Treading Water: How Rhode Island is Dealing with Recent Flooding

Ralph Amitrano Jr. was at home in his Cranston apartment when the floodwaters came.

The seventy-five-year-old had just gotten out of the shower and was preparing to get dressed in the apartment he shared with his wife, Carol, and sister, Robin. A native of Providence, Amitrano — known to friends as “Mickey” — grew up in the Charles neighborhood and lived in the family home until selling it after his father’s death in 2013. Two years later, the family moved into a semi-basement unit at Dean Estates. Since moving in, they’d had recurring issues with water coming into the apartment, once bad enough that the floors had to be redone. The complex is located on Oaklawn Avenue and backs up to the Washington Secondary Bike Path, an area that routinely floods during heavy rain, according to residents. Still, nothing prepared them for the “catastrophic” amount of water that arrived on Sept. 10.

Due to a fall down a staircase years ago, Amitrano has limited mobility and uses a walker — and sometimes a wheelchair — to get around. He had just made it to the living room recliner where he typically gets dressed when water began to pour into the room from every direction. In the kitchen, water blasted open the door to the dishwasher and toppled the refrigerator, still plugged into the wall. The recliner he sat on was lifted from the floor, tipping him practically upside down into the torrent.

“I went from the living room to the bedroom in one splash. My wife was sitting by the kitchen table — the water was up to her neck,” he recalls.

Within a few minutes, a firefighter from the Cranston Fire Department pushed open the apartment door and pulled first his sister with their dog, Penny, then his wife, then Amitrano from the quickly rising water. Embarrassed, he explained to the firefighter he didn’t have a chance to get dressed. “He said, ‘Come on, buddy, I do this every day of the week, don’t worry about nothing.’”

The firefighter carried him to the second floor, where another resident provided beach towels to dry off and cover himself. By that time, the water had reached the second-floor stairwell, and residents waited for the flood to recede. When it didn’t, firefighters escorted them through the water and out the front door, where they stood shivering in the pelting rain.

“It’s like the firefighter said at the meeting,” Amitrano recalls, referring to a meeting of residents and city officials later that night. “If this had happened at night, everybody would have died. Nobody would’ve been prepared for it when you’re sleeping.”

Two miles up the road, his next-door neighbor, Wayne Walker, had run out for groceries at the Stop & Shop on Atwood Avenue. Walker, a resident of the complex since 2017, had also experienced previous flooding issues, but never expected the deluge that arrived Sept. 10. As the rain continued to pour down, he began to worry about his dogs, Gizmo and Gabby, left alone in the apartment. Leaving the store, he was forced to take a detour when he found the rotary connecting Atwood and Oaklawn
avenues closed due to flooding. By the time he arrived back at Dean Estates, residents had been evacuated, and the parking lot was a chaotic scene.

“When I came to the front door, the fire chief was there and there were two firemen in special wetsuits,” Walker recalls. “They wouldn’t let me go in. I’m screaming, ‘I got my dogs in there.’ He said, ‘You can’t go in there, Wayne. The water’s live.’”

By the time the fire department was able to retrieve the pets, it was too late. The dogs, both Papillon-Bichon Frise mixes he’d had since they were puppies, were too small to escape the rising floodwaters. Walker theorizes they might have jumped on the couch in an attempt to flee to higher ground before the water swallowed that, too. He had their bodies cremated and keeps the ashes in two small urns next to photos of his beloved pets.

By the following day, the building was condemned and the residents of twenty-four units — including those on upper levels whose belongings were untouched by the floodwaters — left to find other living arrangements. Almost ten years earlier to the day, a similar flood in 2013 prompted evacuations and left residents homeless before the building eventually reopened. As of January, Walker and other former residents were pursuing legal action, arguing the management company, WinnResidential, was negligent in its maintenance of the complex. In a statement, Ed Cafasso, a spokesperson for the company, pointed out the storm overwhelmed a nearby public drainage system.

“Since the incident, we have been working to keep the storm drains on the property clear in advance of bad weather and to make repairs, where possible, for safety reasons and so that those who were displaced could retrieve their belongings,” he says.

