The gray-shingled house on Abbott Street was built in 1900, just west of the Rhode Island-Massachusetts line in East Providence on a former wetland by the Runnins River. Over the next century, a neighborhood called Luther’s Corner sprang up around it. Ribeiro and her husband Kenneth lived in Luther’s Corner their whole lives and raised their four children in the Abbott Street house. Flooding was a some-time thing. There were the floods of 2005 when the remnants of Tropical Storm Tammy dropped almost 15 inches of rain in Rhode Island over three days. The last days of March 2010 brought a historic 500-year storm—9 inches of rain that capped a series of smaller but significant rain events—turning the Ribeiro’s yard and much of the state into a lake.

“We went out in dinghies and canoes and sailed our streets,” she recalls.

But in the last decade, there were too many battles in the basement to count. One sump pump became four sump pumps. Then, Kenneth passed away sud-denly in 2017, and Kathy Ribeiro was managing the water by herself.

With 400 miles of coastline and 3,578 miles of streams and rivers, more than 33% of the state’s land mass is water. Many more densely populated communities were developed in low-lying areas such as mill towns, where a nascent Industrial Revolution harnessed the hydropower of rivers such as the Blackstone and Woonasquatucket. Over time, the natural landscape that aided the old drainage systems by absorbing rain was buried under asphalt and concrete.

Rhode Island has warmed about 3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900, bringing hotter, drier summers and falls. The shifting rainfall patterns produce wetter winters and springs, with more rain delivered in intense, frequent storms. Precipitation in the area has increased an inch per decade since the late 1800s.

Water quality and quantity are connected—when stormwater systems are blocked or overloaded, the excess becomes a source of nonpoint pollution. The cities’ and towns’ sewer and drainage systems are connected—yet many municipalities do not know exactly what is underneath their streets. Rhode Island’s state and municipal road systems, a sluiceway for uncaptured water, are also connected.

The fight to prevent chronic flooding is underway across the state, especially in urban areas.

“We had six flash-flooding events in 2023 alone—certain neighborhoods and businesses flooded multiple times; we had to do water rescues from apartments—the problems are multiple,” says Sheila Dormody, chief of policy and resiliency for the city of Providence.  “Some of it is related to elevations; some of it is that we have outdated, old infrastructure. Many of our stormwater pipes are more than 100 years old and not designed for the size of the storms we are having. We have a lot more impervious cover, so that means more stormwater runoff—it’s the biggest source of unaddressed water pollution in the city’s rivers, streams, and ponds. It’s really come to a head all across the city.”

There is a huge, deep rock tunnel under Providence.* Here, the Narragansett Bay Commission’s (NBC) combined sewer overflow (CSO) system holds overflow wastewater and stormwater until treated at the Fields Point Wastewater Treatment Facility.*

Every time the stormwater runoff exceeds the capacity of an interceptor* running into that tunnel, from her office in Providence’s Olneyville neighborhood, Alicia Lehrer, executive director of the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council (WRWC), gets a rancid reminder of how water quantity and quality are linked. [* see correction in footnote]

“There’s an overflow release valve in a little park, and it overflows all the time,” she says. “It’s like a geyser popping out of this manhole … and you have bits of toilet paper everywhere. It’s pretty disgusting.”

Yet, as Elizabeth Scott, a former longtime Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM) employee who now helps the state’s cities and towns develop stormwater management plans as Rhode Island’s liaison for the EPA-funded Southern New England Program network, observes, “There isn’t one agency that oversees stormwater management from a holistic perspective to look at both water quality and flooding.”

The Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency (RIEMA) administers disaster relief after a flood. RIEMA also handles the federal National Flood Insurance Program, which offers property owners policies to recoup flood losses if their municipality has enacted and enforced a floodplain ordinance that will reduce flooding risks.

DEM is responsible for monitoring water quality and enforcing violations of state-issued stormwater management permits. Many large and small entities have entered into consent agreements to improve their systems. For example, the NBC has operated under several water quality consent agreements with the DEM since the 1990s to ensure that its two treatment facilities—the largest in the state—adhere to the requirements of their permits. One result is the NBC’s Combined Sewer Overflow Program, the largest public works project in Rhode Island history, which includes the storage tunnel.

