Recovery: Area Struck by 2004 Hurricane Improves Drainage

By the time it was over, most of David Napier's Old City Bar and adjacent catering operation were saturated. After just two days in business, "all of our offices and the kitchen on the first floor were completely destroyed," Napier said.

Such was the impact of Hurricane Gaston, which doused Richmond, Va., with at least 10 inches of rain on Aug. 31, 2004. When it was over, Gaston had produced what some newspapers called a 5,900-year rainfall event and a 2,500-year storm, killed nine people and caused a reported $120 million in damages throughout the mid-Atlantic states.

For many in Richmond, the storm's wrath was epitomized by the devastation of Shockoe Bottom, a historic riverside entertainment quarter. The popular restaurant and nightspot district is the lowest point in the city, and that's where the water went, tearing down buildings and tossing vehicles through the streets.

Today the district is back on its feet, the restaurants are open and perhaps most significantly, the city just completed the first phase of a two-stage effort to rehabilitate the faulty drainage system that failed to stop Gaston's floodwaters.

What Happened?
To put it bluntly, Gaston tore Shockoe Bottom apart because the water had nowhere else to go.

Chris Beschler, director of Richmond's Public Utilities talks about the "box" and the "arch," along with a malformed drop inlet system. As to the latter, intakes for the catch basin existed, "but they were in the wrong places in the gutter, and they were grossly, grossly undersized."

Add to this the box, a massive piece of underground infrastructure designed to gather local rainwater and feed it into a wastewater treatment area. The box has capacity problems because of the arch, a vast pipe in the shape of an inverted "U" that draws water from the higher parts of the city and dumps it into the box. It's more than the box can handle, and Shockoe Bottom has been routinely soaked even by mild thunderstorms for many years. The system couldn't possibly handle Gaston.

A $20 million drainage improvement effort has given many merchants the courage to return to Shockoe Bottom. The plan includes installation of nearly 100 gutter inlets, properly positioned this time. Engineers also have disconnected the arch from the box, so water from uphill now flows directly into the wastewater treatment plant.

The second phase of the plan calls for repairing a retention basin that hasn't functioned properly in years, Beschler said. The entire project is slated for completion in early 2009.

The first phase of the effort came in about one-third under budget, a fact Beschler attributes to good vendor prices thanks to fortuitous timing, after a project launch in January 2007. "With a construction project of that magnitude, you normally do not start working in the winter," he said, "but we wanted to keep the momentum going, and at that time of year the vendors wanted to keep their people working."

In addition to the long-range infrastructure effort, many Shockoe Bottom business owners appear to have been heartened by the city's more immediate response to the storm.

"The city did a fabulous job of cleaning it up very quickly," said Erika Gay, program manager of Venture Richmond, a downtown economic development and marketing nonprofit, formed in 2006 through the merger of four existing agencies.

"There were inches and inches of mud and debris left. Once those 8 feet of water went away, the city got rid of all that debris within a day or two," said Gay. "So when the business owners came back to see what had been damaged, they could see how much of it had already been cleaned up."