Residents Say Development Brings Flooding, Financial Pain to Mt. Pleasant Homeowners

By Michael Gold 

Mary Burke saw four inches of water in her basement laundry room twice, in September 2021, then in July 2023. Her backyard was flooded by rain on Sept. 29, edging up to her statue of the Virgin Mary. Stormwater runoff is infiltrating her home’s foundation, which can cause cracks and leaks.

Burke lives on Warren Avenue, in Hawthorne, in the Town of Mount Pleasant.

“I’ve been in the same house for 25 years,” Burke said. “I get that storms are becoming more intense. I’m getting two inches of rain in the course of an evening.”

Burke said she spent $65,000 to put in a new drainage system and gravel to help stem the stormwater.

“I still had runoff from water in my yard,” she said. “I put in a drain by the back fence to channel the water. I bought sandbags for the yard (after the July storm). We shouldn’t have to have sandbags to protect our property.”

An e-mail Burke wrote to the town supervisor’s office, stated, “It seems like more than a coincidence that this increased runoff and the timeframe in question relates to the completion of the Summit development. Clearly, something was altered that has adversely affected both Linda and Warren Avenues…Mount Pleasant has grown from a small community in the sixties to a populated town. The drainage system for the town should reflect this growth – it clearly is not. Please do more than examine and plan – execute some real solutions to help your neighbors keep their property water free.”
Anna Nelson, an assistant principal at a Bronx school, lives on the Thornwood side of Warren Avenue. She never thought there would be flooding issues.

“We’re on a hill. It happened in a short amount of time and directly correlated to developments above us,” she said.

She has calculated that about 40 families in the area have suffered flooding issues, based on responses to a Mount Pleasant Facebook page.

Nelson said that the Summit Estates homeowners’ association (HOA) is responsible for installing stormwater infrastructure and flood mitigation but does not seem to have taken any action.

Nelson wrote an e-mail stating that, “I don’t see evidence of it (the Summit Estates HOA) existing or doing much.” She also questioned in her e-mail why the HOA would be responsible for stormwater mitigation and not Toll Brothers, the Summit developers.

Summit Estates, up the hill from Nelson and Burke, a development of 26 homes priced above $1 million, was completed in 2020. To build there, a woodland was cleared, which could have possibly absorbed some of the stormwater.

Also, Nelson said, new construction on a Linda Avenue project called Kingsview Estates, uphill from Warren, “is making flooding issues worse. Families have spent thousands of dollars” to mitigate the flooding.

Nelson and her husband spent $7,000 on flood mitigation for their home last summer, which did little good. She said a neighbor on Myrtle Avenue had five feet of water in his basement during a recent storm. One of his children, a little boy is “traumatized he’s going to get swept away by this river” of water.

“People’s lives are in danger, and property too,” Nelson explained. “If the kids were in that basement during the July rains, they would have died.”

“The more development you have, the more impermeable surfaces you have,” she explained.

The U.S. Geological Survey’s website states “As cities grow and more development occurs, the natural landscape is replaced by roads, buildings, housing developments and parking lots…large amounts of impervious surfaces have replaced the natural landscape…in a developed watershed, much more water arrives into a stream much more quickly, resulting in an increased likelihood of more frequent and more severe flooding.”

David Smyth, Mount Pleasant’s town engineer and superintendent of water and sewer, responded in an e-mail that Summit Estates and Kingsview Estates have been or will be issued permits under a state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) regulation, for disturbances greater than one acre, which is required by state law.

To receive the permits, stormwater management practices are required to be installed to provide water quality treatment, flood and stream channel protection controls and maintain some level of groundwater recharge. Developed sites are also required to show no increase in stormwater flows from the site during one-, ten- and 100-year design storms.

Both the Summit Estates and Kingsview Estates have provided professional engineered plans to show their projects have or will meet these permit thresholds and conform to state law, he said.

The town also conducts its own review before the plans are sent to DEC.

Smyth said at Summit Estates, a majority of the stormwater created and managed is discharged into a stormwater basin along Summit Drive, away from Warren Avenue and Linda Avenue. The subdivision was designed to result in zero increase in runoff up to a 100-year storm, which is more than nine inches of rain within a 24-hour period.

“One change that is prevalent and has occurred after the completion of the Summit Estates is that the frequency and intensities of storms have significantly increased,” Smyth noted. “This past year, we have had at least three storms than have occurred which were far greater than 100-year storm rainfall amounts. Unfortunately, these storm events have had an impact on a greater area within the town.”

One storm in the summer resulted in six inches of rain within a half-hour.

He said town officials have made it a priority to focus on ways to reduce flooding impacts. This fall, the Town Board announced it was hiring engineers to look at ways the town can mitigate the flooding impacts.

Pleasantville-based writer Michael Gold has had articles published in the New York Daily News, the Albany Times Union, the Hartford Courant, The Palm Beach Post and other newspapers, and The Hardy Society Journal, a British literary journal.