The Rhode Island Department of Transportation, which manages the drainage on Oaklawn Avenue, declined to comment, citing pending litigation from an earlier lawsuit.

At the same time Walker and his neighbors were raising their concerns to city leaders, residents across the state were being flooded out of their businesses and homes. In Providence, emergency responders answered forty-one rescue calls from people trapped in buildings and vehicles after a combined 3.8 inches of rain fell on the city on Sept. 10 and 11. Business owners in a shopping plaza on Branch Avenue reported looting as floodwaters from the nearby West River invaded their storefronts, and vendors at the weekend’s PVDFest declared the festival a loss after thunderstorms and flash flooding destroyed their merchandise. Residents spent days presiding over their sump pumps, attempting to free their basements from the latest watery onslaught. For some, the soggy summer marked new territory. For others, the floods were just the latest in a series of problems that had worsened over the years.

And they wouldn’t be the last. In December, yet another storm pummeled parts of Rhode Island with as much as six inches of rain, leading to the eighth flash flooding event logged by the Providence Emergency Management Agency in less than two years. As residents launched into a now-familiar cleanup routine, many began to ask: Had the disasters foretold by climate scientists for decades finally arrived? What would happen when the next big rain event struck? And, in a state known for its miles of coastline and beautiful natural features, were communities ready for the onslaught of water that had now become part of everyday life?

A Rising Threat

Most of the state’s 1.1 million residents, if asked to recall the worst flood in living memory, will point to the historic flood of 2010. More than sixteen inches of rain fell in March of that year, at least half of it between March 28 and 30, inundating the state and filling Rhode Islanders’ television screens with images of the Warwick Mall under several feet of water. On March 31, the Pawtuxet River reached its highest ever recorded crest of 20.79 feet, breaking the previous record of 15.1 feet set just a week and a half earlier. Along its length, sewage treatment plants overflowed, resulting in millions of gallons of raw sewage mixed with stormwater being dumped into Narragansett Bay. By the end of the disaster, the governor’s office estimated more than $200 million worth of damage had been inflicted on the state’s homes, businesses and infrastructure.

The weather conditions leading to the 2010 flood were classified as a 100-year storm, or a storm with a 1-percent chance of occurring in a given year. Once a standard for preparing communities against the effects of extreme weather events, scientists are increasingly finding 100-year definitions less than helpful for predicting the probability of such occasions. According to the Fifth National Climate Assessment published by the U.S. Global Change Research Program in November 2023, extreme precipitation events have increased by about 60 percent in the Northeast since 1958, the largest increase of any region in the United States. Joseph Poccia, a senior air quality specialist for the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management and a meteorologist by education, points to our increased use of fossil fuels as the primary reason behind the change.

“We’ve burned a lot of fossil fuels since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Our fossil fuel use as a planet is still increasing, and this all causes the enhanced greenhouse effect,” he says. “When we burn fossil fuels, we add all these heat-trapping greenhouse gases to the planet, which then does not let as much heat escape to space. So we’re turning up the thermostat, which is both increasing the temperature of the air and the ocean.”

Rhode Island’s air has warmed by more than 3 degrees in the past century, with the number of hot days (maximum temperature above 90 degrees) above the long-term average since the mid-1990s, according to the Rhode Island State Climate Summary published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information in 2022. In the past fifty years, surface water temperatures in Narragansett Bay have increased by between 2.5 and 2.9 degrees, according to data provided to the state’s Executive Climate Change Coordinating Council in 2016. While ocean temperatures are increasing globally, those changes are expected to be two to three times larger in the northwestern Atlantic Ocean than the global average.

According to Poccia, those changes create prime conditions for excessive rainfall. “This warmer ocean can provide a lot more water to the atmosphere via evaporation,” he explains. “But warmer air can hold more water. We’re having a warmer ocean that’s evaporating more water into an atmosphere that is ready to hold that water. And when we get these weather patterns that will be very conducive to shower and thunderstorm development over our area, it can essentially increase the precipitable water over our area. So climate change is causing more of our typical weather patterns to be exacerbated by holding all this water and dumping it out at inopportune times.”

