- Philip Thibodeau
- Jul 3
The Town of Southington recently won a $300,000 grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. That money will be spent on assessing the flooding risk in downtown Plantsville and creating a plan to modify the area near the Quinnipiac River to keep excessive storm water from causing damage.
FEMA’s official flood hazard map classifies the land immediately adjacent to the Quinnipiac and the Eight Mile River as a ‘regulatory floodway’ where no new development is allowed. A somewhat wider area in downtown Plantsville, one that includes a section of Route 10, bears the label ‘0.2% annual chance of flood hazard.’ That means it can be expected to be under water once every 500 years, on average.
In fact, the last such flooding event occurred just five years ago. On September 2, 2021, the remnants of Hurricane Ida dropped five inches of rain on central Connecticut in just a few hours. A drone photo of downtown Plantsville (see headline image) taken at the time shows water covering the road and parking lots in an area centered on the old filling station at 740 Main Street.
As air gets warmer, it can hold more moisture – about 4% more moisture for every one degree increase in temperature. Thus, when the atmosphere warms, there is more moisture available for storms, which concentrate and turn it into precipitation. That is why storms that produce flooding have become more frequent worldwide in recent decades, forcing insurers to upwardly revise their estimates of flood risk.
Much of the current infrastructure along Plantsville’s two rivers is more than a century old, and was built at a time when knowledge of flood management was rudimentary. The purpose of the FEMA grant is to reassess the current risk of flooding, project what it will be in the future, and develop a plan to reduce it by, for example, widening the river at its choke points.
The Southington Engineering Department said of the study that it “is needed due to the limited existing information available through FEMA. It is a paramount step in making vulnerable areas of the town more resilient to potential damage associated with ongoing flooding. This study will not only provide critical information to make vulnerable areas more resilient to potential damage but will also alleviate the frequency of future occurrences and allow for a better overall understanding of the Quinnipiac watershed. We greatly look forward to proceeding with this opportunity as it is important for the town and represents a big win for our community.”
The Announcement Event
The official announcement of the grant last Friday was made by a contingent of federal, state and local officials gathered in the new ‘pocket park’ in downtown Plantsville at the invitation of State Rep. Christopher Poulos. First to deliver speeches were Senators Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal. After sketching out the goal of the grant, Murphy took the occasion to talk up the importance of local community gatherings in places like Plantsville Center, touching on a theme from a book he recently published.
Blumenthal for his part offered some big-picture remarks on the relationship between nature and human development. “The Quinnipiac river is a beautiful river,” he said. “The Quinnipiac river floods. It’s not the river’s fault; in many cases it it our fault because we have blocked the flow of the river… What we’ll be studying is how to give the river the freedom it had for centuries.”
Larson cited the grant as an example of officials working together across party lines to accomplish something that benefits their communities. He told a story about a recent press conference in Washington DC sponsored by the Republican-controlled Ways and Means committee, on which he sits as a minority member, designed to highlight bipartisan bills that passed by unanimous votes. No members of the media showed up to cover it, he said, because political sparring gets more press attention than actual problem solving.
Town Manager Alex Ricciardone stepped to the mic to thank attendees and recognize those who worked in a bipartisan way to move the grant forward. He then introduced Town Engineer David Nourse, whom he credited with doing the lion’s share of the work in putting the application together. In their remarks, Nourse and CTDOT Commissioner Garrett Eucalitto both sketched out the engineering problem and potential solutions.
Poulos then noted that a secondary purpose of the event was to recognize the completion of the long-awaited downtown Plantsville renovation project. Towards that end, local resident Linda Zommer came up to the mic to tell the story of the role that she and her late husband played in the development of the pocket park. It was her husband’s idea, she said, to purchase the decrepit building that used to occupy on the parcel and have it demolished. They had originally planned to open a tea shop in the location, but a downturn in the economy made that idea unfeasible. Eventually they sold the parcel to the town, which in turn pulled together the funds needed to turn it into a park.
According to Ricciardone, the official ribbon-cutting for the new park is tentatively scheduled for August 10.
A reporter's personal observation: while the park offered an attractive backdrop for the event, traffic noise making it rather difficult for the audience to hear what was being said. At one point in the middle of the press conference, a large truck waiting for a red light on Route 10 to change played Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” from its speakers at top volume.
