The damage to the Riverbrook Regional YMCA Wilton Branch from flooding after last month’s record rainstorm was heartbreakingly devastating. According to YMCA officials, Norwalk River floodwaters more than 3.5 feet high poured through the property and caused $4.2 million worth of damage.
The YMCA is no stranger to dealing with flooding, and there’s a long history of water cresting the riverbanks at its location at 404 Danbury Rd. The fact that the property sits within a flood zone has been a consideration, both before the 1956 purchase of the land for a park and the subsequent acquisition by the Wilton YMCA in 1971, and since then. Nonetheless, it may not have been considered enough, given what history has revealed to us, and the impact climate change is now having.
The Current Lay of the Land
Most of the 16-acre property owned by the Riverbrook Regional YMCA is categorized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as a “Special Flood Hazard Area” or 100-year floodplain, where the annual risk of flooding is 1% and flood insurance is mandatory.
Unfortunately, the bulk of the property is ineligible for flood insurance because it’s not possible to purchase flood insurance for outdoor portions of a property. Flood insurance also doesn’t cover pools, landscaping, patios, and other outside features.
In the Wilton Y’s case, the parking lot, swimming pond, paddle tennis courts, and the baseball fields and associated structures used by Wilton Little League are all located partially or entirely on what’s called a “Regulatory Floodway,” the area closest to the water source where flooding can be expected to happen most frequently. FEMA requires communities to strictly regulate development in the floodway, especially limiting structures that could impede the water’s flow downstream. Sure enough, flood waters reached the pond in 1985 and 2021. The parking lot in particular is susceptible and made the news for flooding in 2010, 2014, and 2021.
Today, only one YMCA building sits within FEMA’s Special Flood Hazard Area — the Director’s House at the entrance to the property — and it does carry the necessary insurance. Riverbrook Regional YMCA CEO Christene Freedman said that the house’s basement regularly floods and nothing is stored in it.
FEMA used to include the Y’s main building within the Norwalk River’s 100-year floodplain. But a little over a decade ago, the Wilton Y hired National Flood Experts, a civil engineering and certified floodplain management company, to conduct a site survey, contending — and proving to FEMA’s satisfaction — that the ground on which the Y’s main building stood shouldn’t be categorized as a floodplain.
FEMA adjusted its maps, and now the contour maps available at Wilton’s GIS Parcel Viewer show the ground beneath the Y’s main building is 212-216 feet above sea level. Elevations within the adjacent 100-year floodplain range from 206-214 feet above sea level. So far this difference has sufficed: overflow from the Norwalk River did not affect the main building during last month’s flooding.
What’s more, that reclassification exempted the Wilton YMCA from mandatory insurance, reportedly saving the organization at least $18,000 a year in flood insurance.
The YMCA has limited options to lessen potential future damage. In 2011, Wilton’s then-Director of Environmental Affairs Patricia Sesto noted that despite repeated inundation and the absolute certainty that it would keep happening, “ideas to exclude flood waters [from the rest of the YMCA property] are inappropriate as that would exacerbate flooding on someone else’s property downstream.”
Freedman, however, points out that some of the ill effects can be mitigated: erosion-prone areas can be stabilized with plantings ideal for the purpose. But it is uncertain how the YMCA’s situation — or that of other institutions located in Wilton’s floodplains — will evolve if a recent study’s predictions for the Northeast of “increases in both total (9.7%) and extreme (51.6%) precipitation” over the coming decades are accurate.
So how did the Wilton YMCA end up in the situation it’s now facing?
A Flooding Timeline
1900s: Historically the YMCA property was used for agriculture and had no permanent infrastructure. Louis Warncke famously grew pickles there in the late 1800s and early 1900s. A 1934 aerial survey shows nothing but an open field even two decades after Warncke sold it.
1955: When local contractor Abel Fullin purchased the land in August 1955, another 20 years had changed nothing. Fullin intended to subdivide the property and build houses but reconsidered after 13 inches of rain fell in the Norwalk River watershed between Oct. 14 and 17, 1955 — an event that became known as the “Great Flood of 1955.” During that flood, the dam at Great Pond in Ridgefield gave way, followed by the Gilbert & Bennett Mfg. Co.’s Factory Pond dam in Georgetown sending a massive surge of water south through Georgetown, Cannondale, and Wilton Center.
The Wilton Bulletin reported a few months later that Fullin’s tract had been “inundated.” On top of this, within days of the disaster, Wilton’s Planning Commission issued “an immediate moratorium on all proposals for subdivisions in areas susceptible to flooding.” Fullin’s tract was included in the moratorium.
The Town then created a Flood and Erosion Control Board for better oversight of the hydrological impacts of and risks faced by new construction. This move was partially inspired by severe flooding that had occurred in the Arrowhead Rd. development in South Wilton, another of Fullin’s projects that ran afoul of the moratorium. (Last month’s flooding was likewise disastrous for some Arrowhead Rd. residents.)
