Canal Woods area needs permanent fix

Coming north out of Fruitland on Route 13 recently, I wondered whether remediation efforts at Canal Woods had allowed any of those displaced families from last September’s flooding to return home.

It has, after all, been six months since then.

My curiosity was piqued when I realized, while visually reading the lay of the land, that the flooding was at some point inevitable – the result of multiple manmade improvements in conflict with Mother Nature.

A casual map study reveals that the Canal Woods complex is situated on a peninsula that divides two watershed areas. Canol Woods Pond to the north and Slab Bridge Road to the south are essentially stormwater catch basins that accommodate the overflow from the Colbourn (Fooks) Mill and Morris Mill ponds and their respective watershed areas.

According to “Portrait of Salisbury, Maryland,” by Richard W. Cooper, prior to the end of the American Civil War in 1865, the terminus of the aforementioned peninsula, was at the confluence of these two bodies of water that we today call Tony Tank.

Post-war, when the railroad sought to extend its trackage southward to accommodate markets in Princess Anne and beyond, wooden trestles were erected to convey the railroad tracks over and across these two natural water obstacles.

At or about the turn of the century, around 1900, increased demand necessitated the dualization of the railroad tracks south of Salisbury. It was at this time the two wooden trestles were razed and, in pursuit of economy, the railroad’s right-of-way across the northerly pond was filled in with solid earth, blocking its natural flow to the Tony Tank.

A trench was cut laterally across the peninsula just east of the railroad’s right-of-way, to connect and provide drainage from the north to the south pond. This earthen infill and the excavated trench saved the railroad the expense of building a concrete conduit at the north pond. With this manmade confluence, both ponds now drain via a single, narrow concrete conduit that’s visible from Route 13 northbound.

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High school taught those who listened that due to gravity and atmospheric pressure, water will seek out its lowest level, that when the diameter of a conduit is doubled, its capacity is quadrupled and inversely, when that diameter is reduced by half, its capacity is reduced by three-fourths. If a vessel of water is continually fed at a rate greater than it can drain itself, it will back up and overflow.

This is why, when we had only outhouses, there was no need for toilet plungers.

Twelve inches of rain in 12 days probably wouldn’t overburden the system outflow at Canal Woods. However, 12 inches of rain in a 12-hour window could be catastrophic.

Simply put, this is a classic case of quantity versus time. It should be here noted that runoff from rain-saturated soils exacerbated the end result – and this is not an unnatural occurrence.

If flooding of this magnitude had occurred prior to the advent of the Canal Woods development, there would have been no record, since there was only forest, stream and wetlands to flood. Those units affected were built in the 1970s, or roughly 10 years after the initial Canal Woods units, which were built on higher ground.

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Obviously no one saw or could have seen such events as those of last September. But pushing the envelope, Mother Nature put residents on notice that a long-term solution must be secured.

What should be obvious to all is the necessity to increase the outflow capacity of the Canal Woods basins into Tony Tank. Reconnecting the northern pond under Canal Park Drive, the railroad, and both sides of Route 13 would be ideal, but also labor intensive, inconvenient and cost-prohibitive.

Widening the connecting trench and replacing the deteriorating concrete conduit with one of greater capacity, or the addition of a second or third conduit are all viable options.

What a shame it would be when remediations are complete, if flooding once again forced those same residents out of their homes again, because with the problem evident to all, responsibility for funding and implementation of this project descended into a contest of politics, economics and liability.

This unfortunate chain of events is why, in this day and age, we have those annoyances we call environmental impact studies.

L. Richard Lundy lives in Delmar.