Last summer, that weather played out as a closed low-pressure system that kept storms hugging the coast as they moved into New England from the South. In July, Rhode Island T.F. Green International Airport received 8.37 inches of rain — a majority of it falling in just three days — making it the second-rainiest July on record. As has been seen again and again in urban settings, much of that rain fell on pavement and other surfaces not designed to absorb water. Poccia notes climate change doesn’t necessarily create the weather patterns, nor does it stop opposite weather events, like droughts, from occurring. He likens the impact of climate change on weather to a swing.

“Let’s say someone is swinging on a swing. They’re just kind of going along. Climate change is someone that would come up and push behind them, make them swing higher,” he says.

‘Flooding doesn’t care.’

In 2014, recognizing the growing threat posed by climate change, the General Assembly passed the Resilient Rhode Island Act. The legislation set the state’s first greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets and established the
Executive Climate Change Coordinating Council to oversee these and other climate change-related efforts. Three years later, then-Governor Gina Raimondo appointed the state’s first chief resilience officer, Shaun O’Rourke, to drive climate resilience efforts in Rhode Island. O’Rourke, then working under the umbrella of the Rhode Island Infrastructure Bank, spent his first year in the position developing the 2018 Resilient Rhody strategy — which, among other things, identified key actions the state and municipalities needed to take to shore up their infrastructure against flooding, urban heat islands and other climate-related effects.

Not long after, the state established the Municipal Resilience Program, graduating its first cohort in 2019. Launched in partnership between the RIIB and the Nature Conservancy, the program requires participating communities to complete a workshop where they create a resiliency plan. In exchange, cities and towns are eligible for state grants and technical assistance to target climate-related problems like flooding and coastal erosion in their communities.

Last year, Governor Dan McKee revived the chief resilience officer position under the Department of Environmental Management, appointing Kimberly Korioth in December. Formerly a stormwater analyst for the RIIB, Korioth has extensive experience working with municipalities to combat flooding on their streets. In her work with the Municipal Resilience Program, Korioth says, flooding was often the top climate-related concern raised by cities and towns.

“Increased precipitation and the resulting flooding from that is definitely one of — if not the biggest — hazard that we’re seeing across the state, coastally and inland. In those workshops, that’s something that was consistently the top thing brought up by municipal staff,” she says.

In the past three years, awareness of climate-related issues has only grown. In 2021, the RIIB received approximately $5 million in funding requests for Municipal Resilience Program action grants. In 2023, that number grew to more than $52 million.

“Municipalities know what they need to do. They know where the concerns are, [and] they’re ready to tackle them,” Korioth says. “It’s just having the backing to be able to do it.”

Over the past decade, as awareness of climate change has increased, a hodgepodge of grant programs and resources has sprung up to help municipalities combat flooding and other threats. In her new role, Korioth says she hopes to help municipalities and agencies navigate this network of sometimes overlapping resources. Complicating the situation is the fact that climate disasters rarely lie within just one municipality. In 2021, the RIIB piloted a “regional resilience coordinator” position on Aquidneck Island to help communities coordinate their responses to climate change. Korioth says the position has been successful at helping tackle issues like flooding on a regional scale and hopes to add more regional resilience coordinators around the state.

“These resilience challenges, they don’t know municipal boundaries,” she says. “They don’t know the boundaries between funding sources. Flooding doesn’t care.”

Seeking a solution

On Dec. 18, Tamara McKenney was at T.F. Green Airport heading back from Florida with her husband and her business partner, Kris Waugh, when she got a text from her landlord saying the building was in danger of flooding. McKenney and Waugh are co-owners of Apponaug Brewing Co. in the former Pontiac Mills in Warwick, right on the banks of the Pawtuxet River. The group headed straight to the brewery, where property staff were busy sandbagging against the incursion of rising floodwater.

