Our area was ready for major test that never materialized

Hurricane Dorian was aimed pretty much straight at the Treasure Coast. By Sept. 3, it had proven itself to be a monster storm in the Bahamas evoking memories of Andrew and other storied hurricanes. Then came the northerly turn that spared Florida and St. Lucie West from catastrophic damage.

“From Friday (Aug. 30) through the storm event, we received a little over two inches of rain,” said Dennis Pickle, district manager of the St. Lucie West Services District. “That’s all we recorded.”

But “we got very prepared for (Dorian),” he added.

There were two new things in place for the 2019 North Atlantic hurricane season. Dorian was the first time services district employees were on hand at St. Lucie County’s Emergency Operation Center during a state of emergency.

“There was such great communication between the district, the city and the county EOC,” Pickle said. “The county invited us to have a seat at their table.”

Thomas Stirtzinger, the assistant utilities director, was at the county’s emergency operations center for a few nail-biting days, Pickle said. As the EOC got storm updates, Stirtzinger passed them onto others at the services district.

This was also the first major storm since the district did the 6B relocation project. During Thanksgiving week last year, the district closed part of Southwest Cashmere Boulevard, just north of St. Lucie West Boulevard, to do that work to speed storm drainage on the northeast side of St. Lucie West. That includes the intersection of Cashmere and St. Lucie West boulevards, where two grocery and two hardware stores are situated – the kinds of stores folks need most after storms.

Additionally, the Lake Harvey Stormwater Storage Project, which was dedicated in January last year, is online for the next big storm to hit the Treasure Coast. Construction started in the spring of 2017. It wasn’t completed for Hurricane Irma in September that year. Pickle said 2018’s Hurricane Isaac, which didn’t hit Florida directly, did dump some rain on the area, but not as much as Lake Harvey is built to handle.

Also online is the Basin 4E-5 interconnect project, which is bounded within Cashmere and St. Lucie West boulevards and the Ronald Reagan Turnpike. Lake Harvey and the 4E-5 interconnect together should move about 5 inches of rainwater off St. Lucie West Boulevard between Cashmere and Bethany Drive during a 100-year rain event.

Pickle said as Dorian approached, the district was bracing for the proverbial big one.

“We were hearing anything from 12 to 19 inches (of rain) for the full seven-day period,” he said.

Pickle added that despite optimism in the system upgrades, no one at the district was rooting for a bigger system check. “We don’t really care to have the test,” he said.

Still, Dorian was an education. The district has hydraulic gates to move water out of the area into the broader stormwater systems in St. Lucie. It had opened them to reduce local water levels before Dorian’s anticipated landfall on the Florida Peninsula. Pickle said in the future that will probably be done earlier than it was this time.

“The more you drop the gates and the lower the water levels get, the longer it takes for water to leave the system,” he said.

According to the district’s weather station, the most rainfall in a 24-hour period during Dorian was about 6/10ths of an inch. Wind gusts never exceeded 45 mph.

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