Year in review flooding

Climate scientists have been telling us for decades that Northeastern winters would become warmer and wetter, and for Johnston in 2024, the skies would deliver ample evidence that the predicted trend had arrived.
Less than two weeks into the new year, with the ground still saturated from a Dec. 18 storm, a truly daunting deluge arrived.
On Jan. 10, Mayor Joseph M. Polisena Jr. announced the grim news on social media: At Park Plaza Apartments on Park Street, “20 units had to be evacuated with the Fire Department using boats.” Not far from there, he said, “We are also sending another boat to the residents trapped on Belfield Drive. Our military Humvees are shuttling employees to Briarcliffe Manor…. There’s also large-scale residential flooding throughout Johnston.”
The impassible routes would include Atwood Avenue from the Stop & Shop plaza to the Route 6 overpass and from Simmonsville to Central avenues, River Drive at Lafazia Drive, Memorial Boulevard and, of course, Belfield Drive.
The next day, an evacuation was ordered on Belfield Drive, but not everyone left. Some felt they couldn’t.
“Police officers just came in a huge truck and told us about the evacuation but they aren’t taking us by force,”said resident Cynthia Nova. “We have food here. We wouldn’t be able to buy food since we don’t have a car on the other side of the water.”
The water stood 40 inches deep in places along the road, too deep for the Humvees, and it was starting to freeze over, leaving 10 houses and about 30 people cut off from emergency services, fuel, food and medicines.
Polisena, with little assurance of help from the state, saw proximity to Interstate 295 South as a possible avenue of aid and pursued the possibility of a temporary delivery route to the neighborhood through a back channel involving former CVS executive and Democratic candidate for governor Helena Foulkes (a member of Johnston’s School Building Committee), former Governor and then-Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and finally Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and the Federal Highway Administration, not to mention the state’s congressional delegation.
By Jan. 17, the feds had granted permission for a temporary road with locked-gate access.
But even before the storm hit, it was clear to Polisena, whose first year in office was buffeted by one downpour after another, that Johnston needed a plan to improve drainage where it could and retreat where it couldn’t. He ordered engineers to list “recommended projects that will help alleviate flooding for the highest number of people possible.” With that list and a projected cost, he said, “Let the voters decide. Tell them they have two options: We can continue to Band-Aid the problem by pumping water, closing roads and dispatching first responders or we can spend money and do this right.”
On the November ballot, the list of projects became a $40-million bond referendum that 75% of voters approved.
What will all that money buy? Some of it is likely to be the things town officials have discussed publicly over the last year, the upgrading of public-works infrastructure to channel, retain and disperse heavier and heavier loads of precipitation falling on an increasingly developed landscape. And some of it may be the things that are politically less palatable but little by little, storm by storm, seem economically inevitable: the buyout of properties and creation of wetlands in New England’s retreat from the rain and tides.
CUTLINE:
Johnston firefighters carry stranded residents from their apartments at Park Plaza after last January’s deluge. (Beacon Media files)