Largest local rainfall since 1938 Hurricane
Published on May 17th, 2006
STONEHAM, MA - With somewhere between 11-12 inches of rain having pounded the Stoneham area over the last nine days, things could have been a lot worse.
The Stoneham Police received at least 10 calls concerning the troubling level of water in residents’ basements and several frantic calls when the water level rose up toward fuse boxes and electrical outlets, but a pair of sewer and water main improvements kept Stoneham mostly high and dry during what Stoneham Department of Public Works Director Bob Grover termed “the storm of a lifetime.”
While the storm of a lifetime resulted in the normal closure and general avoidance of Montvale Ave. during its crescendo, and also resulted in the annual vehicle getting stuck in the middle of the Montvale puddle, it was a far cry from nearby Melrose – a city that had State Police cruisers dragging boats around town in order to extricate people from their water-logged homes.
“When you look around at Reading and Melrose and some of the other towns surrounding us, we didn’t fair too badly,” said Grover. “There were a lot of calls for water in people’s basements, of course, and I definitely got water in my basement, but our main concern was sewage and keeping the sewer lines unclogged and flowing properly.
“This is supposed to be the most rainfall that we’ve had since the Hurricane of 1938, and I’m pretty old but I wasn’t even alive when that one took place…so this is the worst rainstorm that I’ve ever seen,” added Grover. “When you have that much water, the water table rises that much higher, has nowhere else to go and just seeps into everyone’s basements…it’s an inevitability with that kind of a storm.
The Town of Stoneham spent over $1 Million on a retention basin as part of a storm water drainage system in the area of Bear Hill Golf Course and a parallel sewer line on Oak Street – a pair of improvements that did the trick in improving a trouble spot in the area of Oak Street and Albion Street as well as the potentially troubling water runoff from the high points at the Bear Hill Golf Course.
“We had our usual small bit of flooding that caused us to close down Montvale Ave. and Stevens Street for a short time (during the height of the rainstorm’s accumulation on Saturday and Sunday), but it was over pretty quickly,” said Grover.
The five sewer pumping station were also overworked due to the sheer volume of water coupled with leaky sewer lines, illegal water hookups and sump pumps emptying into the sewers, but the two hired a 24-hour service complete with dump trucks that absorbed and disposed of the potentially debilitating volume of sewage.
“Any town is going to experience some problems when you have a storm of this magnitude over this long a period of time, and of course we expected the pumping stations to be overtaxes,” added Grover, who put a $25-30,000 price tag on expenses caused by the monsoon-like conditions.
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