Some documents age better than others.

And some? They make you cringe – a lot.

Take this June 2016 news release from the City of Asheville. The headline alone has to make anyone in western North Carolina shudder:

“100 years after the Flood of 1916, the City of Asheville is ready for the next one.”

Yeah, not so much.

You can read the entire release here, but I’ll provide some highlights. 

“By any measure Asheville’s catastrophic Flood of 1916 stands as ‘The Flood by Which All Other Floods Are Measured,’” it starts off.

It continues:

“When two tropical storms converged on the mountains in tandem that summer — one from the Gulf in June followed by another from the Atlantic in July — the water that thundered in its wake wasn’t just ‘high;’ it carved away the ground under mountain railroad passes, leaving tracks looking like sky-high trapeze rigs hanging 20 to 60 feet in the air.

Dams breached. Eighty people died.

Never before had so much rain fallen in the United States in a 24-hour period, the National Weather Bureau reported.

Sound familiar? Other than the dams breaching, it’s pretty eerie.

To be fair to the city, it did put in place better procedures for emergency notifications and protocols, and it embarked on a major plan to improve the North Fork Reservoir’s dam and spillway, actually adding an additional spillway as an auxiliary. This isn’t in the release, but the city also installed the bypass line after the 2004 flood, and that’s the pipe that — after being replaced — is providing water to the city right now.

The water is kind of beige, but you can use it to flush toilets and take showers. It’s progress.

The 2016 release acknowledged that “climate change can bring more frequent and stronger weather events.”

“The floods will come,” the release states. “Whether it’s through City policy on building in flood zones, updating the City’s flood action plan or ensuring special rescue training for first responders, the City of Asheville takes a multiple pronged approach to ensuring safety for its residents.”

A city official touted the flood operations plan.

“Those plans, coupled with an unprecedented ability to notify residents of imminent danger through mobile phone technology and computers, greatly lessens the risk of a catastrophic loss of life when major flooding comes to call,” it states. “And based on both history and future meteorology modeling, it will.”

As of Friday, the number of Buncombe County fatalities stood at 42.

The release asked a rhetorical question: “One hundred years after the Flood of 1916, Asheville collectively wonders, “Can it happen again?”

“The answer is yes. And no.”

Ugh. The release said modern meteorology provides more warnings, and FEMA’s mapping systems can predict better where flooding will occur, and the city has detailed emergency preparedness plans in place, and “procedures for monitoring river flow and managing capacity at North Fork Dam.”

And we see what happened. Clearly, that release’s main ingredient was hubris.

Joe Minicozzi, a certified city planner and the principal of Urban3 planning group in Asheville, has at times criticized the City of Asheville. He sent me the 1916 release, which I was familiar with. He also sent a link to the “Flood Damage Reduction Task Force’s Presentation to Buncombe County Commissioners” in September 2007.

“I’ve been watching from afar, and I can’t help having some deja vu all over again,” Minicozzi said. 

That report noted:

• “Nine major floods have occurred in the past 100 years. The most serious were in 1916 and 2004, but there have been damaging floods on an average of every 20 years.
• Building has occurred first along the river because that is the accessible land and the most easily traversed.
• Census data indicates that there will be an additional 30,000 people in Buncombe County over the next 20 years, putting continued pressure to build along the river in the floodplain.”

That certainly came to pass.

Under “Recommendations to Reduce Flood Damage,” the report urged, “Keep it out! Slow it down! Get it out of the way!”

Suggestions were to “initiate incentives or requirements to ensure low impact development,” along with stormwater management and a reduction in impervious surface and steep slope development. It also encouraged removal of flood-prone structures.

Flooding – a giant, complex issue

It noted, “We are all connected by the watershed and need to ‘share in the pain’ and the solution. For this reason, we need a regional approach.”

I’m really not here today to dump on the city or the county. They both have taken some steps to mitigate flooding, and a lot of work has gone on.

 The city spent a fortune on upgrades to the North Fork dam, including adding an auxiliary spillway, and that played a key role in protecting the dam during Helene. All kinds of emergency planning has gone on with the city and the county, and all the fire departments, volunteer and professional. 

