Engineers Provide Update on Flood Protection Program

By Cynthia Drummond for BRVCA

July 3rd 2025

RICHMOND – At a stakeholder’s meeting on July 1, in the Richmond Community Room, residents and representatives from agencies, towns and organizations were briefed on progress on the Wood-Pawcatuck Rivers Watershed Protection Project.

The initiative involves flood mitigation projects over a wide area: from Stonington to Exeter. Participants from Richmond included Interim Town Administrator Erin Liese and Town Planner Talia Jalette.

The Southern Rhode Island Conservation District is sponsoring the project. The municipalities in the watersheds included in the project are also considered to be “sponsoring communities.”

Additional participants are the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed Association and the State of Rhode Island.

Project Update

Matthew Bellisle, of the PARE Corporation engineering firm, provided an update on the project, and the proposed mitigation measures.

“We’re going to discuss the alternatives,” Bellisle said. “That’s where we want to spend most of our time today, is going over those alternatives. That’s what you’ve been waiting several years for as we pull this together.”

The communities where the projects take place would be responsible for permitting, land acquisitions and utilities, and long-term operations and maintenance.

“As a consultant, we’ve done the analysis, we’ve done the engineering, we’ve done the science,” Bellisle said. “We’ve spent a lot of time building scenarios to evaluate solutions.”

The initiative began eight years ago.

“The projects have a pretty long history,  really got going in 2017 with an initial study, picked up some speed in 2020, 2021, and got turned into the study that we’re presenting today, and over the last four years, we’ve been running through those scenarios and meeting with the NRCS  [Natural Resources Conservation Service ] on a regular basis,” Bellisle said.

He also acknowledged what many in the audience were already thinking; that the big unknown is funding. While federal funding was secured to develop a plan, no funds have been allocated to design or construction.

“The next step after this is to determine if the project should be funded, so we’ll complete our report, and then it’ll go to that stage,” Bellisle said.

Richmond’s Flooding Problem

The town’s Hazard Mitigation Plan of 2022 recognizes the extent of Richmond’s flood hazards, stating,

 “The Town has approximately 3,000 acres of flood hazard areas, representing 11% of total acres town wide.”

The causes of flooding in Richmond include excessive rainfall from increasingly intense storms, snowmelt, and runoff from impervious surfaces that do not absorb rainwater.

The Hazard Mitigation Plan also warns of more flooding in the years to come.

“Based on the frequency of past flood events, and the projections for increased frequency and intensity of precipitation events in the coming years due to climate change, the probability of future occurrence of the flood hazard is Highly Likely – will occur every 1 – 5 years,” the document states.

The Mitigation Proposals

PARE geologist Andrew Cummings described the hydrological models he had used to mimic river flow scenarios in different areas of the watershed. Beginning at the southernmost point of the project, Westerly-Stonington, he described the measures that had been considered, from taking no action, to adding structures, such as levees, to using a combination of structural and non-structural mitigation.

Jalette asked whether the measures would be undertaken in a specific order, by community.

“Does it have recommendations for the order of the actions?” she said.

Cummings replied that the order would vary according to the site.

Jalette then asked,

“If you’re able to, as a community, get buy-in for certain options and not others, is it even worth it for the towns to pursue some of these options? Because, if all of these pieces need to work in concert with each other, if you can’t get Landowner A or Landowner B to agree to allow you to develop something along that corridor, then does that not torpedo your entire project?”

Cumming replied that the project, as a whole, would not be compromised, because the sites were independent of each other.

The Proposed Richmond Projects

At a site the consultants have dubbed “Hope Valley East,” Cummings said new levees would protect Dow Field and the surrounding properties but would also increase the velocity of the water. (Although Dow Field is on the Hopkinton side of Hope Valley, it is near the Richmond town line and the home of the Chariho Little League.)

“The flood water velocities become quite high with this channelized Wood River in flood stage, so there would have to be installation of some kind of energy dissipation device, like riffles, or maybe some larger boulders, something like that, just to make sure those velocities don’t scour out everything and start to damage the levee in that location,” he said.

When Cummings began talking about KG Ranch Road, known for frequent flooding, John Chabot, who with his wife Cindy owns a home in the neighborhood, said he had been waiting since the start of the meeting to hear about what might be done there.

The first mitigation option involves the construction of a substantial levee, about eight feet high, stretching from Wood River Circle and Pine Shadows Drive “all the way around pretty much the entire community in KG Ranch where it ties into Valley Lodge Drive near KG Ranch Road,” Cummings said.

The levee would reduce boater access, so Cummings suggested that a possible solution would be to install a public boat ramp, just south of Valley Lodge Drive.

A second option is known as an “operations required” version, because it would need physical operation by town employees.

“The roads would all remain as they are with the installation of these levees that would provide the same level of protection to the community, but there would be the requirement for flood operations to close those different flood barriers during flood events,” Cummings said.

Chabot told Cummings that upgrading the Skunk Hill bridge had significantly reduced flooding in his neighborhood.

“Just to give you a little history, when they did the Skunk Hill Road Bridge over, our flooding in our cul de sac dropped down completely,” he said. “And now, because all the trees and all the stuff has fallen into the water creating dams, you might say, now, the water is coming up higher….

I’ve been living there 45 years. I don’t know why they don’t just find a way to clean up the waterway and open up all the wood and that, and probably save a lot of people a lot of money, too.”

Cindy Chabot added,

“So many people used to canoe and kayak down the river, but now, there’s so much debris.”

The dates and locations of future stakeholder meetings are still to be determined.