1956: Faced with an uncertain timeline, new oversight, and enhanced public awareness of the hazards of floodplain residency, Fullin made it known that he was willing to sell the property “at a reasonable price.” Just a few months earlier a group of residents incorporated what they called the Wilton Community Park, Inc. for the purpose of acquiring and developing a “natural outdoor recreation area” for Wilton residents. In August 1956, the entity purchased Fullin’s land with help from the Kiwanis Club.
The seller, purchasers, Town officials, and Wilton residents were all well aware that this land was a floodplain. A 1956 Recreation Study Committee report to the Town of Wilton — which the Wilton Community Park, Inc., and the Kiwanis Club had closely followed in choosing the Fullin tract — had even specifically recommended “the purchase of riverfront property for recreation.”
1965: By 1965, what came to be known as Kiwanis Park boasted an outdoor swimming pond, bathhouse, baseball field, bleachers, refreshment stand, picnic tables, office building and Director’s House. Aerial photography from that year shows that the parking lot was still unpaved, allowing the ground to absorb water.
1971: In 1971, the newly formed Wilton YMCA purchased the property and, a few months later, successfully applied for a special permit to build an “indoor swimming pool and accessory spaces.” The new building was completed by early 1972 and, that spring, the dirt parking lot was paved.
Town of Wilton Annual Reports show that it was around this time — sometime between June 30, 1970 and June 30, 1972 — that the Flood and Erosion Control Board was quietly scrapped. Nowadays, these issues are under the purview of Wilton’s land-use commissions and boards, including the Planning and Zoning and Inland Wetlands Commissions, but it is not clear if they took over immediately after the Flood and Erosion Board was phased out, or at some later date.
The early 1970s were also the last gasp of the Norwalk River Flood Control Project (NRFCP), created after the 1955 disaster and once touted as “a showpiece of state, local and federal cooperation.” The NRFCP had called for a series of river channel improvements and the construction of flood control dams on the Norwalk River and Comstock Brook. Channel improvements were planned at three locations, including the present YMCA site. But after nearly 60 years, no channel work has been done, and only two out of five planned flood-control dams were built.
Unfortunately, approval for the location of the original core of the Wilton Y’s current main building was granted based on flood encroachment lines that had been drawn up “on the assumption that the flood control project would be completed.”
FEMA’s Flood Insurance Rate Maps (available following The National Flood Insurance Act of 1968) with its Special Flood Hazard Zones and Regulatory Floodways — both of which the Y’s main building is now outside of — were also affected by the same miscalculation, which seems to have originated with Army Corps of Engineers flood zone maps that were produced beginning in 1962.
1980s: According to the State Department of Environmental Protection’s (CT-DEEP) flood control coordinator in 1989, FEMA’s maps did not reflect “actual conditions” until 1982. On top of that, state-drawn flood encroachment maps used by the Town of Wilton for site approval purposes by Wilton’s Flood and Erosion Control Board and later, presumably, by Wilton’s Land Use officials, were equally flawed. Hearings to revise the state maps used by the Town only began in 1989, with the new guidelines set to be issued by the State Department of Environmental Protection the following year.
1990s: Shockingly, CT-DEEP’s assistant director was back in Wilton just four years later: “We were here in 1990, with the same project, but there were errors in the original plan that were corrected, and tonight we’re back with the best available project.” In fact, the state had originally drawn maps with flood encroachment lines set too narrowly, and to rectify the problem made an offer to residents in the impacted areas “to purchase their homes and demolish them, leaving the land free of any construction.”
Locals, primarily from the stretch of town between Orem’s Ln. and Arrowhead Rd., pushed back against the proposed map changes and the state’s offer. One Arrowhead Rd. resident was quoted responding with what seemed to sum up the local sentiment: “What it is is bureaucratic nonsense. It’s been 40-something years and not a trickle of water.”
Ultimately, state officials said they would not force the issue: “If the town doesn’t want the channel work, if the Board of Selectmen don’t want it, the state won’t come in and mandate that it will be done.” Ultimately, the state did file its finalized maps with Wilton’s Town Clerk in 1998.
As for the homes and other buildings within those new encroachment lines, whose owners resolutely refused to relocate, the Town invested in “a new automated flood warning system.” The ALERT system was activated in 2001 and came packaged with free flood audits from the CT Department of Environmental Protection. These were offered to the owners of 200 at-risk buildings. A quarter of them participated, receiving a customized “Emergency Operation Plan to reduce damage during a flood.”
Whether or not the original decision to purchase and develop the land where the YMCA is located was a good one, the Norwalk River Flood Control Project created a false sense of security that influenced regulations and decisions, leading up to the point when the Y’s main building was constructed. Forty or fifty years later unknown evidence was provided to FEMA that got the agency to change its map and exempt the Y from mandatory insurance.
But given how close this most recent flood got, how there is overlap between the elevation of the floodplain and the building’s elevation, how likely it is that flooding will increase in severity and frequency in the future, and how many potentially false assumptions may yet underlie FEMA and state maps, it might not be such a safe assumption that the Y’s main building will remain high and dry.