Higher sea walls may be needed in future; will residents agree?
Robert Stalzer, the tennis pro at Eau Palm Beach Resort & Spa, helps a hotel guest cross the flooded road in front of the resort after rains in late 2024. Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By John Pacenti
State transportation officials have a short-term fix for the flooding that vexes Manalapan along State Road A1A from the Eau Palm Beach Resort & Spa to just past Town Hall: raise the road.
But a long-term solution given expected sea level rise will force either the town or Palm Beach County to tackle how to get private property owners to foot the cost to raise their sea walls, engineers told town commissioners at their Dec. 9 meeting.
Jeremy Nichols, a consultant with Allbright Engineering, representing the Florida Department of Transportation, said a data-driven study that analyzed chronic flooding problems found that both tidal surges and heavy rainstorms routinely inundate area roadways, driveways and sidewalks, disrupting residents and local traffic.
New backflow preventers are helping a bit, but any driver during the recent king tides knows the problem is far from fixed.
The study used precipitation records, tidal data and elevation modeling, in addition to firsthand, time-stamped flood photographs from a September 2023 storm. “This gives us a high level of confidence in what we propose,” Nichols said.
It found that up to a foot of water accumulates at low roadway elevations. He showed photos of significant flooding in front of the Eau Palm Beach at the intersection of East Ocean Avenue and South Ocean Boulevard (A1A).
Nichols said the intersection was the “center of our study.”
“There’s flooding that occurs here during high tides and rainfall events that has generated a bunch of complaints,” he said.
Looking at the watershed as a whole, a lot of small basins drain toward the roads unless there are private drainage systems on abutting properties. “The roadway itself has a lower elevation than surrounding properties,” Nichols said.
That’s despite a $10.4 million state-financed project in 2009 raising A1A’s roadbed 18 inches and improving drainage on a 3-mile stretch south of the Eau.
The current plan presented to commissioners also includes sidewalk improvements off A1A north of East Ocean Boulevard that don’t lie in the town’s jurisdiction. Unfortunately for Manalapan, that $250,000 project will be the first on the checklist because it is the easiest and least disruptive.
Within the next five years, FDOT plans to elevate a portion of South Ocean Boulevard and upgrade the gravity drainage system for $6 million. The project would run from the intersection to just south of Town Hall.
Future efforts
Long-term plans include improving sea walls for both FDOT’s right of way and private property owners for $500 per linear foot. Installing a pump system would run $9 million to $10 million per mile.
“This project kind of addresses immediate current-day flooding and future flooding problems, both from tidal and precipitation,” Nichols said.
However, it is going to need town and resident buy-in.
“There has to be a joint effort, whereas the sea walls need to start coming up with time,” said Aylin Costa, another engineer with AllBright.
“There are other municipalities, and, you know, counties that have put in sea wall ordinances and things like that, where, when folks are coming in to do repairs, there’s a higher elevation that’s required.”
Property owners would have to bear the cost of increasing the height of the sea walls, while FDOT would pay for installing the pumps, she said.
Some coastal municipalities have gotten pushback from residents for trying to mandate sea wall height. Right now, it is a hot topic in Broward County, FDOT drainage engineer James Poole told the commission.
“How do you compel a private owner to raise their sea wall? They may not be interested,” Poole said. “They may be OK in accepting whatever vulnerability they might have to the sea level rise with whatever wall that they have out there today.”
Broward, he said, is mandating that any property owner who repairs a sea wall must meet new standards. Furthermore, this can trigger a mandate on neighbors to raise their sea walls because they are now a “weak link,” Poole said.
By 2060, every sea wall has to be 5 feet NAVD88 in Broward. “I know that Palm Beach County is keeping an eye on it and contemplating doing its own,” he said.
Commissioner David Knobel said the standing water is an environmental concern because it becomes stagnant and collects pollutants from the cars. He wondered if the state Department of Environmental Protection would have any input on the project.
Any drainage upgrades would have to meet state water quality benefit requirements, specifically by treating polluted roadway runoff before it enters local waterways, Costa said.
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