As Fayetteville looks to strengthen its stormwater infrastructure, the city’s government may step in to mitigate the risk of a “high-hazard” private dam breaching.
That’s according to the city’s Public Services Department, which proposed the project to fortify the private Arran Lakes West Dam during a Fayetteville City Council work session on Aug. 5. With a unanimous vote, the council expressed support for staff to move forward with the project development and design for safeguarding the Arran Lakes West Dam, located in the Arran Lakes neighborhood, on the southwestern city limits near Hope Mills.
The proposed fix was presented three days before another private dam in Cumberland County, the Raycona Dam, breached during Tropical Storm Debby. Jim Talian, capital project portfolio manager for the city’s Department of Public Services, said the dam project aims to mitigate downstream impacts of other stormwater projects the city is implementing in the Arran Lakes area, which the department’s models show would slightly increase the risk of the dam overtopping.
“Helping things in one area can potentially make it worse in other areas if you don’t mitigate what you’re doing,” Talian said.
The overtopping project, Talian said, would provide new water detention space in the neighborhood, where options for storing excess water are low, partly because of the subdivisions built there. The project could also minimize potential overflow issues for a nearby Beaver Creek tributary and ensure the city-maintained street on top of the dam does not get blocked in the case of a breach, Talian said.
The Arran Lakes West Dam, as constructed, doesn’t meet certain state safety standards; the project, city staff said, addresses that as well.
The project is estimated to cost the city about $8.5 million, which is about three times the estimates for the other proposed option for stormwater management in the watershed, Talian said. That option involves doing localized detention for the two stormwater management projects underway in the watershed, and would require the city to also complete an additional 10 solutions proposed to manage stormwater in the watershed. The Arran Lakes West Dam overtopping project, Talian said, is “the most direct, effective, and economical solution to protect the facility from potential flow changes.”
‘Looming question’
For Fayetteville residents, concerns about dams breaching amid regular flooding and aging infrastructure is nothing new. But as the city’s growth and development increases, and extreme weather events become more common, the debate about who’s responsible for maintaining and restoring private dams that are vulnerable to flooding has ramped up. Such has been the case with the lengthy legal battle between four homeowners’ associations and the city, which the homeowner associations argue should help restore their now-barren lakes after catastrophic
flooding from Hurricane Matthew in 2016 destroyed them.
A couple miles down the street from the Arran Lakes West Dam, are the remnants of another dam in the Arran Lakes neighborhood: the Arran Lakes Dam. Situated in the former location of Arran Lake, the dam overtopped during Hurricane Matthew in 2016, leaving the lake dry. The Arran Lake Homeowners Association is part of the lawsuit against the city to get the dam fixed.
Martin Young, former Arran Lake HOA president, said he has lost faith that the city will ever do anything to fix the Arran Lakes Dam, even as a ruling on the HOAs’ appeal to a decision favoring the city is imminent, according to attorneys on the case. He described former neighbors who had expected to retire surrounding the peaceful lake, but who instead spent their last years fighting to get help to restore it.
“They lived for the lake and they died not having the lake that they gave their lives to,” he told CityView.
During his presentation at the August work session, Talian addressed the unique challenges posed by the city working on a private dam, such as the neighborhood’s consent to work on it and the extent of the homeowners association’s involvement in the city’s fix.
“One other thing I should probably mention is that Arran Lakes [West] Dam is a privately owned dam, and therefore there are a lot of other implications, other than engineering implications on how that would be accomplished,” Talian said. “But we feel that that is certainly worth overcoming due to the tremendous cost savings that we’re showing here and the overall benefit to the community and the city as a whole.”
Young also expressed concern that the Arran Lakes West Dam was being addressed by the city — one of a select few dams the city has attended to — while others have been empty since breaching during Hurricane Matthew, or are still at a high risk of breaking and destroying surrounding infrastructure.
“That fits right in with what we’ve been through,” Young told CityView.
Talian acknowledged that the logistics of working on the Arran Lakes West Dam presented a “big question that’s looming out there.” But he emphasized the city was only considering fixing the dam to mitigate the impacts of its own stormwater management projects, and not any private buildings or developments.
“So we are not really providing protection for any individual development other than our own work, other than the work we are doing to reduce flooding in the neighborhood,” Talian said. “I guess a developer could possibly approach us and want to maybe participate in some way, contribute, but I don’t know the legality of that or the precedent for that. But we’re not providing protection for any private development.”
What’s next?
Mayor Pro Tem Kathy Jensen, who said she had experienced destructive flooding when a dam in her King’s Grant neighborhood breached during Hurricane Matthew, expressed support for the project.
“For somebody that has been through the overtopping and the street falling into the ground and having one way in and one way out, I will say that it will cost the city more money in the future if that happens, and I lived through it,” Jensen said. “It took a year and a half to get our road fixed and to get the culvert right, and I think that we really need to think about it, so I will be supporting that.”
Now that the council has given consent for staff to start developing the design for the project, staff will return with updated findings. Council Member Derrick Thompson suggested that the Arran Lakes West Homeowners Association should support the proposal when they are consulted about it.
“As a representative of that district,” Thompson said, “I think it would behoove the community to try to look at this project so they don’t lose their lake in case we have another little Debby come through or a large Debby come through, which would not be able to mitigate the amount of water that will come through.”
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Are you interested in discussing our situation here in Arran Lake? Our perspective on how the city failed on their obligation to mitigate the failure of our dam by utilizing our lake as a retention pond.