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| Pollution UpDate" is dedicated to the reporting of timely environmental news. I'd like to thank our readers for their comments and suggestions, and DEP for giving us plenty to write about. | Raymond
Proffitt Foundation P.O. Box - 723 Langhorne, Pa. 19047-0723 gateway@rayproffitt.org http://www.rayproffitt.org |
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Regular readers of PU may not know that on May 16 the Bucks County Commissioners voted unanimously for the "non-structural" alternative for reducing flood damages in the Neshaminy Creek watershed. They did not vote to build Dark Hollow Dam, which has been the subject of a few past PUs [2/22/01, 02/09/01, 7/17/00, 11/13/98, 5/19/98]. On June 15-17, parts of Bucks and Montgomery counties were hit by the remnants of Tropical Storm Allison, with some areas receiving up to 10 inches of rain. Flooding occurred along the Neshaminy and also along Little Neshaminy Creek. The flooding was blamed for a fire and explosion at an apartment complex in Montgomery County that left six people dead.
The vote of the commissioners last month was accompanied by disagreement from dam supporters. In public, most of it was polite (toward the Commissioners, anyway; dam opponents weren't treated very nicely), if not well-reasoned. That's to be expected for an emotional issue that has commanded a lot of attention. And as you might expect, talk of the vote and the dam has risen as the recent flood waters rose. Dam supporters
are once again saying how Dark Hollow would have helped them, and continue to attempt to paint the Commissioners' vote as something it was not.As elected officials, the Commissioners have a lot of different things to consider when voting on something as complex as flood control. Dam supporters focus on various facts (or myths) and spin them, like
These things ignore one important reason why a vote for Dark Hollow Dam would have been a bad vote: dollar for dollar, it wouldn't do a good job. That was certainly a deciding factor when the board of the Conservation District voted against the dam, and it certainly was a factor in the Commissioners' vote. Do you think that they would have
voted against the dam if it had been clearly the best choice in minimizing flood damage? No matter how much a flood victim "thinks" Dark Hollow Dam may have helped them, it wouldn't have helped as many properties as the same money spent on non-structural measures (yes, even if you disregard the price of the land).And there is some real question about how effective it would have been in the recent flooding, because much of the flood flow came from the Little Neshaminy Creek watershed, and that stream enters the big Neshaminy downstream of where Dark Hollow Dam would have been built. Obviously, the best thing to do is to move as many homes and businesses out of the flood plain (perhaps we should stop thinking about it as "flood plain" and start thinking about it as "the Neshaminy Creek stream channel").
Just as spring rains help our plants grow, these latest spring rains have nourished the illusions about Dark Hollow Dam and its effectiveness in controlling floods. Whether Bucks County is flooded before the non-structural alternative is fully implemented won't change the ineffectiveness of Dark Hollow Dam in controlling floods. The Commissioners should use this latest flood as an opportunity to secure, if possible, more Federal and state money for especially buyouts and, as a second choice, flood proofing of structures. And they should do it now.
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