Weather pros gauge last year’s historic rainfall by the record books. Pennsylvania farmers have another measure: decayed crops, withered and uneaten in their fields.
At golf courses, extraordinary downpours kept grass growing, mowers spinning and payrolls humming, even as some greens hosted less play. Roofers saw work pile up, thanks to leaky rooftops, but had few dry days to finish their jobs.
“When you can’t work, thousands of dollars are on the line,” said Craig Gouker, owner of Craig Gouker Roofing in Bethel Park and West Mifflin. “Things like this that are out of everyone’s control — it can be catastrophic to smaller companies.”
His firm managed to schedule jobs around the rain and handles off-site work in a warehouse, but other roofers might not be so fortunate, Mr. Gouker said. “We’ve been waiting basically for drought season to happen — and it never has.”
Such was the story in 2018 for weather-dependent businesses, agencies and utilities across southwestern Pennsylvania, where annual precipitation totals soared some 50 percent higher than normal. The Pittsburgh area logged 57.83 inches, with year-end showers Dec. 31 dropping just enough water to clinch a local record, according to the National Weather Service in Moon.
For the city’s biggest water utility, all the deluges added up to more customer calls for basement backups. There were 237 for the year, up from 166 in 2017, the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority said.
“We’re creating our proverbial wish list of projects throughout the city. Our response has been, in every case, to focus on repairing where the existing infrastructure has been compromised,” PWSA executive director Robert Weimar said.
The authority has tangled with a mess of costly landslides and overwhelmed storm sewers, many of them decades old. Officials are putting top priority on fixing system failures with “the most egregious impacts,” but they recognize “many others that will need action” as more money becomes available, Mr. Weimar said.
At the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority, workers recorded 153 days last year when precipitation was so intense that it overran storm sewers and mixed with raw sewage. Those so-called “combined sewer overflow” days — when the untreated contamination menaces local waterways — were up about 50 percent over 2017, said Douglas Jackson, Alcosan’s operations director.
The region is federally mandated to end those discharges in the coming years. Some storm water reaches the Alcosan treatment plant in Marshall-Shadeland, which treated about 5.5 billion gallons more in 2018 than the year before, Mr. Jackson said.
Still, the 6 percent to 7 percent increase in water flow increased the plant’s electricity costs perhaps $400,000 for the year, Mr. Jackson said. Pumps at the plant run on electricity.
There was one, minor upside, for Alcosan, to the wet weather: “Rain water comes to us with a little higher oxygen content, so our process to put air in the water — to keep microorganisms alive during rain events — uses less of our own air,” he said.
The weather landed a financial hit on Pennsylvania farmers, too. Flooding led to soil loss and crop failures, while waterlogged ground often made it tough for farmers to tend to their fields, said Franklin Egan, education director at the Centre County-based Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture.
“A lot of farmers are expressing anxiety about how typical this type of year might become, and how you keep farming in these conditions,” Mr. Egan said.
Some are rethinking their approach, looking in part at building soil health and investing in equipment that’s lighter or doesn’t involve tilling, he said. Such advanced tools can reduce soil disturbance, Mr. Egan said.
Closer to the urban core, Pittsburgh’s swiftwater rescue teams last year responded to at least 50 percent more incidents than normal, an emergency official estimated. Most involve drivers who try to ford high water, such as flash floods.
“They are not heeding the warnings. I wish they would. It would make our job so much easier,” said Richard A. Linn Jr., an operations chief in the city Bureau of Emergency Medical Services.
“It seems silly, but people don’t understand that only 6 inches of water will carry your car away. Six inches,” Chief Linn added. “And people drive through all the way up to their door, to the hood of their car.”
His advice: Don’t drive through water if the surface of the road isn’t visible — because that means the water depth is uncertain.
As for whether the area can expect more high water in 2019, Chief Linn has trouble believing that local meteorologists can predict a whole year, he said. At the National Weather Service, the Climate Prediction Center lists equal odds for above-normal, below-normal and normal precipitation in Western Pennsylvania over the next few months.
Rainfall and snowfall are more likely to be above normal later in the year, according to the center. AccuWeather.com meteorologist Brett Rossio has said he expects a return to more typical conditions by summer.
Persistent low pressure during 2018 allowed lots of damp weather from the Gulf of Mexico to surge northward, Mr. Rossio said earlier. Pennsylvania lately has had more wet years — compared to the long-term averages — than dry years, “but there’s no guarantee that will continue,” according to Penn State University meteorologist Jon Nese.
“I’d be excited to hear it’s a dry year,” said Chris Kukor, golf course superintendent at the Williams Golf and Country Club in Weirton, W.Va. Golfers there played about 450 fewer rounds overall last year than they did in 2017, although a special deal drew in non-members, he said.
A busy year at the club can host about 12,000 rounds, Mr. Kukor said. “We got people out as often as we could.”
The Wildwood Golf Club in Allison Park was just about even last year in rounds played, but that reflects facility improvements including drainage work to mitigate rainfall, superintendent Tom Fisher said.
“We’ve done what we could over the years to facilitate as many rounds as we could,” he said.
At the same time, the rainy weather drove slightly higher labor costs to cover more frequent grass-cutting, Mr. Fisher said.
And about 2019?
“It’s not like the weather says, ‘Hey, new year, new me,’” Mr. Fisher said. “Who knows what’s going to happen?”
Adam Smeltz: 412-263-2625, asmeltz@post-gazette.com, @asmeltz.
First Published: January 6, 2019, 4:19 a.m.
