Most workday mornings, I drive south on Fruit Valley Road to get to The Columbian offices, and most evenings I take Fruit Valley north again. There’s little suspense or surprise involved in making this commute — other than the usual creeping hazard of tailgate zombies, always impatient with my maddeningly law-abiding pace. That does get my adrenalin pumping, a little, during too many commutes.
But when hard rain fell in mid-February, an intermittent body of water I’ve always called “Frito Lake” submerged a slice of Fruit Valley Road and tested the mettle of commuters along that route. Apologies to the Frito-Lay plant that happens to be west of a dip in the road that’s usually shallow enough to ignore — until it fills with rainwater. Then, suddenly, it’s not so shallow anymore.
I turned my little sedan around and went a different way. Then I called Burgener’s Woodworking, the small business on the east side of the road, which finds itself ground zero for Fruit Valley flooding. When I started to explain my question — what’s up with the body of water I’ve now renamed “Burgener Bottoms”? — somebody yelped “Oh my gosh,” and passed me directly to the boss.
Robin Burgener said he’s been in business since the early 1990s at 4809 Fruit Valley Road, a building built in the 1970s. But no lake ever submerged Fruit Valley or his business, he insisted, until the city of Vancouver widened and improved the road about a decade ago — and installed a new stormwater system underneath it.
“They changed the grade of the road at that point,” he said. “The street drains run downhill to this drywell, but it doesn’t have the capacity to deal with the rain.” So when it rains hard, he said, rainwater doesn’t just pool at this spot after falling from the sky. It also rises up from below.
“The water runs onto our property and floods us,” Burgener said. “For the last three years we’ve been fighting it by building a dam. We keep sandbags in place for the whole rainy season, November through March. If something happens, we might have some ability to control the water.”
How much ability, really?
“We’ve had three inches of water inside our building,” Burgener said. “These events happen three or four times a year so it may not seem like an emergency, but it’s catastrophic to us.”
Burgener’s neighbor to the north is the Fruit Valley Commerce Center, a small light-industrial building built in 2015 by Jim Pomajevich. That same year, Pomajevich reminded the city that his project was “required by the city, at considerable expense, to construct a storm drain system on our property.” While that system now contains “99 percent” of the stormwater that falls on his property, he wrote, the city’s system “was seriously undersized, perhaps improperly designed … and is terribly inadequate for the needs for which it was intended.”
In 2015, Vancouver’s surface water manager Annette Griffy’s response was that the city, while exploring solutions, was limited by funding and land-use restrictions. More than three years later, the answer appears to be the same.
Slow solution
Last month, Griffy said the rebuild of Fruit Valley “created dips in the road. That’s where they put in the infiltration systems.” Burgener’s Woodworking “is in one of the low depressions that was designed to take the flow,” she said.
Furthermore, Burgener’s property actually sits lower than the road itself. Because water continues to overflow adjacent properties, including neighbors to the north and the railway to the east, Griffy said, Burgener “is probably helping to manage some of their flows too.”
“The system installed with the new roadway … has limited capacity to handle the stormwater runoff it is receiving,” she wrote in an email. “The solution will be an engineered project that can handle the stormwater overflow here.”
Sounds great. Any actual plans to make it happen?
Only preliminary ones, Griffy said. This trouble spot is on the city’s six-year Stormwater Capital Improvement Program, “and is currently ranked highest on the list of arterial safety stormwater projects,” she wrote. It’s considered a safety project precisely because of the hazard to cars and drivers that suddenly appears when it rains hard, she said.
Griffy said $30,000 is now budgeted for “surveying and preliminary design.”
“That work will also give us an estimate on what the total project will cost,” she continued. “The City does not currently have additional funds to construct improvements.”
These types of retrofitting projects don’t qualify for grants from the state Department of Ecology, she wrote.
When Fruit Valley Road was demolished and rebuilt years ago, she said, the city took the opportunity to do major underground infrastructure work — including boring drainage pipes as far as 18 to 20 feet down, she said.
“When you’re redoing a road you have the ability to dig deep,” she said.
But for a problem-solving “retrofit,” she said, the opportunity is literally tighter. So are updated rules for treating and discharging stormwater. The city needs to send and treat overflow stormwater someplace nearby, she said — but heading west toward Vancouver Lake may be prohibitively costly, if not impossible, thanks to regulations that protect wetlands.
When does Griffy foresee a final fix?
“I don’t have a crystal ball,” she said. “This probably goes … well into six figures. It’s a matter of funding availability and our budget process.”
Burgener said he informs the city every time the water rises. Of all his battles, he said, he hasn’t summoned the energy to fight this one with gusto. But with no solution to “Burgener Bottoms” in sight, this woodworker is considering his options.
“It’s going to come to a head when I decide to move or sell this building,” he said. “It diminishes the value of my property.”
