Flood-damaged property, river now stronger

 / COURTESY/FUSS & O'NEILL INC.
/ COURTESY/FUSS & O'NEILL INC.

Six years ago this month, Rhode Island was hit with a record-breaking amount of rain, which translated into historic floods throughout the state.

The damage was widespread and Rhode Island has rebounded in different ways, including most recently with the completion of a $3.5 million restoration project in Coventry along a portion of the South Branch Pawtuxet River.

Coventry was hit particularly hard by the flooding on the east side of town. Specifically, where the South Branch Pawtuxet River passes beside Concordia Manufacturing LLC and the Lofts at Anthony Mill, before running under the bridge at Laurel Avenue.

In 2010, at the height of the flooding, the high volume of water rushing downstream was augmented by a relatively narrow passage where the water could go, resulting in widespread damage to the area.

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“The Laurel Avenue bridge was washed away and the river channel from Anthony Mill and Concordia was essentially washed away,” said Dean Audet, senior vice president of water environment and natural resources at Fuss & O’Neill Inc.

The damage concerned town officials, not only because it was dangerous to traverse the area, but also because it called into question the resiliency of Concordia and the historic Anthony Mill, which threatened to fall or sink into the river. There was also widespread doubt about whether the area could survive a similar flooding event.

But a restoration project of that size wasn’t going to come cheap. Coventry ended up receiving a $3.2 million federal grant from the Natural Resources Conservation Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to put toward restoration efforts.

The town, along with private property owners, put up the remaining 9 percent of the funding, according to Paul K. Sprague, Coventry’s director of planning and development.

In 2012, Fuss & O’Neill Inc. joined the public-private partnership after winning a bid from the city to design and restore the site. The Providence engineering company specializes in designing resilient river systems, which Audet says is increasingly more important in the face of global climate change and rising sea levels.

“We were really thinking about creating a long-term resilient system and not just repairing the damage,” Audet said of the Coventry project.

In addition to restoring the bridge, buildings and walls along the river, Audet and his team, along with the construction company Cardi Corp., turned to Concordia and Anthony Mill, which they tied into the bedrock to prevent the chance of any future separation.

“We stabilized the mill tower to make it unsusceptible to the river if it ever scours out again,” Audet said.

Cardi, of Warwick, headed the reconstruction and spent a fair amount of the two years working in the river itself. The riverbed needed to be stabilized, widened and deepened to “reduce the potential for high stream velocities to scour out and damage the existing mill buildings,” according to Audet.

To access the river’s bottom, workers redirected the flowing water in different ways to work section by section, according to Sprague.

“They used large sandbags and separated the river in half, working on the north wall and then switching the bags to work on the southern wall,” he said.

The restoration, completed in December, has completely transformed the 500-foot-long stretch of river, Sprague added.

“It looks 100 percent different,” he said. “The walls have been removed and replaced. The tower, which was leaning like the Tower of Pisa, was straightened out so it can now be occupied.”

Anthony Mill, built between 1872 and 1874, was formerly home to the Coventry Co., which operated as a cotton mill. Today, it’s been converted into luxury one- and two-bedroom lofts. The Concordia building is home to Concordia Fibers, which produces custom-engineered, fiber-based yarns and fibers for technical textiles.

Both organizations have also done individual restoration projects to complement the work done along the South Branch Pawtuxet River.

Sprague is optimistic the restoration will last for a long time.

The 2010 floods were estimated as a 265-year flood, meaning the probability that a similar storm comes along once in 265 years. Sprague doesn’t expect another major flood anytime soon, but he does predict the newly restored area will withstand future flooding.

“We were able to reduce the velocity of the river and increase the volume of the river to withstand … a similar flooding event,” he said. •

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