New buildings in Biltmore Village have been built higher up. Sure, they still flooded in numerous cases, but they adhered to a stricter code.

The problem is that flooding is just a mondo-huge, gigantic complex issue.

A couple of weeks ago when the Small Business Administration administrator was in town, I asked Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer about the longer-term, big-picture solutions. We were standing in Biltmore Village, near a restaurant that flooded up to the second floor.

“I know that over the years, larger scale stormwater projects have been discussed,” Manheimer said. “For example, there was one that would have created some kind of a dam system all the way out by Warren Wilson (College), that, if I understand the engineering around it, would mitigate flooding in this area.”

That idea emerged after the 2004 flooding, which as the city’s release noted, killed 11 and damaged 16,234 homes.

Manheimer said any large-scale mitigation effort would be “very costly, and sort of a regional need for our area.”

“With projects like that, the barrier is money,” Manheimer said. “But this may be an opportunity to be able to think about those large-scale projects and not just upgrading and improving the stormwater system in the city, because you have to do something larger like that in order to prevent this sort of flood event.”

Manheimer said a gigantic project might not even have prevented the Sept. 27 disaster.

In the “perfect timing” department, Chris Joyell, director of healthy communities for MountainTrue, the Asheville-based environmental nonprofit, called me Friday to chat about the story Victoria Ifatusin and I published Sept. 17 abou the possibility of more frequent catastrophic storms in the area. 

Joyell also has served as director of the Asheville Design Center since 2009. The center, which merged with MountainTrue in 2017, connects volunteer designers with projects “that promote healthy, vibrant, and equitable communities.” Previously, Joyell worked with the Nature Conservancy, the Connecticut River Watershed Council, and League of Conservation Voters.

He said he was calling because his experiences over the past 20 years have impressed on him “a need to really rethink the positions that we’ve taken on this redevelopment and what the future looks like.”

“We have some really uncomfortable conversations to grapple with, and I want to make sure that we do that before flood amnesia sets in again,” Joyell told me. “That’s really how quickly we need to turn it around.”

The spirit of rebuilding runs strong here, he acknowledged, and he gets that. So do I. People have invested their money, sweat, tears and lives into their homes and businesses, and they don’t want to just throw in the towel.

Joyell understands that people want to show resilience.

“But I really think that we need to re-examine what we’re doing in our floodplains and recognize that we’re in a changing world,” he said.

As Manheimer said, this might be a good time to shoot for the stars, so to speak. As Joyell put it, the chances of getting something big done diminish “with every day we get further away from Sept. 27.”

‘A lot that’s going to require a lot of money’

“That’s my biggest concern,” Joyell said. “And I do agree that there’s a lot that’s going to require a lot of money. And I think we have a window right now where the legislature is actually willing to consider the needs of western North Carolina. That’s a rarity.”

Joyell pointed out that Hurricane Milton hit Florida right after Helene devastated our area, and the focus can shift quickly with “cataclysmic events that are starting to stack up.”

“It seems like every single year, it kind of gets amped up more than the previous year, and I think it becomes harder for us to maintain focus,” Joyell said.

In short, while we still have the physical reminders of this flood, and the loss of so many lives remains vivid, it’s time to get serious about more permanent solutions to our flooding problems. 

As that 2007 county report stated, “There is a cost-benefit ratio to consider in flood planning and big-ticket mitigation projects.” 

“Research has shown that for every one dollar that is spent on mitigation, approximately four dollars are saved from monies that are eventually spent on correcting damages,” the task force stated.

I doubt that equation has changed much. 

In the 2016 release, McCray Coates, the city’s former Stormwater Services Division director, said the department “plays an active role in monitoring runoff patterns and developing systems to manage that water.”

“What we do is provide mitigation to the depth of flooding, but this is an area subject to flooding — and it will flood again,” he said.

We know how true that is. It’s time to get serious about the mitigation plan.

Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. John Boyle has been covering Asheville and surrounding communities since the 20th century. You can reach him at (828) 337-0941, or via email at jboyle@avlwatchdog.org. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.

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