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MBTA installing floodgates where D Line goes underground
By adamg on Fri, 11/09/2018 - 9:26am
The Boston Sun reports work began this week to install large steel doors at the Fenway Green Line portal that would close and keep water out of the tunnel should the Muddy River ever flood again.
Ever since water pouring into the Green Line in the Fenway flooded Kenmore station in 1996, the T has sent crews of workers to the portal to lay down a wall of sandbags whenever the Muddy begins to rise during storms.
Extensive work by the Army Corps of Engineers in recent years has lessened the odds of the Muddy overflowing its banks, but the T is not taking chances:
In addition to large steel doors, the project will also include installation of a big pump at the entrance and cameras along the normally meek Muddy River to monitor its rise.
Work, which will be done mainly at night and on weekends, is expected to take 16 months. Schedule.
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Comments
Been going on for months
Perhaps they are entering a new phase of construction but the project has been active since the early summer. They have rerouted the walkways between the station and Miner St. Between that, the Landmark renovations, and all the new buildings it's different walk every day.
Automatic?
They've had the brackets and wooden beams in place since the last flood so you could hand-build such a barrier. Are they looking for more of a slip-a-switch solution?
And of course these are going in now that the muddy has larger culverts and we shouldn't get a flood in that location of that magnitude again (so they say)
Project got grant money and
Project got grant money and conventional funding all these years. Better to have redundancy than take a chance with a vital bit of infrastructure. Muddy River is less likely to flood after Phase 1 of the Army Corps project, much less likely to flood after Phase 2. But that assumes something doesn't go wrong with the gatehouses at the Charles River or the emergency overflow conduit (which isn't that big) at Brookline Avenue which empties out behind BU. This flood door and sump pump is a 3rd and final line of defense if all else fails.
Brookline was forced to stop dumping overflow sewage and stormwater from their systems into the Muddy River so there is less volume of water potentially entering the river during major storms. Similarly the parkways are being slowly rebuilt to minimize overwhelming stormwater overflow.
Now if only the State Department of Environmental Protection would let the phragmites be mowed by Boston and Brookline....
This was in a book
I see someone at the T has read Troubled Waters