The D.C. Department of the Environment is studying the District’s Palisades neighborhood to confirm what long-suffering, water-logged residents already know: The community’s storm sewer is utterly inadequate.
Along Sherier Place Northwest, at the bottom of steep hills between Macarthur Boulevard and Potomac Avenue, hundreds of residents face the threat of flooding virtually every time it storms.
The water surges are the result of the confluence of heavy development, low-lying homes and an undersized 48-inch sewer main carrying storm water from higher elevations to the Potomac River.
Caroline Quandt’s rear basement wall first caved in in 2001, the result of water exploding from the sewer main and overloaded gutters.
Nettie Graulich recalls one flood that forced an air conditioner out of a window and flooded her basement with 7 feet of water.
“Basically it’s just a story of unrestrained development and neglect of infrastructure,” said Quandt, whose home at Sherier and Macomb Street has become the poster child for the area’s flooding issues. “We need the sewer to be enlarged to the point where it can handle at a minimum the engineering standard for a 15-year storm. It has never been.”
The $288,000 study, undertaken by a D.C. Water and Sewer Authority consultant, is to include closed-circuit television inspections of the sewer system, manhole inspections, resident surveys, interviews and modeling. The broad study area runs from Norton Street to the north to Arizona Avenue to the south, which generally encompasses the Sherier-Macomb Watershed.
The final report is expected in September.
A June 2005 WASA study, limited to the immediate area around Quandt’s home, found that even moderate rains would bring “street flooding and flooding of low lying properties.” The report, from consultant Greeley and Hansen, recommended construction of a backup storm sewer among other improvements. Roughly $2.5 million was set aside in WASA’s budget, but the project was later scrapped in favor of the new analysis.
Palisades flooding is a “chronic problem that quick fixes have not solved,” said George Hawkins, director of the environment office. The new analysis, he said, should result in long-term, “wiser” solutions.
“We’re now trying to engineer ourselves out of a very serious historical problem,” Hawkins said.
