Original Article posted by Florida Today
By Jim Waymer – Enviornment/Government Reporter, Florida Today

Record rainfall in October caused significant flooding in Brevard County, damaging homes, cars, and roads. Officials are concerned that extreme weather events are becoming more frequent due to climate change. County leaders are rethinking development and stormwater management as existing infrastructure is overwhelmed.

If you didn’t know your flood risk yet, after October’s record rains, you may have learned the hard way.

Recent downpours reminded us that our ponds and ditches often can’t keep pace with Space Coast deluges. Dream homes, cars and roads got ruined, along with homeowners’ peace of mind.

“The ground’s still saturated,” said Andrea Sadler of Briarwood Manor in Cocoa, nearly two weeks after her neighborhood was inundated. “It’s still flowing into our street 12 days later,” Sadler added of the floodwaters. “It’s a nightmare.”

If it hasn’t already, Brevard’s increasing flood risk could soon knock on your front door, as global warming and aged infrastructure collide. So local officials are rethinking how Brevard can keep new and existing residents above water in the years ahead, and how to pay for it all. Brevard’s developable land on high ground is growing scarcer. Property insurance rates have swelled to new heights. And climate change fuels heavier rains and higher water levels.

“People were trapped in window-high water in their vehicles,” Commissioner Katie Delaney told fellow commissioners at their Oct. 28 meeting, a day after record rain fell on her North Brevard district. “One of my staff members had to wade through waste-high water to rescue her teenager, because emergency services were dealing with flipped-over vehicles.”

“I think events like this are going to get more and more frequent,” she added, urging better communication from public officials about the severity of flood risks. “I keep being told, ‘Oh, this is a 100-year storm,’ or, ‘Oh, this is a freak thing.’ But what happens when the freak things happen every other month?”

Record October rains wrought wet wakeup call

After heavy rains earlier in the month, the record Oct. 26-27 downpours dumped 14 inches of rain within just six hours in some parts of Brevard, according to the National Weather Service in Melbourne. Titusville, Cocoa and North Merritt Island got hit especially hard.

Floodwaters swamped roads, stalled cars and inundated living rooms. Some in the water’s wake posted photos on social media of parking lots that looked like ponds. Chunks of road sank into erosion holes along North Indian River Drive in Cocoa.

Current system not designed to handle that much rain

Stormwater retention ponds have long been a first-line of defense against flooding in the Sunshine State. But they’re generally only to handle the “first flush” — that first half-inch of floodwater over streets, driveways and other impervious surfaces.

The goal was to get as much water off residential areas as quickly and as affordably as possible. But those “first flushes” gush runoff pollution from fertilizers, septic tanks and other sources into the Indian River Lagoon.

For decades, standard engineering practice has been to use wide underground pipes to send polluted runoff from stormwater ponds to the lagoon, to keep neighborhoods from flooding. Three-foot-wide concrete outfalls under U.S. 1 spit out that urban runoff directly to the lagoon, along stretches such as Riverside Drive in Rockledge.

And as heavier rains become more frequent in a warming world, those pond designs haven’t kept up with all the downpours and new development. Rains once predicted every 50 or 100 years are happening much more often.

Future hurricanes will grow stronger faster and likely loiter as long as Hurricane Frances in 2004. But they will flood Florida with way more rain than Frances did, a recent study by Colorado State University and the University of Florida predicts. So as land grows scarcer, Brevard and other Florida municipalities are trying to tap more natural processes and vegetation to manage runoff, rather than relying only on traditional “gray” infrastructure such as pipes and concrete basins. The goal is to mimic natural hydrology, reduce runoff and improve water quality in coastal waters like the lagoon.

Newer techniques

Cape Canaveral didn’t have much room for traditional methods of capturing, holding, and treating stormwater. So the city in recent years has embarked on projects that allow runoff to seep back into the soil with minimal to no contact with the city’s existing stormwater system. The city’s largest example of so-called underground stormwater exfiltration systems is at Canaveral City Park.

Stetson University, the East Central Florida Regional Planning Council, and Florida Sea Grant also worked with the city on a green infrastructure “smart” rain garden stormwater project at Veterans Memorial Park, via a $25,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. This native plant rain garden typically filters and empties within about 24 hours.

“Just studying it is not going to solve the problem,” said Hunter Freeman, a senior advisor to the green stormwater infrastructure practice for McAdams, a planning, design and engineering firm in Raleigh, North Carolina. He’s also a board member of the Southeast Stormwater Association.

What areas are most threatened?

To remain eligible for disaster assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, municipalities must maintain a Hazard Mitigation Plan and update it every five years. Brevard approved its latest plan on Oct. 28. According to the plan, the most vulnerable areas to damage from flooding (and therefore the focus of stormwater improvement projects) include:

Merritt Island: North Merritt Island between the Kennedy Space Center to the north and east, State Road 3 to the west, and Hall Road to the south.
Cocoa area: Space Coast Gardens in Cocoa West, Melrose Manor and Shakespeare Park.
Rockledge Area: Silver Pines
Melbourne area: Lamplighter Village, Eau Gallie Road west of Interstate 95, and Harlock Road next to and east of Interstate 95.
Palm Bay area: upper basin of Turkey Creek.
South Brevard: Near Sebastian River; Fellsmere Grade Road; Little Hollywood and Deer Run.

What does the hazard mitigation plan include?

Brevard’s hazard mitigation plan includes such countermeasures as:

• Elevating homes and critical facilities in FEMA Special Flood Hazard Areas;
• Buying properties that have severe repetitive losses; flood-proofing public buildings and utilities to maintain operations during floods;
• Tapping FEMA grants to raise structures and critical equipment such as HVAC, mechanical systems and electrical panels above the anticipated flood elevation level; and
• Using more flood-proofing building techniques such as sealing walls and floors with waterproof materials and installing shields or barriers for windows and doors.

Converting acquired land to open space or natural flood storage areas and restoring beach dunes; and hardening roads and bridges vulnerable to flooding and increasing backup power for stormwater pumping stations.

Brevard’s comprehensive plan requires identifying costs and timeframes for controlling flooding. But those are moving targets the county determines on a basin-by-basin basis. The county stormwater utility maintains an online map of hundreds of stormwater projects in recent decades, broken down by Commission district.

The main way Brevard’s stormwater utility pays for flood prevention projects is a monthly fee of $5.30 per every 2,500 square feet of impervious surface (driveways, roofs, etc.), or about $64 per year to most single-family homeowners.

Brevard also leverages state and federal grants via the 10-year Save Our Indian River Lagoon program, funded by a half-cent sales tax, which includes some $90.3 million in funding stormwater projects.

Could more affordable housing increase flood risk?

Some conservationists fear that in the drive to boost affordable housing, Brevard will allow too many homes on ever-shrinking floodplains. That could destroy the flood protection and ecological benefits wetlands provide, especially if ponds are built the usual way — with high chain-link fences, and maintained mostly with herbicides. Turtles and other wildlife that could sequester carbon, nutrients and other excesses from ponds often flee after landscapers poison the weeds.

“There’s wonderful habitat there,” Freeman, of McAdams, said of stormwater ponds, adding that better pond design means less maintenance. “The goal is to make that as attractive as possible,” he added. “This ‘nuking’ with herbicides shouldn’t be the answer.”

But new development can landlock the best-laid stormwater plans, and many times, there’s just no room to design for once in 100-year rain events.

“It’s not that development as a whole needs to stop,” Delaney told fellow commissioners. “Development needs to happen in a way that the land can handle.”