People living near Belmont Park in Floral Park’s West End have feared floods for decades.
When a lot of rain falls, Mayor Thomas Tweedy said, runoff water from the park and other parts of the village without much green space overwhelms storm drains, backing it up into streets and homes.
“They (West End residents) haven’t slept well in the summertime knowing a storm’s coming,” Tweedy said.
The village is moving forward with a group of infrastructure projects that it hopes will put those fears to rest by resolving the area’s drainage problems.
The projects, which Tweedy announced in a pair of villagewide messages in late October and early November, are aimed at reducing the amount and velocity of water flowing through the village’s drainage pipes.
One component of the effort is the installation of a second recharge basin at Belmont Park’s border that will collect runoff storm water and slowly drain it into the county’s underground aquifer.
Tweedy estimates the basin will put millions of gallons of storm water out of the drainage system and back into the ground, easing the burden on Floral Park’s pipes.
A recharge basin was installed near Belmont Park in the early 1980s, Tweedy said, but over the years it has proven insufficient to address Floral Park’s flooding problems.
Through an inter-municipal agreement, Nassau County will be footing the bill for the $1.75 million project, which has been in the works since 2008.
State Sen. Jack Martins (R-Mineola) helped the village get permission from the state Franchise Oversight Board, which oversees Belmont Park. Engineering firm Divirka & Bartilucci is now drafting final plans for the basin to send to the state Office of General Services for approval.
Tweedy said the village hopes to solicit bids for the project in the spring.
“It’s not bureaucracy, it’s process,” he said. “People want to be very careful. … If we’re going to spend money we want to make sure it’s going to work.”
Because it will eliminate so much water from the drainage system, the second recharge basin allows the village to install a larger drainage pipe in one of its most easily flooded areas.
In the spring, the 18-inch-wide pipe at the intersection of Cedar Street and Hickory Street will be replaced with a 30-inch pipe.
Though this was a long-known solution, the county Department of Public Works found that unless some storm water could be kept out of the pipes, a larger pipe there would still result in flooding in another area.
“By trying to relieve a problem in one place, you just push the problem someplace else,” Tweedy said. But with the recharge basin, he said, that won’t happen.
The pipe replacement is one of three updates to Floral Park roadways that will start next year.
Lowell Avenue on the north side of the village and Raff Avenue on the south side will both be fully rebuilt, Tweedy said. The village took out bonds to pay for the projects, which will cost $1.9 million combined.
