Crime & Safety

Engineers: Pascack Brook Flooding Could be Reduced by Dam Operations

Engineers hired by Hillsdale to review United Water's dam plan said the project would not worsen flooding downstream.

Engineers from GEI Consultants said Tuesday that United Water's upcoming project at the Woodcliff Lake Dam would not worsen flooding downstream along the Pascack Brook, and a change in dam operations to carefully release water from the reservoir before storms could likely mitigate some flooding.

Flood-prone residents said that the Pascack Brook is usually full by the time the reservoir reaches capacity. United Water typically begins slowly lowering the dam's two gates once the water hits elevation 95.25, the highest level it can hold.

Engineers who prepared the report said that it is possible to develop tools which better predict when would be best to lower the dam gates before a storm hits. Simply releasing water ahead of a storm without developing a new model could make flooding worse, they said.

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"It's a matter of mathematics and money" to develop the tools, Kerri Price, one of the engineers, said.

Price also identified three factors they say have caused flooding along the Pascack Brook including:

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  • increased development in the watershed all the way into Rockland County, N.Y.,
  • an insufficient capacity of the brook to carry water for even a storm statistically likely to happen once in a year and
  • that some houses were built too low in the "fringe" area of the flood plain.

That provided little comfort to flood-prone Hillsdale and Westwood residents who attended the presentation Tuesday night. Beechwood Drive resident Vishal Chaturvedi said he moved into his home less than a month ago and it already flooded twice, with 10 inches of water in his garage, crawlspace and work area May 23 and another 3 or 4 inches last weekend.

"It seems that we are unable to manage even 2 or 4 inches of rain," Chaturvedi said. "It's ridiculous."

The engineers did not have any specific answers about how to stop flooding along the brook, as that was not part of their assignment from the borough. Hillsdale hired the engineers only to examine the dam project's potential effects on flooding.

Council President Tom Kelley said he believed the government had done "very little" to address the flooding problem so far, but noted that fixing it would be expensive.

Hillsdale officials said they hoped to work with other Pascack Valley towns and possibly higher government agencies to get another study done looking at flooding in general.

An operations change would be only one factor of a multi-part solution to the flooding problem, engineer Joe Engels said.

"You have a very difficult problem here," he said. "It's not going to be an easy fix."

Donald MacLachlan, the attorney for the Hillsdale & Westwood Flood Solution Group, called again for the Hillsdale Planning Board to review United Water's plan, citing a borough law which is currently the focus of a lawsuit the utility filed against Hillsdale.

Borough attorney Eric Bernstein said he was advising officials to wait until a judge had ruled on the matter.

MacLachlan said he believed a "better design," incorporating a planned operational change like that alluded to by the GEI engineers, should be used for the project as one of the aspects of a flooding fix.

Have a question or news tip? Contact editor Jim Leggate at Jim.Leggate@patch.com, or find us on Facebook and Twitter. For news straight to your inbox, sign up for our daily newsletter.


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