The Village of Pelham handled calls from about a dozen residents about flooding in their homes during the storm April 30 along with issues with standing water in areas around the village. 

According to Mayor Chance Mullen, the areas most affected by flooding were Highbrook Avenue, along with Fourth through Seventh Avenues. Residents on those streets have dealt with flooded basements for decades, ranging from mild water intake to dangerous levels that reached their electrical panels.

The village has put systems in place to assist these residents after the flooding occurs.  

“There’s real-time support which is providing pumps for people who need it,” said Mullen. “And sort of connecting people with resources. We didn’t have a lot of people reach out to us this time, but in the past we often ended up being the intermediary between some nonprofits like the Polar Center and volunteer organizations like the Junior League and Pelham Civics.” 

Beyond helping residents who have already suffered from flooded homes, the mayor said there has been a great deal of progress over the last year in finding a permanent solution. In June 2022, the village board voted unanimously on a $110,000 agreement with Dolph Rotfeld to complete a village-wide flood mitigation study for “evaluating the feasibility of correcting flooding problems, preliminary cost estimates and sketches to alleviate the flooding conditions in accordance with objectives set by the village.”

Pelham is to receive the final report in the next few months, as well as preliminary recommendations for a system redesign. The study has also forced the village to clean all of the sanitary sewers, which handle sewage rather than rainwater runoff, and to do other work.

“We’ve relined 15,000 linear feet of sanitary sewers,” Mullen said. “We’ve cleaned almost all of the storm drains, so not just the catch basins but the actual pipes that run through the catch basins. And, we are nearly finished with the (closed-circuit TV) assessments of the storm drains which will help us identify any structural issues, any blockages, things like that.”

Once the reports on the state of the sewer systems are received, it will be possible for the village to get a cost estimate on the project. Mullen said he anticipates a “hefty price tag.”

Village of Pelham engineers assigned to the project are currently working with Millennium Strategies, a grant writing firm, hoping to get as much funding for the redesign as quickly as possible. New Rochelle is also cooperating with the village to solve flooding from a shared watershed that causes issues on Highbrook.  

There is no set timeline on the project.

“We want to make sure we are doing it right because it is a multi-year project,” said Mullen. “There is a reason things like this have gone unaddressed for so many decades. It’s because it’s expensive and takes a lot of time. It takes longer than any one trustee or one mayor will even be on the board. Fortunately, we have a full board that wants to move this as far down the road during our time as we can and continuously put the village in position to take each next step as we go.”