When John Lyons, of Strand Associates, tried to compare this past summer’s 100-year floods to football game day traffic, he missed the mark.
“So your level of service Saturday for your road network is going to be horrible,” Lyons said as he delivered the initial results of a flood control study to MUB. “So you say to yourself as a community, ‘Will we live with that six times a year or do we want to build a road network that can convey that Saturday football traffic?’ The answer, generally, is you live with that inconvenience because you don’t want to pay for a network that is rarely going to be used. That’s the same challenge we’re going to have with the stormwater conveyance system.”
Except it’s not just home football games that clog streets in and around Morgantown. It’s home basketball games, orientation weekend, graduation weekend, move-in week, move-out week …. Besides, we doubt anyone would complain about improvements to relieve the congestion.
While Lyons was talking about a different kind of infrastructure — stormwater systems — the point remains: Just as it is wrong to underestimate Morgantown traffic, it’s also wrong to underestimate the number of severe weather events Monongalia County will experience in the future.
Climate change is making storms, floods, droughts, etc., worse and more frequent, which means those 100-year floods — not to mention the more common 10- and 25-year floods and the less common 1,000-year floods — are happening more often and will continue to happen more regularly.
We can understand the hesitancy to move forward. Just finishing the flood control study is expected to cost about $300,000, and Strand Associates estimated that fixes to Burrough’s Run and Popenoe Run to handle 100-year floods would cost $30 million to $40 million.
However, each severe weather event can cause millions of dollars in damage. The “Atlas of Disaster” — a comprehensive study from Rebuild by Design, founded in the wake of Hurricane Sandy — says federal agencies have spent $100 billion on disaster recovery in the last 10 years and estimates the federal government will spend another $72 billion on flood damages alone in the next 10 years. That doesn’t include damages related to drought or heat, such as subsidies for decimated crops, nor does it include payouts from private insurances or states to address weather-related destruction.
Paying $30 million to $40 million now to avoid possibly hundreds of millions in damage in the next 10 years is a worthwhile investment. With so many federal funds and grants available for infrastructure projects, MUB could more than likely find federal dollars to help offset the cost.
If we don’t pay now to fix the problem, we’ll be paying even more later to fix the damage.
