Kimberly Griffith and two of her children were driving home after lunch when the rain started to pick up. The day — Aug. 19, 2011 — had already been a rainy one in Pittsburgh.
Griffith pulled up to the bottom of Washington Boulevard in a storm with enough force to blow off 60-pound manhole covers. The street filled with 9 feet of rainwater and sewage, and Griffith’s minivan was submerged, killing her and her two daughters. Another woman was killed after being swept into the sewer.
Such heavy rain used to fall once every couple of years. But in the last eight years, the area has seen storms with an inch or more of rainfall in a single hour about three times every year. The prevalence of intense rain will likely worsen with climate change, scientists say.
Solutions have long been ignored. Flooding killed a motorist on Washington Boulevard in 1951, but Pittsburgh City Council at the time deemed the $785,000 needed to raise the road and build a storm sewer too costly.
More than 60 years earlier, the city buried the stream that once carried floodwater to the river. Renowned entrepreneur and judge Thomas Mellon argued against it, saying that there was too much water to fit into an underground sewer line. “This run in cases of heavy rains is turned into a raging torrent which an eight-and-a-half foot sewer cannot carry off,” Mellon said in an 1887 article in the Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette.
They call the proposed stream Little Negley Run.
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