At My Window
The Great Flood
Text and photos © 2010-2012 Ron Cohen. All rights reserved.
Posted March 2011. Revised March 2012.
Left: Scene of flooding from the writer’s window, March 15, 2010, 6:17 pm.
Below: View upstream from the Windsor Village culvert, March 15, 2010, 4:09 pm.
These photos, and the slideshow below, remind us not only of nature’s raw power, but also what can happen when the drainage system of our beloved Hardy Pond is abused or neglected.
Run-up. A few months before the two, great floods of March 2010, we learned that the Windsor Village culvert — located on Chester Brook, the drainage outlet for Hardy Pond — had partially collapsed, reducing its flow capacity by half. City officials resisted calls for emergency steps. In these photos, you can see the result.
Flooding. The photo below shows a swollen Chester Brook just upstream of the Windsor Village culvert at the height of the first, and greater of the two floods. The stream was at this level all the way back to Hardy Pond. As best as I could judge, the water outside my window (top photo) was at about this level, too. There can be no doubt that the partially collapsed culvert made shoreline flooding far more a threat than it otherwise would have been.
Lessons Learned. A similar flood threat now is presented by the outlet channel that drains Hardy Pond into Chester Brook. The channel has silted up — almost certainly as a result of the 2010 floods — and has lost much of its flow capacity. It badly needs cleaning, as an outside engineering study (pdf) recommended early in 2011. A year later, little or nothing had been done.
Related Issues. Flood prevention will be a high priority, of course, for those who live around the pond and saw their homes threatened in 2010. But there’s another, compelling reason to maintain proper drainage: it promotes a healthy pond ecosystem. By flushing away decaying organic matter, for example, it helps prevent oxygen depletion. It also draws off road salt and lawn chemicals that wash into the pond, as well as airborne pollutants that dissolve in the water.
Photographs. Both floods were “100-year,” and occurred on March 15-18th and March 30-31st, respectively. Most of the photos shown here are of the first and worse of the two, “The Great Flood.”
During that first flood, I stuck close to home, because of the difficulty of getting around in the torrential rain on the first day, and then worry about the rising water in my basement after that. The events unfolding outside my window and at the nearby Windsor Village culvert were drama enough. By the time the second flood came around, my passion for flood photos was spent.
Single photos: Click an image to enlarge it, browser’s back arrow to close.
Slide show: Click thumbnails or use keyboard arrows to view slides. Click an image to enlarge it, click again for sharper image, click browser’s back arrow to close.
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