Back to Home > Tuesday, Sep 26, 2006 News Posted on Tue, Sep. 26, 2006 email this print this reprint or license this DAN Z. JOHNSON / Inquirer Ken Hellendall, the Emergency Management Coordinator for Cheltenham Township, closes a road barrrier on the Tookany Creek Parkway. The barrier is lowered when the road is closed due to flooding conditions from the creek, but motorists sometimes ignore it and drive around it. Where fools rush in, they might foot the bill Interactive Map Ask a question about the Watershed study Profiles of flood survivors and more in our series "A Flood of Trouble"
Home to nearly 100 companies with 14,000 workers, the complex sits at the crossroads of two major highways - the Pennsylvania Turnpike and Route 309 - in one of Montgomery County's most affluent areas.
Something else intersects there, too: four streams, each about three feet wide, that need little provocation to overflow. Then, the Fort Washington Office Park can look more like Six Flags Great Adventure's Congo Rapids.
In the summer's most notorious storm, up to three inches of rain fell in the vicinity on June 27 and into the wee hours of the 28th. By daybreak, a lake had formed on the 563-acre campus, covering parking lots and sidewalks with water four feet deep and swamping a couple of early birds' cars as the drivers screamed for help.
Since the office park opened in 1953, the chronic deluges have cost one life, tens of millions of dollars in damaged property, and an inestimable amount in lost commerce - even as more buildings have been put up and asphalt has been laid.
Now this infamously flood-prone development is about to become an important laboratory on storm-water management. The Temple University scientists who mapped the nearby Pennypack Creek watershed will spend the next 18 months seeking ways to turn the tide at Fort Washington.
If they can counter decades of imprudent land use, their work could produce a national model for flood control in densely built suburbs. Southeastern Pennsylvania and South Jersey are awash with communities under threat from suddenly rampaging creeks and uncontrolled runoff.
"We increase development. We increase impervious surfaces. We have not in the past done very good storm-water management," said M. Richard Nalbandian, the group's geologist. "All of this contributes to more and more extreme events."
The Temple researchers are up against not only an aqueous office park but the temperamental Sandy Run Creek watershed, in which it is situated. One of the smallest of the region's watersheds, at less than 13 square miles, the Sandy Run drains portions of Upper Dublin, Abington, Springfield and Whitemarsh Townships, home to 37,500 people.
The area was a beehive of home-building in the 1960s and '70s, when "the way we dealt with storm water," Nalbandian said, was to "make it your downstream neighbor's problem."
So much development so poorly thought-out has left the watershed "in bad shape," he said. Even so, "the game is not lost" in the office park, Nalbandian added. "A lot of things can make the place work better."
They might include using state-of-the-science porous pavement that slowly releases storm water into the soil, returning sprawling parking lots to green space and erecting multi-story garages, even razing buildings. But Temple's recommendations are a long way off, and actual fixes far longer.
Until then, the Tot-Time Child Development Center's emergency evacuation plan will include life jackets and an inflatable boat for its 50 children, as young as 6 weeks. The only time the center flooded was four months before it opened in 2001; two feet of water poured in during renovations.
At Jaguar Press, owner Michael Paston will keep sandbagging the door and lifting everything off the floor when heavy rain is predicted. Twice in the last five years, his business has been inundated. Depending on the forecast, he said, "I don't sleep."
At Nesbitt Graphics about a mile away, the bolts jutting from the brick facade will stay so boards can be quickly affixed over windows and glass doors.
In December 2000, Bruce Nesbitt and his nephew Harry J. Nesbitt III bought the one-story building for $1.2 million and made it the headquarters of their textbook publishing services company. Six months later, Tropical Storm Allison hit, unloading 10 inches of rain.
Instead, they tried to flood-proof their place. And, Bruce Nesbitt said, "we upped our insurance" - also a popular choice. Since 1979, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, businesses there have filed claims to the National Flood Insurance Program for as much as $10 million, representing a fraction of the water damage in the park.
The 213 acres the home builder bought were obvious marshland, fed by the Sandy Run, Pine Run, Rapp Run and Bodenstein Creeks as they headed for the Wissahickon.
"If we had the knowledge we later got about wetlands, we would not have built on most of" the site, Seltzer, 85, recalled in a recent interview. "But we didn't know anything about wetlands."
More so than a swamp, he saw a gold mine, occupying what he bet "would be an important spot" - an "ideal place" for one of the nation's first light-industrial parks.
Big local roads leading into the city already passed by Seltzer's property, as did the Reading Railroad. Advancing from the west was the new Pennsylvania Turnpike, which would reach Fort Washington by 1954.
To try to dry out his soggy acquisition, he hired a consultant. Thomas Buckley, a well-regarded engineer and surveyor for the city, came up with a grand plan. According to Seltzer, it required municipalities to the south, from Whitemarsh to Philadelphia, to "dig a little deeper" to ease the flow from the creeks into the Wissahickon and ultimately the Schuylkill.
"So we had to proceed with what we had," he said. And what he had kept growing, until he had accumulated more than 800 mostly flood-prone acres.
Squishy soil wasn't his only problem. The specter of a gigantic industrial center in their midst brought protests from hundreds of area residents. "They pictured Kensington," Seltzer said. "They thought I was talking smokestacks and five-story factories."
He tamped the resistance by promising a "completely elegant" campus with many low, sprawling buildings - a then-modernistic design that later would be blamed for exacerbating the flooding. It created vast impervious surfaces, including roads and parking lots "put in with absolutely no attention to the location of streams," said Jeffrey Featherstone, director of Temple's Center for Sustainable Communities, which is conducting the study.
Missing from the plan was any storm-water management. Systems to channel and absorb runoff wouldn't become a routine part of development until after 1968, when Congress created the National Flood Insurance Program and compelled communities to take steps to lower their flood risk.