McKenney left for home to monitor the situation remotely from the property’s security cameras, but around 2:30 a.m., unable to watch from afar as the river invaded her business, she returned to the scene. By the time the river crested the following evening, the Pawtuxet had reached 15.11 feet, six feet above flood stage and the second-highest recorded elevation after the flood of 2010. Inside, water had damaged 90 percent of the kitchen and bar equipment and climbed two feet up the brewery’s walls. Instead of an anticipated monthlong vacation, McKenney, Waugh and their staff spent the holidays ripping out walls and tallying up losses. They were preparing to reopen the week of Jan. 7 when the January storms brought a second flood, this one less damaging than the one before.

“We had sandbagged doors and everything, but we’ve got glass doors. You can’t hold that much water at bay,” McKenney says.

At the same time McKenney was sandbagging doors in December, David Radcliffe, deputy director of the Providence Emergency Management Agency, was on Charles Street in Providence, monitoring an area of frequent flooding. He and the PEMA staff had spent the day driving from one location to the next — measuring water levels, closing off streets, monitoring power outages and meeting with city councilors about flooding in their wards. Over the previous summer and fall, the agency and Providence police had honed their approach and learned which streets to close during heavy rainfall, resulting in fewer calls for trapped people and vehicles than during the September storm. Still, that approach was relatively new. Providence, long accustomed to grappling with coastal and stormwater flooding due to its location at the top of Narragansett Bay, had recently become a hot spot for riverine flooding, when rivers snaking through the city overflow.

“With the riverine flooding side, that’s a little more complicated because it’s not always what rain’s falling in Providence, but what rain is falling to the north and west of us,” Radcliffe says.

Providence sits at the intersection of several rivers, including the Woonasquatucket, Moshassuck and West, all of which carry water from beyond its borders. During periods of heavy rainfall, these rivers often overflow their banks, resulting in the scenes of submerged cars and flooded storefronts so often spotted last summer. One river that proved particularly challenging was the West River, which flows into Providence from the north. Often appearing as little more than a drainage culvert, the river was responsible for the repeat flooding that inundated Branch Avenue.

“That river is so small that people don’t take it seriously enough,” Radcliffe says. “It’s usually a nice little babbling creek. But as soon as it rains, it becomes a full-blown river, and that’s something that’s complex and has a lot of nuances to it.”

As with many cities, the majority of Providence’s sewer infrastructure was built more than a century ago, long before paved roadways created a vast network of impermeable surfaces. Most of its stormwater drainage wasn’t built to handle ordinary rainfall on a highly developed area, let alone the concentrated storms resulting from climate change. While the Narragansett Bay Commission oversees the city’s combined sewer system, in which stormwater and wastewater flow together to a sewage treatment plant, the city maintains a separate stormwater system. Unlike some locales that charge property owners a fee for stormwater removal, Providence has no dedicated funding source for its management, resulting in decades of deferred maintenance, according to Sheila Dormody, chief of policy and resiliency for the city. 

“We have pipes that are 200 years old that are still in service,” she says. “This is a system that was designed for a different city than the one we have now, and a different climate than the one we have now.”

In the past, stormwater management has taken one of two approaches. Gray infrastructure, consisting of objects like pipes, culverts and retention basins, manages the water after it’s entered the system. Green infrastructure, which includes solutions like rain gardens, vegetative swales and tree canopies, mimics nature and attempts to keep water from entering the system in the first place. 

“Warmer air can hold more water. We’re having a warmer ocean that’s evaporating more water into an atmosphere that is ready to hold that water.” —Joseph Poccia

For much of the last thirty years, as other urban areas around the country were turning to green infrastructure solutions and prioritizing stormwater reduction, Rhode Island’s urban core invested in a massive gray infrastructure upgrade known as the Combined Sewer Overflow Abatement Program. Consisting of a series of partially built tunnels beneath Providence and Pawtucket, the project — overseen by the Narragansett Bay Commission — is designed to store excess sewage and stormwater and prevent it from emptying into the bay during heavy rainfall. 

While highly successful at improving water quality in Narragansett Bay, Dormody says the project has kept the focus on traditional gray infrastructure at a time when others were looking at more sustainable green models.

