By Thane Grauel

WESTPORT — Flooding along Deadman Brook, on most days a gentle waterway but during downpours a raging river spilling over its banks in the heart of downtown, is a longstanding problem not easily solved.

That’s what Ted Gill, an engineer with the town’s Department of Public Works, told the Flood and Erosion Control Board at its online meeting Wednesday.

At its lower end, the brook runs behind Evergreen Avenue, Violet Lane and under Myrtle Avenue and Post Road East.

Gill said a town-commissioned study in 2019 looked at the brook, and came up with a dozen ideas for mitigation. Six of those were recommended for further study and design.

But even the most viable would be very costly, Gill said. And fixing flooding in one area could worsen it in another.

One idea, creating retention ponds upstream, could require the taking of land by the town.

“The issue with all of these flood storage basins is that they’re basically going onto private property, taking private property, digging out their entire yard and creating this big bowl,” Gill said.

And, Gill noted, the town has specifically avoided taking responsibility for retention basins elsewhere, for commercial developments, based on the ongoing maintenance costs. That precedent, he said, is the opposite of what would be needed if the town created retention basins along the brook.

And, he said, remedies for some more frequent storm events, because of peak flow rates between different tributaries, could make the effects of very serious storms even worse.

“We would have a situation where we would be making the situation better for a two-year storm, a 10-year storm, a 25-year storm, but then we’re making flooding worse for a 100-year and a 500-year storm,” Gill said.

He said the last, most viable option, is widening the brook between Myrtle Avenue and Post Road East.

“The current channel is about four feet wide,” Gill said.

“In order to get it to stop overtopping the banks in a two-year storm, you’d have to widen the stream from four feet to 25 feet wide,” he said.

“To widen this channel to 25 feet wide, we’d either have to tear down an entire strip of buildings [at Sconset Square], or we’d be going on to the neighboring property that’s just a parking lot and basically be taking almost their entire parking lot in order to install a larger stream,” Gill said.

“That would come at a significant cost …” he said. “The value lost for that property would be extremely significant, most likely up to the value of the property itself.”

To hold everything to a 100-year storm underneath Myrtle Avenue, he said, “We would end up with larger than a 25-foot channel north of Myrtle,” Gill said.

“We would basically need to need to either buy out all of the houses on Violet Lane and have them torn down.”

Gill said there are basically three ways to approach living in an area that floods.

“The first way is by moving, getting away from the water,” he said. “The second way is by completely destroying the environment and putting all the water somewhere else, bury everything underground like New York City …”

“The middle ground is we let the stream do, halfway what it naturally does, and we don’t leave, we leave the houses as they are where they flood but then we just design them to be resilient to flooding. The water can come in, it can flood the lower level of the house, and it can leave.”

Jennifer Johnson said the Federal Emergency Management Administration has a grant program the town should be taking advantage of, called Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities.

“The BRIC program is both for municipalities and for individual property owners,” she said. “And so this is a new program by FEMA, but the problem is that in order to be considered for this program, you have to be on a list, and we’re not even on that list. Westport doesn’t have any projects on that list, and that needs to change.”

The board also discussed having meetings solely dedicated to discussing stream flooding, rather than after hearing applications, but a decision on that was delayed.

Thane Grauel, executive editor, grew up in Westport and has been a journalist in Fairfield County and beyond more than three decades. Reach him at editor@westportjournal.com. Learn more about us here.