“Certainly, the DEM has lots of experts who understand hydrology and municipal drainage systems, but that’s not really their mandate,” says Scott. “So, there’s a gap.”

Nonetheless, there is a vast network of state and federal agencies, municipalities, universities, nonprofit environmental organizations, and citizens tackling the enormous challenge of flood mitigation and storm-water management.

“You really have to consider the entire watershed,” says Stefanie Covino, program manager for the Blackstone Watershed Collaborative at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. “The climate effects are at the watershed scale, so it makes more sense to work together.”

On a Sunday morning in February, Wayne Pauplis went fishing in the old Blackstone Canal. The channel was built in 1828 by Providence merchants who wanted a more efficient network to transport produce from farmers of Worcester and the Blackstone Valley to urban consumers. The canal functioned as a mill location and commercial waterway for two decades before the Providence and Worcester Railroad rendered the latter obsolete.

Much of the canal has been filled in, and the remaining parts are meant to be scenic companions to the river beside it. In Cumberland, it is part of the Blackstone River State Park and lazes past the old Ashton Mill, once part of the Lonsdale Company tex-tile empire, now apartments.

Pauplis, who lives at the converted mill, was using a 16-foot pool net to fish plastic bottles and beer cans caught in the fallen branches at the canal’s edge. Nearby, a volunteer crew from Cozy Rhody Litter Clean Up was doing the same, armed with plastic buckets and trash grabbers. Among them was the Markarian family, which was snagging lots of glass and dog poop bags. The January rainstorms had flooded the basement of the main apartment building and sent a torrent of trash down the Blackstone. John Marsland, president of Friends of the Blackstone (FOB), was there, too.

During the January storm, he was obsessively checking the U.S. Geological Survey’s cfs (cubic feet of water per second) data, watching it rise from a normal 600 cfs to 35,000 cfs. Then he met fellow FOB member Keith Hainley to see what those numbers looked like on the ground. The river had risen 5 feet behind the building FOB shares with the Blackstone River Watershed Council in Lincoln, spilling its banks by 100 feet and trashing the docks at Central Falls Landing, where lots of river tours and canoe trips launch.

“We were like holy s—!,” he recalls. “Once [the river] went down, it was like, look at the mess.”

That February day, volunteers spent three hours trash-picking the area around the Ashton Mill. Marsland says they didn’t even make a dent.

Trash is one of flooding’s pollution byproducts; surface and legacy pollution distribution is another.

“A lot of our headwaters are urbanized,” says Covino. “Some rivers start as stormwater, so urban waterways are often influenced by how much it’s raining.”

The Blackstone Watershed Collaborative, a coalition of 115 municipalities and other entities connected to or interested in the watershed, works on stormwater management and watershed restoration in 39 Massachusetts and Rhode Island communities. For example, the collaborative and students from Worcester Polytechnic Institute have been working with the town of Sutton to prioritize the repair and replacement of its 80-some-year-old rusting steel culverts, now heavily taxed by flooding.

Tucked under roads, railroads, and bridges, culverts play a critical role in municipal drainage systems. They create stream continuity by channeling excess water into the watershed. Culvert failures can lead to catastrophic flooding and road collapses, which are much more disruptive and expensive repairs.

The collaborative also works in Worcester’s city center’s Green Island neighborhood. Fifteen percent of Green Island was built over the Blackstone Canal, which flows under shops and triple-deckers and serves as part of the combined stormwater and sewer system. If it rains enough, that system backs up.

“In Worcester, over 20% of the area is impervious surface, and anything over 10% reduces water quality. We also have a lot of private unpaved roadways located near waterbodies, where the water washes off the dirt and funnels it into the river, causing sedimentation. At the receiving end, Woonsocket also has a lot of impervious surface, which creates flash flooding,” Covino says. “When that water is directed from the ground to somewhere else, at the outfalls, you have big floods of dirty water.”

The Woonasquatucket River is also beset by legacy pollution, making it unsafe for swimming or fishing. In floods, it becomes a circulator of nasty industrial chemicals. With headwaters in North Smithfield, the 19-mile river winds its way south through seven municipalities to the Providence River.