Those green models are on display at Roger Williams Park, where the Stormwater Innovation Center monitors thirty-five green infrastructure sites. Launched by a partnership of government and nonprofit agencies in 2020, the SIC serves as an outdoor classroom where municipalities and businesses can learn green methods for controlling their stormwater. Urban ponds such as those at the park offer a case study in modern water pollution, with everything from road salt to geese poop making its way into their depths.

“There are a lot of people that think water goes down a storm drain and it magically goes into a treatment facility, and it doesn’t end up right at the beach where they’re swimming,” says Ryan Kopp, SIC director.

Originally conceived to improve water quality, green infrastructure methods have the common side effect of reducing its quantity. Dormody says both types of infrastructure are necessary to tackle Providence’s drainage issues. In the short term, the city has dredged the stream that flows along Pleasant Valley Parkway and commissioned engineering studies of other repeat flooding locations to control the overflow. In the future, she envisions the city partnering with businesses and residents to implement green infrastructure solutions that “take the edge off” heavy storms. 

“We can’t choose gray infrastructure or green infrastructure investments. We’ve deferred maintenance on our gray infrastructure for so long, that bill has come due and we can’t ignore that. But we also know that we need the green infrastructure to add to that,” she says.

For Mayor Brett Smiley, who has compared the city’s approach to flooding to the blockbuster snowstorms of yesteryear, the issue is a top focus.

“We know what we can do to reduce the effects of climate change, and we know what we have to do to adapt our city and our state,” he says. “It’s past the point to be debating what caused it and to really focus on adaptations, because it’s here.”

For decades, communities have pursued federally funded buyout programs as a long-term solution to flooding. Between 1982 and 1985, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers purchased or moved sixty-one homes on thirty-eight flood-prone acres in Warwick in one of the largest examples of the strategy. The initiative, known as the Pawtuxet River Local Protection Project, restored the land to its natural state as a floodplain. Today, the strategy continues in municipalities including Johnston, Cranston, East Providence, Narragansett and Middletown using funds secured by U.S. Senator Jack Reed from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.

Though the strategy is effective at removing homes from the path of flooding, Pam Rubinoff, coastal resilience extension specialist for the University of Rhode Island Coastal Resources Center and the RI Sea Grant, notes the buyout process can take years.

“There needs to be large-scale changes, and we’re doing it piece by piece,” she says. “We’re not seeing large-scale plans that look at this for our communities.”

A former coastal engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Rubinoff served in the Peace Corps helping rural farmers in Thailand build systems to irrigate their crops before coming to the CRC. In her current position, she works with cities and towns to develop solutions to flooding and climate change. Initially focused on coastal communities, the CRC’s focus has begun to move inland as problems once considered coastal in nature affect a larger area of the state, Rubinoff says.

“This is a system that was designed for a difFerent city than the one we have now, and a different climate than the one we have now.” —Sheila Dormody

In 2015, URI — in partnership with the Coastal Resources Management Council — developed Stormtools, an online modeling program that projects flooding during storms and sea level rise. Cities and towns have long relied on flood maps developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to guide planning decisions, but Rubinoff notes these maps are often based on past conditions with outdated projections for events like 100-year floods.

“Now, we’re seeing these storms happen more frequently,” she says. “Given the increased storm intensity, the probability of a high-intensity storm has increased.”

Currently limited to coastal areas, the center recently received funding to expand Stormtools to show projected flooding along inland rivers. Rubinoff advocates an all-encompassing approach in which communities plan for the larger adaptations needed in response to climate change rather than respond to isolated storms. She points to Warren’s Market to Metacom project, an effort to gradually relocate activity away from the frequently flooded Market Street, as an example of long-term planning on a municipal scale.

“We need to be hopeful,” she says. “If we’re talking about resilience, we need to really build the resilience as opposed to acting out of fear — looking forward to making our community a more resilient place to work, play and live.”

