EDITORIAL There are no easy fixes for our flooding problems

There’s an old saying that tells us, “Into each life, some rain must fall.” But if you live in our area, it seems as if that rain is always falling, often heavily, and it’s usually accompanied by flooding.
The weather of this past weekend gave us another round of damaging precipitation. In the McDonald area, the trouble started with heavy storms on Friday evening. The focus of the flooding seemed to be in the area of the Southern Beltway construction project near the line between the borough and Cecil Township.
Mark Finney has had it worse than most. He operates an auto repair shop along Route 980 at the edge of Cecil Township he estimates has been flooded seven or eight times since the beltway construction project began last spring. He took another direct flooding hit on Friday and was still cleaning up the mess at his business on Monday.
Said his girlfriend, Nicole Starnes, of Friday’s storm, “It was like a river coming down. It was horrible.”
Finney’s not the only one in those parts to suffer multiple flooding episodes. According to a story in Tuesday’s Observer-Reporter, “additional sediment and control measures were put in place near the work site last year after flooding in July damaged a number of homes and businesses in that area.”
Clearly, the corrective action was not sufficient, at least in the area of Finney’s shop, where crane operators are placing beams as part of a project to construct a beltway bridge over Route 980.
Matt Burd of the Turnpike Commission, which is overseeing the beltway work, said the contractor had not yet installed erosion and sediment controls in the area of the bridge work when Friday’s rains arrived, but that they had since been put in place. That’s little solace for Finney.
Burd also said regulations require control measures that can handle a so-called “two-year storm,” and Friday’s storm was much heavier than that. It suggests to us the regulations are insufficient to protect property owners in the area of these construction projects, and whoever is in the position to change these regulations should do so.
The state Department of Environmental Protection sent personnel to that area on Sunday and found “issues with missing or ineffective erosion and sedimentation controls” on the project site. It’s the very same type of problems the DEP found last August when it issued a notice of violation to the Turnpike Commission.
Of course, McDonald and Cecil Township are not the only communities in our area struggling with frequent flooding. Pretty much every time heavy rain crosses the area, there are locations throughout Washington and Greene counties that see flooding. Chestnut Street in Washington and Henderson Avenue in Canton Township are two such spots. Locations in the Mon Valley also are hit with regularity. This past Sunday, there were two landslides there, one along Route 837 in Union Township that hit a tractor-trailer, and another on Route 906 in Rostraver Township, Westmoreland County.
These highly visible weather-related problems are just the tip of the iceberg. There are countless folks around our area who suffer flooding in their homes every time there’s a significant storm.
There’s already a group of municipal officials in Washington County who are trying to find solutions to some of these problems. Also, state Rep. Jason Ortitay was holding a town hall meeting last night in McDonald to address the issues there. The “fixes” might include dredging of streams and improvements to storm sewer systems. That’s expensive work, and would require input and significant amounts of money from either or both the state and federal governments. Even if a plan existed today to cure some of these problems, the financing and carrying out of the necessary projects could be years down the road.
So, in the meantime, we’ll be left to cast a wary eye to the sky every time the clouds open up. But to quote Vladimir Nabokov, “Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.”