Salisbury: Town seeks remedy to halt Route 1 flooding

By Angeljean Chiaramida
Staff writer

April 23, 2008 08:02 am

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SALISBURY — Last year on the day after Patriots Day, boats floated aimlessly along Route 1, as flood waters lifted them from their storage cradles at Hudson's Outboard after heavy rains and harsh winds drove storm tides inland.

The Patriots Day storm was the second major rainfall in two years that brought flooding to the Northeast, coming slightly less than a year after the Mother's Day storm of 2006.

Now, town officials believe they're smarter for the experience of dealing with those two storms. Additional equipment and altered procedures make Salisbury fire and police chiefs think they'll handle the situation better if there's another flood.

"There are some astronomically high tides predicted for May," Salisbury Emergency Management Director Bob Cook said yesterday. "I've got my fingers crossed we don't have a lot of rain at the same time so the same (flooding) won't happen again."

Cook said town officials are working with state and federal agencies to remedy the problems that brought the river and ocean waters across Route 1 and into area businesses.

Flooding along the road was caused by two separate failures. On the southern portion of the road — where Richard's Maytag and others had 4 feet of water in their buildings during high tides last year — flooding came when high tides coincided with wind and ocean storm surges.

After the ocean spilled over the rim, cascading over Ferry and March roads, it filled the marshlands and abutting businesses like a bathtub. Small and phragmites-clogged culverts didn't allow the water to drain back out to sea quickly enough to prevent it from pooling across Route 1 for hours during high tides.

Bill Richard of Richard's Maytag lost $75,000 worth of appliances during the floods. Although all was cleaned and back to normal at the store within days, Richard is still dealing with the financial ramifications of last year's flood.

He hopes the state Highway Department, which is responsible for Route 1, and the town are making plans to rectify the situation that caused the flood that seriously hurt his business.

But Richard isn't taking any chances. He's willing to spend his own money to ensure similar incidents are prevented.

Richard hired his own engineer to take steps to fix the drainage on his property. His plan is now before the Conservation Commission.

Along the northern section of Route 1, by Harbor Gardens, David's Fish Market and Hudson's Outboard, where the flooding lasted longest and was the most severe, flood waters came from the collapse of an old railroad trestle over Town Creek, a tributary of the Merrimack River.

It was the second time in three years that the trestle's tide gate, which acts like a dike, breached when fierce winds, high tides and heavy rains drove the water inland.

Salisbury officials called upon hometown contractor and bridge builder SPS New England to rebuild the trestle temporarily. Public Works Department personnel check the trestle regularly, but Cook and others know temporary fixes don't last forever.

"We needed to come up with a permanent solution," Cook said. "The work that was done there last year was done well, and it was done better than the first repair we made there. But there's enormous power behind water during the kind of storms we had."

Cook said town officials are working to find a permanent solution to the problem. Recently, the Conservation Commission offered to pay for the town's portion of a study that could eventually lead to a remedy.

Richard and Harbor Gardens' Tim Lamprey are pleased to see something being done. But the business owners think studies are only helpful when the money to pay for the recommended changes can be found. They are not willing to sit back and relax just yet.

"It's never going to get better if someone doesn't start looking into the problem," Lamprey said yesterday. "But projects can get hamstrung by studies. And it's always an issue of money ... There are a lot of people with the scientific knowledge to know how to fix it, but what's needed is the money to do it."

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