Historically, it has served as a dump for the textile, jewelry, and chemical industries. One of the country’s worst Superfund sites is in North Providence and Johnston. The Centredale Manor Restoration Project is removing a laundry list of the industrial pollutants left behind by chemical production and drum reconditioning businesses, which buried toxic waste or discharged it directly into the ground and the river in a 9-acre area between the 1940s and 1970s.

In 2012, the EPA created a clean-up plan; in July 2018, it reached a $100 million settlement with Emhart Industries, Inc. and Black & Decker, Inc. to implement it. Most of the contaminated river sediment and floodplain soil has been excavated, and now the project is seeking an offsite disposal and treatment facility. The WRWC provides input to the cleanup and handles community outreach via a technical advisory group. It’s one of its many projects the council works on toward its goal of “a swimmable, fishable” river and “climate resilience for the surrounding community,” Lehrer says. 

After days of gray, the sun and the winds are up on a Saturday afternoon in January, and the Woonasquatucket speeds clear and free through Olneyville. You can see right through the sienna-colored water to the carpet of stones on the river bed, and the banks are remarkably clear of trash. María José Gutierrez gives a brief tour of the greenway. She is a graduate of the WRWC’s Nuevas Voces, a program that taps community members for a leadership course on environmental justice and climate resilience.

Gutierrez, now a co-facilitator of the project, points out the bank erosion, the rain gardens that flank the bicycle path, and the activities depicted on a WRWC banner, flapping against a chain-link fence. The WRWC organizes trash pickups, runs summer camps, and monitors fish migration to raise environmental literacy and engage the surrounding community as stewards of the Woonasquatucket.

Since 40% of the river’s neighbors are Latino, Nuevas Voces addresses cultural nuances, such as the tradition of kitchen gardens, advising residents not to grow vegetables in the ground without a soil test because it is likely contaminated.

“Our program makes people pay attention to all these natural phenomena and teaches them that they can be resilient to climate change,” Gutierrez says. “And I am proud to be part of this organization because we have broken the language barrier and created the bond between Americans and the residents, who, regardless of their immigration status, are members of this community and have a right to have an active part.”

The state’s main stormwater management system focuses on water quality—not quantity—under the authority of the federal Clean Water Act and separate municipal stormwater management permits. The Rhode Island Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (RIPDES) requires cities and towns to map their drainage systems, inventory their components, such as catch basins and outfalls, and perform basic maintenance.

The first five-year RIPDES permits issued to 29 municipalities expired in 2008 and have not been updated. Joseph B. Haberek, administrator of the DEM’s Surface Water Protection unit, wrote in an email that the agency expects to have a draft permit available for public comment by the end of 2024 or early 2025. While Haberek doesn’t anticipate that the new permit will include a specific flood control requirement, he says the pollution control measures may have additional benefits, such as promoting stormwater infiltration, that help with flooding.

On the state level, the Rhode Island Department of Transportation is in the sixth year of a 20-year plan to upgrade its stormwater management system after the federal government fined it for failing to meet its obligations under the Clean Water Act. The state agreed to fix the massive drainage system with 25,000 catch basins and 3,800 outfalls that serve more than 3,300 lane miles of divided highways and surface roads.

To date, it has spent more than $70 million on watershed plans and stormwater treatment units that range from surface treatments such as bioswales (vegetated ditches) to subsurface devices such as hydrody-namic separators, which circulate incoming stormwater to remove the solids and allow clean water to move downstream.

Although the work addresses water quality, some of the improvements will also reduce stormwater flooding.

After what it termed “decades of neglect,” the department wrote in an email, “RIDOT is now making the necessary investments in rebuilding our stormwater infrastructure to bring it into a state of good repair so it will be resilient, environmentally compliant, and sufficient to protect our roadways from flooding in the future. We are also making investments for the necessary maintenance, both in terms of equipment and personnel, to preserve these investments.”

When the heavy rains come to Providence, Lindsay Dulude grabs her rain gear and an undersized dinosaur umbrella she appropriated from her son and heads out hunting for water—where it is flowing or pooling.