Protecting vulnerable communities

Gloria Morales is no stranger to extreme weather. In 1998, a landslide triggered by Hurricane Mitch tore through her hometown in Guatemala, devastating the natural environment where she had grown up. After moving to the United States, the Olneyville resident decided to educate herself on environmental issues. In 2021, she joined Nuevas Voces, a program run by the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council that empowers residents of Olneyville and other riverfront communities to advocate on environmental concerns. Participants undergo a ten-week training program focused on neighborhood impacts including flooding, toxic exposure and heat islands. Some participants, including Morales, have continued their involvement through Campeones de Combate Climático, a newer environmental leadership program for Spanish-speaking residents.

Morales spoke about her experience in an interview translated by WRWC community programs assistant Haley Essington. Olneyville, like several neighborhoods in western and southern Providence, is particularly vulnerable to flooding due to its proximity to the Woonasquatucket River. In a previous residence on De Soto Street, Morales says, she watched during the storm as floodwaters reached the parking lot of her home. Though she acknowledges the city has collaborated with organizations like the WRWC to find a solution, she feels city officials are not acting quickly enough to respond to the urgency of the situation. As the impacts of climate change continue to accelerate, floods are happening more frequently than before, she says.

“We should not wait, because we are at risk of suffering something worse,” she says. “I think it is better to act quickly and think about the worst in these cases. Because if we don’t think like that, it’s going to happen like it happened to us [in Guatemala].”

Many organizations are increasingly looking at the outsize impacts of climate change on vulnerable populations. In 2019, Providence released a Climate Justice Plan outlining its efforts to create an equitable response to climate change, particularly for neighborhoods designated by the Environmental Protection Agency as “frontline communities.” These include parts of Olneyville and Manton as well as Silver Lake, Wanskuck, Washington Park, South Providence and the West End. Earlier this year, a coalition including Groundwork RI and the Providence Resilience Partnership launched a project to enable residents of Washington Park and South Providence to envision a new future for the shoreline along Allens Avenue.

“There’s a whole aspect of climate impacts on more vulnerable people that we really need to be thinking about,” says Michele Jalbert, executive director of the Providence Resilience Partnership. “If you live with a disability, for example, if you’re in a wheelchair, how do you get out when the water rises to the level of the ceiling in half an hour?”

Looking ahead

In January, President Joe Biden approved the governor’s request to make federal disaster assistance available to individuals affected by the September flooding in Providence County. The storm caused an estimated $1.6 million in uninsured damage and had the greatest impact on low- and middle-income families already suffering from a housing crisis, according to the request submitted in November. The approval means individuals like Walker and Amitrano can apply for reimbursement for expenses related to their flooded Dean Estate apartments, though for many, the monetary loss is just part of the overall cost. As of January, Walker was still living with a friend in Johnston. After three weeks at the Extended Stay America in Warwick, Amitrano and his family were able to find a new apartment off Scituate Avenue in Cranston. Earlier this year, the basement level of their new building flooded, but the family’s apartment, located on the second floor, was safe.

“Everywhere you ask, the rent’s either higher than what we paid or there’s a year waiting period,” he says.

In January, Apponaug Brewing Co. reopened after its second round of flooding, but the river and the increased likelihood of storms pose a continued risk. McKenney is looking into the stormwater management practices of towns and entities upstream from the brewery as she tries to find a long-term solution.

“There’s so many things we could’ve done to prepare ourselves, and we certainly will for the next time,” she says.

As of January, municipal and state officials were still assessing whether the flooding from the December and January storms qualifies for federal disaster assistance, but resilience practitioners say more is needed. Korioth, the chief resilience officer, says boosting funding for state and municipal climate resilience projects is among her top goals in the position. While some of that funding will come from federal sources — such as FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant program and NOAA’s Climate Resilience Regional Challenge — the state plans to put another green bond before voters in 2024, and Korioth is looking into creating a resiliency line item in the state budget, as is done in neighboring Massachusetts.

“Over $52 million in resilience needs really can’t be ignored,” she says. “The more that we can bring these challenges to the forefront, the quicker we can get them addressed.”

For those whose homes have already flooded beyond repair, it may be too late. But for the 1.1 million people depending on these 1,214 square miles to sustain their way of life, the cost of failing to act is higher than most are willing to pay.