus, Andover's public works director.

But sandbags are a short-term solution. What's needed, he said, is a long-term fix for several flood-prone areas, especially along the Fish Brook, where drainage pipes under High Plain Road aren't large enough to contain the overflow.

"We would like to take care of it," Petkus said. "The magic missing ingredient is money."

That's a lament heard across the region, as cash-strapped communities await federal reimbursement to rebuild from the past two years' storms.

"Every time it rains I think about this," said Robert Desmarais, Amesbury's city engineer.

Amesbury officials have spent two years negotiating with the Federal Emergency Management Agency for a $150,000 project to rebuild channel walls along Powow River that were washed out during the May 2006 floods. The town recently received a commitment from FEMA and is moving ahead with designs. It plans to complete the work this summer.

In Salisbury, $350,000 worth of road and culvert repairs have been made to shore up 1.5-miles of Route 1, which was flooded and closed for five days last April. Much of the work was federally reimbursed, but a long-term solution still eludes town leaders.

"The [culvert] is not big enough to handle a large influx of water," said Bob Cook, Salisbury's emergency management director. "It's much better than it was before. But it's going to have to be looked at really, really hard to come up with a way to permanently repair it."

In Peabody, where the downtown has been flooded five times since 1996, Governor Deval L. Patrick came through with $2 million after last year's Patriots Day storm to help the city finally address its chronic flooding. Peabody has begun the first phase of a $20 million project to widen channels along the problematic North River and build modern, high-capacity culverts to better handle the flow.

That's the kind of project T. J. McCarthy dreams of for Lowell. The city's assistant manager of public works said a newly completed study by the Army Corps of Engineers may help design long-term solutions for the chronic flooding of the Pawtucketville neighborhood around Beaver Brook.

The city upgraded its sewer system to prevent raging waters from backing up into the street and also built up berms along the river's banks after the 2006 storm devastated the Pawtucketville section, flooding dozens of basements, many up to the first floor. Last year's storm pummeled the neighborhood again, but damage was not as bad.

"People spend their whole lives making their homes," McCarthy said. "To have two events like these, then they see these tributaries rising again and it creates anxieties. I wish there was more we can say we can do to protect them."

Globe staff writer Steven Rosenberg contributed to this report. Kay Lazar can be reached at klazar@globe.com.