Dulude, a project manager for a software company, is one of about 30 volunteers using the city’s RainSnap app to take pictures and videos of storm drains, swales, and infiltration basins to be uploaded to the Stormwater Innovation Center’s RainSnap website. Dulude documents areas in Roger Williams Park, near her house, where the city has installed about 40 green infrastructure projects to filter polluted stormwater overflow from Mashapaug Pond.

“Some structures in the park work really well, but in others, the water just bypasses the trench completely and floods somewhere else,” says Dulude.

The vast majority of drainage networks are composed of aging gray infrastructure, such as pipes and tunnels. Increasingly, communities are retrofitting those systems with green infrastructure—a range of measures designed to reduce sewer flows by using landscaping, ditches, permeable pavers, gravel substrates, and other elements that tie back to the existing system to capture runoff and allow it to filter into the ground. 

Providence has embarked on a multipart plan to address its stormwater management and flood control deficiencies. The city has hired a consultant to analyze the mitigation strategies and costs and to make recommendations.

In addition, officials are using federal grants to better understand the city’s hydrology and flood patterns and aligning proposed solutions with its capital improvements budget. In the short term, the city is planting trees, which naturally soak up the rain and slow the rate at which it hits the ground, installing green infrastructure on city land, and encouraging private citizens to capture water with rain barrels and gardens.

“2023 was a case study of the consequences of inaction—failing infrastructure, sinkholes, road damage,” Dormody says. “The whole system suffered from decades of deferred maintenance, and the bill has come due.”

In 2019, the city established the Stormwater Innovation Center to research and monitor the existing green infrastructure in Roger Williams Park, experiment with new filtration technologies, train officials from other cities and towns, and serve as a stormwater professional information exchange. The center also enlists participatory scientists, like Dulude, and educates residents.

“We try to teach the public that all stormwater starts on an impervious surface, so replacing a patio or a driveway with something where the water can soak in—that’s less water running off and contributing to that flooding,” says center Director Ryan Kopp. “It’s a balance between what the community can do and the load that the government has to carry.”

That load can be heavy. Cranston, for example, spent $131,000 in manpower alone to respond to the storm events in September, December, and January. But there is also lots of help. Cranston officials are working with the Stormwater Innovation Center and have applied to DEM for a $300,000 grant to assist with site mapping, planning, and management of green infrastructure and tree planting, says spokesman Zachary DeLuca. Central Falls, which suffers from street and riverine flooding, has neither a facilities plan nor a good sewer and drainage system inventory. Nonetheless, “stormwater management has just become an essential part of the planning process,” says City Planner and Director of Economic Development Jim Vandermillen.

Macomber Stadium, a multi-sports complex, now boasts a permeable paver mezzanine, stormwater bioswales, and a state-of-the-art synthetic turf surface, covering an infiltration system and sand filter that captures runoff from more than 6 acres of surrounding hardscape. The field had been hosting Central Falls High School sports games since 1934 when Raymond Macomber bought the land from the Weyboset Mfg. Co. for $10.

By 2017, the field was worthless, sited on top of contaminated soil too unsafe for athletic play. Stormwater runoff issues also plagued the surrounding cityscape of abandoned mills. With a $6.5 million state loan and an $800,000 DEM grant, Central Falls was able to remove or encapsulate thousands of tons of contaminated soil and piggyback on the NBC’s CSO program and the stormwater tunnels running through the city. In 2020, officials cut the ribbon on the new Macomber Stadium. 

“Now we have this beautiful new complex that sits on a combined sewer and stormwater chamber,” he says.

Cities and towns also can get planning assistance from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). The agency, charged with watershed protection, conducts hydro-logic investigations of trouble spots and, if invited by a municipality, will work with the town to plan and design solutions. The NRCS is currently working on 14 different watershed projects statewide.

“One of my hopes is that we will start looking at the big picture. We are creating these hydrology models … so when a decision to grant a permit is made, they can consider the effects downstream,” says Darrell Moore, state conservation engineer for the NRCS.

Another source of support is the Rhode Island Infrastructure Bank (RIIB). In 2022, Rhode Island voters passed a $50 million green energy bond, which included a $16 million Municipal Resilience Program administered by the RIIB. In January, it awarded $12 million to 19 communities. The demand outstripped the supply—the bank received $52 million in requests from 30 communities.

