Months after flooding, Slippery Rock deals with long-term effects
SLIPERRY ROCK — The flash floods that swept the borough last August brought mother nature’s menace to the doorstep of residents and businesses in a way that borough officials said had never happened before.
The Aug. 5 flash floods trapped motorists in vehicles and compelled council president Jeff Campbell to declare a state of emergency. It also formed a sinkhole on Boller Drive, which remains partly collapsed, in Slippery Rock Community Park.
“Stuff was put on hold to get immediate things reconciled, just immediate problems that we saw,” Christian Laskey, borough manager said. “But there were a lot of long-term goals as well — the biggest one being the Slippery Rock Park entrance. Unfortunately, that took the brunt of the storm damage.”
The damage caused the borough to rethink its plans for the entrance and instead focus on fixing the newly discovered problems there.
“We’re still down to one lane on the roadway, and the pedestrian bridge has been shut down,” he said. “Those are just two line items that we hadn’t budgeted for. We didn’t think they were going to be an issue in the future, but now they are in need of immediate attention.”
Laskey said the borough will turn to the expertise of engineers to navigate the long-term challenges of further weather events. This is why, even though Boller Drive has emerged as a priority, the borough cannot estimate a completion date for repairs — not until it hears back from engineering.
“We probably aren’t looking at 100-year flooding events anymore,” he said. “These 100-year flooding events are happening a lot more often than every other 100 years ... So when we say we don’t have a time frame, it’s just sometimes the wheels of government slowly grind away. We are trying our best to get this remediated, but we want to do it the right way.”
“We don’t want to just dump topsoil in there and say, ‘All right, good enough until the next storm,’” he continued.
Laskey said he can’t estimate the price tag of all recovery costs involved, but the flooding also effected the community’s experience in a dramatic way, he said.
“Everything was overwhelmed. There was just no place to go, and a couple people ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. But thankfully, no one was hurt,” he said.
Campbell recalled rescuing his 80-year-old neighbor from Arlington Drive when her car became trapped in the floodwater there.
“I tried to drive through the water,” Campbell said. “It was four foot deep, and she became disabled right in the middle of it, and I had to go in and get her out of the vehicle and get her to safety.”
“The water was clear up to the gear shift in the car,” he said. “She was still sitting in it.”
The flood destroyed the woman’s car, he added.
Borough road crews, volunteer fire companies and other first responders, such as Butler County Water Rescue Team 300, performed another rescue.
Low-interest loans up to $200,000 were made available last fall for homeowners or renters with real estate, and $40,000 to fix or replace personal property, such as vehicles. Interest rates ranged from 0.87% and 4.37% at that time.
Laskey noted that the borough recently received more than $55,000 in grant money from Butler County’s municipal infrastructure program. The timing of this application and support has proved fortuitous, Laskey said.
“It’s a very large project,” he said of filling in and repaving culverts that have begun to fail. “It’s probably a year or two of planning to get that.”
The borough is working to meet a challenge that continues to grow and change, Laskey said.
“You talk to the engineers, and you talk to the different people at the university, and these storms are happening more frequently,” he said.
“We were aware of several issues before the flood, and several issues arose after the flood,” Laskey said. “There were private and municipality challenges we had faced to kind of make life easier in the borough.”
Damage to property owned by the borough did not include all the damage that Slippery Rock had to endure, Laskey added.
“There was a lot of private damage as well,” he said. “And it’s tough to be the one who takes all those phone calls and tries to appease everyone.”
“Since then we’ve done a significant amount of work,” he said. “We’ve brought in companies to clean up some of this infrastructure. ... So we’re really doing our best to get on top of these issues before something like this happens again.”
Laskey recalled speaking with a number of residents in their 70s and 80s. “They’ve ... never seen anything like that the entire time they’ve lived here,” he said.
Flooding hit several businesses hard, including a dentist’s office, a doctor’s office and some businesses on Main Street, Campbell said.
“It was a very unique event,” he added. “You don’t think of downtown Slippery Rock as being a floodplain.”
Dr. David Gordley’s dentist office suffered $15,000 worth of damage, between a damaged carpet that would need removal and a parking lot that also endured flooding, Dr. Gordley estimates.
Fortunately, his staff acted fast to help clean the building, bringing in family members with Shop-Vacs to remove all the water they could, he said. Then he brought in an outside contractor, he said.
The borough Gordley that more preventative work, which it aimed to undertake, would help protect the site, which was at higher risk for flooding, Gordley said. The borough is contemplating removing debris that still cram catch basins near the site, Gordley said.
