20 Years of Belmont Water Trouble

By Sumner Brown

Belmont has two types of water trouble. One is flooding during heavy rains. The other trouble comes from leaking sewer pipes.

Flooding

Today, as I write this, there is no flooding in Belmont. Floods are rare enough that we do not make ourselves perpetually anxious about them, but parts of Belmont are vulnerable. In both Belmont and Arlington, people live in what were swamps, and there seem to be 100-year storms every 10 years. Climate change may have something to do with this. The Belmont Citizens Forum advocates for rain gardens and other measures to slow the flow of stormwater from paved surfaces and buildings.

We will have to wait and see if the new middle school and high school will be on high enough ground to avoid flooding. Our new electric substation also is close to a floodplain.

Belmont Uplands Development

This development, called the Royal Belmont, should never have been built. Not only was an urban wilderness lost, but we cannot predict how much of the development and surrounding areas will flood when the next 100-year storm comes.

The development of former swamps and flood plains in the 1920s was unfortunate, but it’s easier to forgive those builders as less was known then about flooding. That excuse does not fit the Uplands development.

Sewer Problems

We have leaking sewer pipes. Every town in greater Boston has similar troubles. These leaks go both ways: sewage leaks out and gets into streams, and groundwater leaks into the sewers, causing sewer overflows downstream and taxing the capacity of the Deer Island plant to treat sewage. Belmont has built a temporary fix in the Winn Brook neighborhood: underground storage tanks and pumps for sewage loads that occur during heavy rains to deal with overloaded sewer pipes. It has worked so far.

Belmont is now under a consent decree to stop discharging sewage into the waters of the Commonwealth, and the town is working on that problem. It’s expensive. It has cost millions. People who say, “Just do it now!” apparently have no idea how difficult it is to get Proposition 2.5 overrides in Belmont.

Sumner Brown is a director of the Belmont Citizens Forum.