Kent Hicks, a contractor and sustainable design professor, said Tropical Storm Irene was a wake-up call to flood-proof his home, which is next to the Westfield River in West Chesterfield, Massachusetts. He recalled standing in chest-high water and pushing uprooted trees away from his house during the storm.
"I was pushing debris away because logs were coming down through the forest here. I was trying to guide them away," Hicks recalled."Until got about up to my chest and I said, 'All right, I need to get out of the water.'" "With a flooding event, these doors will come open on this side and let water flow through here. So, I’m not trying to stop water," he said."The water will push them open," he said."It'll lift up."
Some of these efforts may sound extreme. But with more precipitation in New England — and more intense storms — property owners are taking action to prevent flooding. And even FEMA recommends what it calls “FEMA's recommendations include elevating service equipment like water heaters and large appliances above the area where they could be flooded. FEMA also suggests avoiding materials like drywall in parts of a house that might get flooded.
"Now we are running full force 12 months a year and at times gasping for air trying to keep up," he said."Over the last about 50 years, the annual precipitation amounts have increased by about 20 to 30%, which is a tremendous amount — in New England," said David Boutt, a UMass Amherst hydrogeologist."It's certainly happening faster than I thought it was ever going to happen, just by how our rain seasons are, our winter seasons are," he said.
Wilson said another resilience strategy — elevating mechanical equipment like furnaces and electrical panels to keep them out of floodwaters — can be expensive. But he points out most of it has a limited lifespan.At the same time, he said, homeowners should consider choosing to replace"fossil fuel boilers with mini splits or air source heat pumps."In Florence, Davis also made changes outside his house to reduce flooding.