[thistleclub]

Study hopes to tame, if not reroute, Spencer Creek
(Dundas Star, Richard Leitner, Nov 21 2013)

If it had its way, Spencer Creek would use King Street to get through Dundas.
That’s just one of the challenges facing the Hamilton Conservation Authority as it tries to find ways to control flooding and improve the overall health of the creek’s watershed below the escarpment.

Hazel Breton, manager of water resources engineering, said a class environmental assessment begun earlier this year has already determined lower Spencer Creek isn’t dependent on groundwater from the upper watershed for its flow.

It’s instead a delta river system fed by surface water, one rerouted to higher ground as Dundas developed and whose storm surges are now controlled by engineered solutions, like channelization and a large drop structure by Market Street, she said.

“In the old days when they had floods, it wasn’t from the creek, it was from the water coming down the escarpment and heading down King Street,” Breton said during a presentation on the study to the authority’s conservation advisory board.

“The stream doesn’t want to be there. It absolutely doesn’t want to be where it is today. It wants to be going along King Street,” she said.

“It’s going to fight you and it will try to erode everything because when you deprive it of its natural floodplain, what you’re doing is building up a lot of energy within that very small plain.”

Breton said complicating matters during major storms is that Highway 403 hampers flow from Spencer Creek into Cootes Paradise and beyond.

“Dundas is like a bathtub and the kind of constriction at the 403 is filling up that bathtub up more,” she said. “You have metres more flooding because of the constriction.”

Breton said although Spencer Creek can’t be returned to pre-settlement conditions, it is an ideal candidate for adaptive measures to create “a novel ecosystem that is sustainable.”

In full here.