No guarantee

Two months earlier, Middlesex Borough homeowners questioned a federal flood risk management project’s slow progress. Now, the Green Brook Flood Control Commission had another battle on its hands.

This time, during a virtual meeting last October, it was only one questioner, not the couple of hundred beleaguered homeowners who turned out in-person at the prior session.

That inquirer – Middlesex resident Kevin Redzinski – is known as a persistent questioner who gets under the skin of public officials. The commission’s October session was no different. 

Redzinski and Ray Murray, the commission’s chairman, debated the drawn-out nature of the flood management project. Another contentious point was the lack of action in addressing the precarious Heather Lane situation, according to meeting minutes. There, serious erosion threatens to drop at least two homes into a stream along the Green Brook border. The units’ owners and local officials contend a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers flood risk management project has added to – if not created – the problem.

Murray reiterated the Army Corps position, that the erosion problem would have occurred even if a flood wall and pumping station had not been constructed nearby. Other officials logged into the session jumped to the defense of Murray and the Corps.

But one – civil engineer Nate Wales from the Corps’ planning division – may have uttered the most telling comment of the entire session.

“It is important to keep in mind when we talk about a project that it is a misnomer to say the USACE (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) prevents flooding, We don’t,” Wales said after one Murray-Redzinski exchange. “USACE helps manage the risk; we seek to reduce damages from what it might have been. We make it so that smaller events don’t cause flooding, but there will always, always be the possibility for an event that may exceed what we are able to do.”

Wales’ candid assessment was missing from the August meeting, when flood-plagued Middlesex homeowners turned out, longing for the completion of a wall and other measures. Their assumption appeared to be, the project would bring 100% protection their homes don’t have currently.

Wales, however, acknowledged that isn’t necessarily so, particularly in the event of another cataclysmic storm like 2021’s Hurricane Ida.

The long-running nature of the Middlesex portion of the Green Brook Flood Risk Management project, together with Wales’ admission there is no iron-clad protection, won’t help the local perception of the Army Corps. Here, it has gained the reputation of an unresponsive bureaucracy, slow to act and unwilling to seriously consider it might have erred.

That perception may eventually be tested in a courtroom. Ken Beck, the owner of one of the erosion-threatened Heather Lane homes, said on Wednesday, Jan. 10 that the filing of a tort claim against the Army Corps is being considered. But Beck realizes that litigation could be extremely costly and take years to conclude.

Would his home and those of others, survive the erosion threat while it plays out in court?

It would not be the first time a plaintiff alleged the Army Corps had created or worsened an environmental problem. The internet contains numerous accounts of parties alleging the Corps’ work has had negative consequences.

In one case last year, a federal appellate court upheld a lower court’s 2020 ruling that the Army Corps was responsible for recurring flooding that damaged properties along the Missouri River in Nebraska. The Corps had changed how it manages the river’s flow to better protect the habitat of endangered fish and birds.

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