Flood Control Goes Greek: Fed Up With Frequent Deluges, a Prince
George's Town Turns to a Mathematician From 3rd Century B.C. for Help
By Rosalind S. Helderman
Washington Post Staff Writer; Saturday, November 24, 2007; B01
A working-class community in Prince George's County that has flooded four times in the past
four years has put a technology more than 2,000 years old to work in a new $6 million pumping
station that residents hope will keep their little town dry.
The design, known as an Archimedes screw for the 3rd century B.C. Greek mathematician
credited with conceiving it, employs a massive, slowly turning screw to lift a huge quantity of
water up a short distance. The new station in Edmonston uses three of the screws to raise water
the 20 feet necessary to get it up and out of the town and into a levee system that runs along the
Anacostia River.
The technology has been used to shore up the dikes and levies of the low-lying Netherlands for
years but is relatively uncommon in the United States. An engineering consultant working on the
project thinks the Edmonston's station is probably the largest such Archimedes screw pump on
the East Coast and one of the most powerful in the nation, capable of lifting 250 million gallons
of water a day.
Edmonston, which borders Hyattsville and Bladensburg, is essentially at the bottom of a
geological basin along branches of the Anacostia. Levees built in the 1950s by the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers keep the swelling river out of the town and neighboring communities. But
they also form a barrier that prevents stormwater that pools in the town from flowing out and
into the river.
A pumping station was built in Edmonston when the levee was constructed, but it was small
even when it was first unveiled, designed to flush the town of water from the kind of flooding
that might occur every two years. Anything more, and Edmonston residents were out of luck.
Since then, the Edmonston section of Prince George's has become more urban, covered with
acres of parking lots and flat-roofed warehouses that collect water -- which have channeled more
and more stormwater into the 1,500-resident town.
The pump has also aged. It's a traditional design for providing flood control, with a small
rotating impeller that spins quickly, lifting water up a vertical pipe. But because the fan spins so
fast, it can short out or get clogged with branches. It has also had a tendency to freeze up when
the water flowing in becomes icy.
In December 2003, a hard, fast rain hit melting snow and swamped the town. "Town hall was
full of people yelling and yelling," Mayor Adam Ortiz said.
Edmonston flooded again July 4, 2005, and in October 2005.
When the water rose once more in 2006, 86-year-old Mary Temarantz declared she'd had
enough. The water poured in her windows and doors so quickly that she had to be evacuated by
boat. After more than four decades in Edmonston, she decided to move.
"When I get that house in order, I'm getting out of there," Temarantz said shortly after the flood.
But, impressed with Archimedes and his screw, she has decided to stay put.
Edward Binseel, associate director of public works for Prince George's, said the county began
studying what to do about the Edmonston pump about two years ago. About the same time,
Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.
With horrific images of a flooded New Orleans fresh in mind, Binseel said Prince George's
officials decided to foot the cost of a new system rather than retrofit the pump. The county
contracted with Waste Water Management, a Falls Church-based engineering firm.
"They basically came to the point where they said, if you had a blank canvas, what would you
do?" said David Rigby, the company's president.
That's when Rigby and his team came up with the idea of the screw pump. It can't lift water very
high, but that was no problem in Edmonston, where the pump only had to raise the water high
enough to get over the levee. "It's an absolutely classic situation for the application of an
Archimedes screw," he said.
Because the new pump sits alongside the Army Corps of Engineers' levee, it had to be approved
by the federal agency. When the plans arrived, Corps engineer Jim Ludlam did some cursory
research. He couldn't find an example of the Corps having built a similar pump anywhere in the
country. Only in one other place did he find an example of a local government constructing one
alongside their federal levee -- in Texas City, near flood-prone Galveston.
But Ludlam said he could see no danger to the federal government's investment in the levee, so
he gave the thumbs up. "It's their money," he said. "And it's their solution to their problem."
Prince George's also had to find a company that made large enough screws, 10 feet in diameter
and 50 feet long. Nothing in the United States seemed ideal, Rigby said, so the county contracted
with a Dutch company. The screws were shipped from the Netherlands to the Port of Baltimore.
Ortiz said the screws, which have recently become operational, are so powerful that if a person
fell into the water pond at the base, there's a good chance he'd be pulled up the screw and flushed
whole out the top. Not that Ortiz would advise trying it.
Except for a stint in the Navy, Bill Fronk has lived in the same Edmonston house since he was a
boy in 1941. He remembers all the floods, including big swells in the late 1940s and a more
recent deluge that destroyed the appliances in his basement. But, he said, he's hopeful that the
new technology will, at long last, keep the town flood-free.
"I'd sure hope so," he said, laughing. "The thing cost $6 million