HIGH, DRY AFTER A 100-YEAR STORM
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City denies 37 damage claims filed by insurance companies, homeowners
JORDAN CARLEO-EVANGELIST STAFF WRITERSection: Main, Page: A1
Date: Sunday, July 12, 2009
ALBANY -- Alyse Sherwin is the sort of young person the city is trying to attract.
Sherwin, originally from Long Island, settled into her Warren Street apartment last year in plenty of time to begin Albany Medical College. In early August, Sherwin, 22, got away to South Carolina for a break.
She was there when she got an ominous message: "I hope your apartment is OK."
It was not. Welcome to Albany.
On the afternoon of Aug. 7, Sherwin's basement apartment was swamped in three feet of water, mud "and other debris" when a summer storm flooded sections of the city to levels not seen in decades, if ever.
Even in what has already proved to be a summer cursed by almost daily cloudbursts, last August still stands as a foul high-water mark.
The storm dumped two to three inches of rain on some neighborhoods in less than an hour and caused water to rise four feet and swallow an SUV on Hackett Boulevard, launched manhole covers skyward on South Pearl Street, and sent water rank with sewage cascading into homes.
In the aftermath, 37 damage claims totaling at least $296,000 were filed against the city by homeowners and insurance companies.
Last month, all of them were denied.
Luigi Benincasa's rejection arrived from the city corporation counsel's office on June 26. Attached was a letter from an engineer working for the Albany Water Board and the city's Department of Water & Water Supply, urging the city to deny claims because the storm "exceeded all levels for which municipal storm sewers or municipal combined sewers are designed."
In other words, the city claims it is not liable for the fact that the sewer system wasn't big enough to handle the water that inundated buildings like Benincasa's newly renovated apartment building on Elberon Place.
Benincasa claimed about $81,000 worth of damage from the flood, just one of several he said he's been forced to endure since buying the building in the spring of 2008.
So much rain fell that day -- particularly in the areas bounded by Washington Avenue in the north and Normanskill Creek in the south -- that it "well exceeded" the benchmark for a 100-year storm, wrote the engineer, Daniel Hershberg.
The definition of a 100-year storm is not one likely to happen once every century, but rather one that has a one percent chance of happening in any given year, said Steve DiRienzo, a senior hydrologist with the National Weather Service in Albany. It's not just how much rain falls -- but how quickly.
Hershberg says he's mapped three such soakers in Albany over the last two years -- in June and July 2007 and The Big One last August.
The weather service takes rainfall measurements at Albany International Airport, which is miles away from the city, and at its headquarters off Fuller Road.
But to graph the intensity of the August storm in Albany's hardest hit neighborhoods of Whitehall Road and New Scotland Avenue, Hershberg said he was forced to rely on unofficial measurements and his knowledge of the sewer system.
"I've got a better rain gauge than anyone else can create. I've got the sewer system as a rain gauge," Hershberg said. "We had reports of street flooding that we've never had before and haven't had since."
The problem, the city concedes, is that the sewer system -- about two-thirds of which combines storm drainage and sewer water -- cannot handle all the water that runs off Albany's streets, parking lots, rooftops and other surfaces during downpours.
Parts of that system were designed between 1840 and 1860, when city fathers didn't envision widespread urban development farther west than Lark Street, Hershberg said.
As the city grew, more water began pouring into its main trunk sewer lines from various uptown branches, like a subterranean river system. The trunk lines funnel water generally east and downhill toward a county treatment plant and into the Hudson River.
The Beaver Creek trunk sewer, for example, which runs under Lincoln Park, is 14 feet by eight feet at its widest point, Hershberg said. But that's less than half the size needed to drain the 5.2-square-mile Beaver Creek drainage area.
"The law is pretty clear," said Assistant Corporation Counsel Bradford Burns, "that you can't hold a city responsible for its design choices -- especially, in this case, in the 1800s."
Because the city is self-insured up to $50,000, Albany would have had to pay the claims out of pocket.
(Burns notes that more than $70,000 of the claims came from insurance companies, which had already repaid the victims for damage to cars.)
Benincasa, who has pressed city officials to address the problem and even confronted Mayor Jerry Jennings about it at a public forum, concedes that a lot of rain fell that day. But he doesn't accept the city's explanation and refuses to believe the damage was unavoidable. He said he plans to appeal his denial in court.
Several people who filed claims cited a lack of maintenance. But Burns said he queried the Water Department in each instance, and the response was that the sewers functioned properly.
In February, the state Department of Environmental Conservation fined the Albany Water Board $2,000 for sewer backups and, among other things, ordered it to inform residents about a grant program that pays up to $1,500 for a special valve to prevent them.
The city is urging residents to apply for the grant, though in some neighborhoods such as Melrose that have been plagued by flooding for years, some have spurned the valves as a "Band-Aid."
Hershberg said the solution must be incremental because the alternative -- a new sewer system -- could cost billions.
"It's not the Big Dig all over," he said, "but it's pretty close."
Albany has applied for federal stimulus money to build upstream ponds that would keep flood waters out of the system.
Meanwhile, even if the federal funds aren't approved, the city will soon move forward on two water-retention projects, Hershberg said.
Beyond that, Albany has complied with DEC's mandates, agency spokesman Rick Georgeson said. But in the meantime, residents like Benincasa and Sherwin get stuck with the bills.
Both Warren Street and Elberon Place flooded again earlier this summer. Sherwin's apartment was safe this time, but her BMW was not. The car survived, she said, but not without costly damage.
First she had to move to the third floor, Sherwin said, "now I have to get a garage spot because I can't park on my block."
Jordan Carleo-Evangelist can be reached at 454-5445 or by e-mail at jcarleo-evangelist@timesunion.com.