Did developer influence play into Santa Rosa decision to continue using old rainfall data?

For months, as the painstaking process of putting together a revised Santa Rosa County Land Development Code rolled forward, Chris Curb, an advisor for Flood Defenders - Panhandle, could take comfort in knowing the county was determined to update the data it used to instruct developers on how to design storm water systems.

His hopes for progress were dashed on Sept. 18, though, when County Engineer Rebecca Jones announced the planned switch from an ancient FDOT 1 rain calculus data inventory to the somewhat less dated Noah Atlas 14 model had been scrapped.

"Influence," was Curb's answer to a question about what might have happened to bring about the county decision to make the last-minute change. "I believe developers hired engineers to go to the county and influence them to not go with the more stringent design principles."

Moving from the FDOT 1 plan to the NOAA Atlas 14 plan would have forced developers to, as Jones described it in a 2022 interview, "build a little bit bigger (retention) ponds" and "install a little bit bigger pipes." Both are items that would drive up the cost of construction.

Curb's argument that "it's obvious someone's been influenced" has gained a lot of traction, especially in light of the recent revelation that Pace-based developer Edwin Henry paid $13,000 to fund an unsuccessful 2022 smear campaign to prevent County Commissioner Kerry Smith from winning the District 2 seat.

As documents recently released as part of a legal settlement show, Henry used false information to go after Smith, who campaigned on reining in haphazard development, to better the chances of a commission candidate of his choosing.

Curb and a group of fellow county activists are organizing efforts to appear at Thursday's County Commission meeting to protest the flood data policy reversal ahead of the board's vote to finalize the contemplated LDC revisions.

Their argument is that the Florida Department of Transportation's rain data charts precipitation from some unknown start date through 1979, so that the information the numbers provide is nearly 45 years old.

Santa Rosa County has experienced 14 storm events exceeding a 100-year storm measurement since June of 1989, Curb argued on social media, and in the last 34 years has experienced rainfall events exceeding 100-year storm status every 2.4 years.

He said the Department of Transportation itself has decided its data is no longer to be used for the design of storm water infrastructure.

"We're using obsolete rainfall data," Curb said. "I don't think that's very smart. I think it's actually foolish."

Assistant County Administrator Brad Baker said he realizes the timing of the announcement of the decision to stick with the antiquated DOT 1 rain data, a month before the new LDC is voted on, was not ideal.

"I get that it looks suspicious," he said.

He said he is not sure why a group of local engineers waited as long as they did to approach the county to suggest that switching from DOT 1 to NOAA Atlas 14 would create costs with no benefits, but added that, in the interest of fair play, county staff felt obligated to research the proposition.

County engineers determined that what the private industry engineers were telling them was true, that all of the flooding problems occurring in Santa Rosa were happening in areas where storm water containment defenses had been implemented to standards theoretically able to withstand a 25-year storm event.

Since 1996, developers have been designing storm water systems to meet the challenges of a 100-year storm, which differing models state is a storm producing somewhere between 12 and 20 inches of rain in a 24-hour period.

"We found the flooding problems we have all come from before we went to the 100-year storm requirements," Baker said. "The engineering department did a lot of research and what they found was that we were trying to solve a problem that is not a problem."

And, as both Curb and Baker pointed out, the NOAA Atlas 14 precipitation data isn't exactly hot off the presses. Its statistical review charts rainfall patterns from 1840 to 2012.

The NOAA data is also gathered using rainfall gauges, of which, Baker said, there are just two in this area, one in Jay and another in Pensacola. That's not enough data collection, he said, to provide a fair reading of what is happening with the region's weather.

County officials have gone so far as to produce a power point presentation to argue how well the existing design standards are working to prevent dangerous flooding.

According to information contained in the power point, the county has had one catastrophic failure of a storm water retention pond constructed since 1996. A lack of proper maintenance at the pond site in the Sound Hammock subdivision, coupled with the arrival of Hurricane Sally, is blamed for causing the September 2020 failure.

Baker said there are some items within the LDC to be considered Thursday that should help the county to better control flooding.

Most of the county's subdivision flooding problems, Baker said, are caused by pooling in areas where water is not allowed to drain and move through ditches or storm drains to a collection point.

Lot grading plans, required for South Santa Rosa development as part of the 2021 LDC revision, will become mandatory in the north county this year, Baker said. They are being introduced to encourage developers to come up with "conveyance systems" to better move water through subdivision sites.

The county has also been seeking out hazard mitigation grants, Baker said, to update storm water drainage infrastructure in neighborhoods built prior to 1996.

And even as the argument rages over FDOT 1 and NOAA Atlas 14, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has embarked on a $23 million project to update rainfall data. NOAA Atlas 15 is scheduled to be released in 2026.

Both Curb and Baker spoke with enthusiasm about the new precipitation calculations, Baker said data collected will be done using Doppler radar, rather than rain gauges.

"I'm looking forward to Atlas 15," he said. "We have good Doppler coverage in our area. It will be way more advantageous for us than using one rain gauge in Santa Rosa County and one rain gauge in Escambia to base our whole data system upon."

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This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Santa Rosa to use outdated rain data in revised land development code