On Tuesday, the plans for The Landing at River North were unveiled. (which, let’s take a second and sigh at how confusing this is. Because the development is on Cowan street and the river is curvy, it will indeed be north of downtown, but it’s on the east side of the river. Usually, when you say “north” people think Germantown or Salemtown, which are kind of northeast.)
Getahn Ward over at the Tennessean reports:
Chicago-based Monroe Investment Partners LLC plans to begin the work with a 40-acre first phase called The Landings at River North planned just north of the Kelly Miller Smith Memorial Bridge near where Jefferson Street becomes Spring Street. The overall River North Development District will span 125 acres, including where the Topgolf sports entertainment complex is rising.
I think this development is a good idea, for all the reasons people make in Ward’s story. It is a chance to do massive development in the urban core that doesn’t disrupt an existing neighborhood. And, if you haven’t driven Cowan Street before, do yourself a favor and rectify that. Just when you think, “Well, how many warehouses can there be in this city?” you turn and get one of the most beautiful views of the river and of downtown. If developed properly, it will be a lovely place to live.
That “if” though, man, it’s a doozy. Adam Sichko over at the Nashville Business Journal got the skinny on the developers’ thinking on flooding, because, yes, that area is in the floodplain (which you’ll notice on your drive, should you take it).
David Bailey, a principal at Nashville's Hastings Architecture Associates, said flooding "has been at the forefront" during planning, with a goal of avoiding impact on sites located downstream. Most if not all of this property was underwater during the flood of 2010.
"The project will elevate streets, sidewalks and first floors above the [Federal Emergency Management Agency] flood elevation level so that access and investments in this new neighborhood are protected," Bailey said. "This plan also has been put together with significant input from the city as to flood protection."
This is good news. It’s still our civic duty to keep an eye on this and make sure that flooding is taken into consideration. We’ve seen in the past developers spouting off about how we had our 500-year flood in 2010, so why not let people 490 years in the future worry about things. That’s unfortunate.
Nashville, if you hear nothing else I’ve ever said, hear me on this: the term x-year flood may make sense to the Army Corps of Engineers but it’s confusing and misleading to civilians. It doesn’t mean that you only have a flood that bad once every x number of years, so once you’ve suffered through a flood once, you don’t have to worry about a flood that size for some period of time. It’s more like a dice with x number of sides. Just because you roll “500 year flood” one year doesn’t prevent you from rolling “500 year flood” the next year. Having a 500 year flood also doesn’t eliminate a 50 year flood or a 100 year flood. Those are their own dice, so to speak.
As I’ve stated before (and I’m sorry, but this is just super important and we have a lot of new people here since then):
The National Weather Service calls any crest above 45 feet on the Cumberland downtown a "major flood stage." This is our worst-case scenario. The rarest of the rare floods. In the past 100 years, we've reached 45 feet or above 15 times. It had been a long time. Before 2010, we hadn't seen a major flood on the Cumberland since 1984. But we do see flooding. Flood stage is 40 feet and we've hit that 25 times since 1887.
Again, to go back to the D&D analogy, since we've started tracking floods on the Cumberland in detail, Mother Nature has had 128 chances to roll all her flood dice to see if and how bad we're going to flood. In spite of FEMA putting flooding chances at 1% or 2%, suggesting Nature ought to roll "flood" very infrequently—once or twice every hundred years—she's actually hitting "flood" 19.5% of the time—every five years or so.
And, repeating myself, just to drive the point home—the really rare, really bad floods of 45 feet or above have hit 15 times since 1887. We call these "100-year floods" or "500-year floods" or whatever other name we want to slap on them to assure ourselves that we'll never see another, but Nature's dishing out these floods almost 12% of the time. That's a "really rare" flood every decade or so on average. We were long overdue.
Increasing the density in the urban core is necessary. And the Cumberland is beautiful and we should take more advantage of it as a wonderful feature of the city. Plus, the Corps has done a really good job of mitigating flooding, in general, on the Cumberland. But we’re not gods. As much as we know and as able as we are to dam up the river, we can’t stop it from flooding sometimes.
But those floods will be a lot less devastating if we plan our city keeping them in mind.