“Up until five or 10 years ago, it wasn’t on municipal officials’ radar. But the frequency of the flooding has been a catalyst for people to realize that infrastructure has to change because it starts impacting property and commercial values and increasing other costs to cities and towns,” says RIIB Executive Director William Fazioli. “A lot of municipalities have the ability to plan and conceive a solution, but at the end of the day, it comes down to funding to make those plans a reality.”

oThere was a time when the water rolling down Cross Street in Westerly was caught by a wooded lot behind Sherry Hall’s furniture store. But the parcel was sold, and in 1957, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence built St. Pius X, a beautiful stone-fronted church with a large asphalt parking lot in the back. Now, there is nothing to stop a hard rain from ending up in the store’s basement. The January storms left 10 inches of water in a small troublesome area by the shop’s back door. In mid-February, the water was still there.

“I have to have the fire department pump it out— it happens a couple of times a year,” she says.

Hall took over the family business in 2000 when her parents retired. She changed the name to Hometown Furniture, picked up some more upscale furniture lines, and painted the exterior trim purple. She tried to address her water issues with a new roof and a rubber seal coat. But the cinderblock building sits low on Main Street, parallel to the Pawcatuck River.

In the summer of 2023, a Southern Rhode Island Conservation District (SRISD) representative approached Hall about participating in the Westerly Resilient Riverfront Renewal project. The conservation district, in partnership with the town, has been working on a more than $2 million redevelopment of Main Street with stormwater, traffic, and streetscape plans to beautify this industrial-looking commercial stretch, make it more pedestrian-friendly, and control stormwater to protect the Pawcatuck, says District Manager Gina Fuller.

The SRISD has been recruiting property owners on Main Street to give up some of their hard surfaces—mostly parking spaces—to allow the construction of grass strips, rain gardens, and other containment structures.

“I saw this as a perfect opportunity to incorporate the state’s stormwater management goals with the town’s goals of revitalizing the economic district on Main Street,” Fuller says. “Our roads are so narrow, and there really is no public property available for incorporating stormwater management best practices, so it’s critically important that we have the support of private landowners willing to house these components.”

The SRICD has signed up eight property owners to work on specific design plans. Hall is trying to weigh her parking needs against her desire for low-maintenance greenery that will boost Hometown’s curb appeal.

“It’s not just going to be beautiful, it’s going to be functional,” Hall says.

Sometimes, the best intervention takes away rather than adds. The NRC’s Emergency Watershed Protection Program buys private property at fair market value to remove structures and restore the land to its natural state. The program is now working with some Cranston property owners beset by chronic flooding. In July 2022, it secured $9.65 million to buy flood-prone homes in Luther’s Corner. Ribeiro was one of 18 who took advantage of the offer.

“I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it,” she says. “I just had to put my heart on the shelf.” When the sale closed in November, “I was holding back tears, because I have a lot of memories there,” she says. “But I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing.”

* Correction to print version: The print version of this story incorrectly identified this tunnel as being in Pawtucket and Central Falls due to an editorial error. The overflow occurs at a near-surface interceptor connected to the tunnel, not the tunnel itself. More info about the CSO Project: 

The Providence tunnel went online in 2008 and has since captured over 16 billion gallons of flow. The NBC is constructing a similar tunnel under Pawtucket and Central Falls, slated for completion in 2028, which will send captured flow to the Bucklin Point Wastewater Treatment Facility. Even these massive tunnels, however, cannot capture every drop of water; in very heavy storms, the 65 million gallon capacity tunnels will fill up and the excess stormwater will overflow.

NBC’s CSO project is not just tunnels. In addition to the tunnels, NBC did some sewer separation and a constructed wetland in Providence. Re: Macomber, the NBC’s consent agreement with RIDEM stipulates a certain amount of investment in green stormwater infrastructure (GSI). The projects in Central Falls (Macomber, Pierce Park, Louis C. Yip Field) fulfill that requirement. The stormwater captured through the GSI projects does not go into the tunnel, but percolates into the ground via a variety of methods (bioswales, underground retention chambers, permeable pavement, etc.).