Seltzer could not recall whether Columbia Steel, the first company to move in in 1953, experienced flooding. But he ventured a guess: "They probably did."
Water damage, and the occasional hair-raising escape, became the price of doing business there. Still, location trumped all. By the early 1970s, the complex had grown to 50 buildings, headed toward an eventual 95.
Seltzer, who had originally intended to lease the properties, began selling them because, he said, he needed capital for other projects. Rather than industry, however, many buyers came from the new suburban service economy, with a voracious appetite for office space. White-collar businesses and a large commuting workforce moved in. Parking lots spread as fast as hot asphalt can.
Meanwhile, development upstream - almost all residential - was driving more storm water toward the complex. Two dam projects proposed in the '70s would have reduced flooding along the Sandy Run by 40 percent, federal experts estimated. Seltzer said he had offered 112 acres just north of the park to Upper Dublin Township to build one of them.
By the 1990s, the flooding had "become much more intensely concerning," Seltzer said. "It emptied a lot of buildings. People didn't want to take a chance on the next time."
Six inches of rain fell during a storm on Sept. 20, 1989. Kahreem Raheem, a 43-year-old Philadelphian, was walking from the Fort Washington train station to his dishwashing job at a hotel inside the office park. At the complex's entrance at Pennsylvania Avenue and Commerce Drive, swirling water caught him and swept him into a drain.
Raheem's widow sued the Seltzer Organization and Upper Dublin Township, among other government agencies and property owners, in Montgomery County Court. The lawsuit alleged that her husband's death had resulted in part from their failure to provide "safe and adequate" storm-water drainage. The case settled in 1998 for "close to a million dollars," said her attorney, John F.X. Fenerty.
Several years after Raheem was killed and just a few hundred yards away, Seltzer had to be rescued by boat from his office. He had lost track of time while working one rainy evening, and "when I went out to go to my car, the water was up to the roof," he recalled.
Seltzer still owns 75 acres in the office park. He said he was happy that some of the country's most expert eyes were focusing on "the impairment."
Posted throughout the Fort Washington Office Park are fluorescent green markers warning "Roadway Subject to Flooding." Just as ominous, and more abundant, are signs advertising "Space Available."
Typical of property owners there, the Nesbitts knew about the complex's water woes and bought a building anyway because it was the right place "for the right amount of money," explained Harry, also a district justice in Horsham. But "if I was a tenant in this building, would I consider leaving? Sure."
Enough have pulled out that the vacancy rate has reached about 30 percent, nearly double that of the office market across the Pennsylvania suburbs.
Of five buildings owned by Massachusetts-based HRPT Properties Trust, two have been empty for a few years. Totaling 160,000 square feet, they sustained $1.6 million in damage from Allison in 2001.
Another vacancy sign is staked outside Savino Costanzo's granite-countertop company. He bought the 21,000-square-foot building three years ago for $1 million; two weeks later, flooding destroyed carpeting valued at $13,000.
Now Costanzo is trying to rent out 4,000 square feet. During the June 27-28 storm, in a grimly comedic touch, the vacancy sign stood in four feet of water for nearly seven hours.
The office park comprises three-quarters of the commercial real estate in Upper Dublin. During the 1990s, owners of half the properties in the complex appealed to have their assessments lowered; many cited the flooding. Twenty million dollars wound up being shaved from the buildings' market value, translating into an annual loss of about $250,000 in property-tax revenue for the local government and the Upper Dublin School District.
It's a "disastrous" domino effect, warned Bob Pesavento, president of the Board of Commissioners: Assessments in the park go down, taxes go up, homeowners leave. "But," he said, "the real problem is for the school district," which needs more than $100 million to replace a 58-year-old high school.
Although the township asked the Temple researchers in, their study is being funded with a $420,000 federal transportation grant to Upper Dublin and $200,000 from FEMA.
Consider the high hopes once pinned to a rail bridge that SEPTA built over Sandy Run in 2001, replacing one Allison washed out. Three times wider, the span allows more water flow. Yet during a storm last September, Upper Dublin Township Manager Paul Leonard said, "we had cars floating up Pennsylvania Avenue within hundreds of feet of that bridge."
In the last few years, about a half-dozen buildings have been reconstructed, and the ground has been raised under them - only to create inaccessible, or unescapable, islands when the water rises. Hardly any of those projects have created more permeable surface to soak up runoff. An exception is the Expo Center, vacated in June and soon to be reoccupied by 2,000 employees of GMAC Mortgage and GMAC Bank. As part of a $110 million renovation, more green space is being added - 3 percent more.
"You can fix it," Nalbandian said of the sodden complex. "The question is whether the financial resources are there and the political will is there. People want the problem fixed, but when they learn the price, they may not be so ready to fix it."
Not only could Upper Dublin not foot the bill alone, Leonard said, but "there may not be enough money on God's green earth to repair this problem."
A restaurant and possibly a bank are proposed for six acres by BET Investments, a development firm owned by Bruce Toll, chairman of Philadelphia Media Holdings, The Inquirer's parent company. The tract is at the foot of the turnpike slip-ramp to one of the park's main thoroughfares, Virginia Drive, but is separated from that road by Pine Run.
The new buildings would occupy high ground, but getting to them would require constructing a bridge over the creek, with driveways and storm drains crossing flood-prone land.
Under new township rules, BET would have to install an alarm on the bridge, triggered when Pine Run's water depth reached eight feet, and build an escape route to the turnpike.
It's a hassle and a risk, but to not build would be to "pretend the turnpike isn't there," said David Barnhart, who markets BET's real estate. "It's always easy just to say things shouldn't be developed... . That may be a valid position, but it's also the ostrich position."
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