43 Fair St_DEP Response_02.05.21 Berkshire
Design
Group
February 5, 2021
Northampton Conservation Commission
210 Main Street, Room 11
Northampton, MA 01060
RE: Notice of Intent File Number: WE 246-0748 – MassDEP Comments
Dear Commissioners:
On behalf of Mr. Joe Jasinski, we submitted a Notice of Intent on February 1, 2021 for work in the Bordering
Land Subject to Flooding of a single-family home property at 43 Fair Street in Northampton. The application
was received by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP) and assigned the file
number, WE 246-0748. The purpose of this letter is to address the four comments made by the reviewer from
MassDEP.
1. The most recently available flood profile data for the City of Northampton under the National Flood
Insurance Program is from the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Flood Insurance
Rate Map (FIRM) community-panel number ‘250167 0002 A’, effective date of April 3, 1978. Please find
attached a copy of the FIRM for the area surrounding 43 Fair Street.
2. Plans have been revised to show all elevations on the NGVD29 vertical datum. As noted on the plans,
the elevations of the survey were originally taken in NAVD88 and then converted to NGVD29 through
the program CorpsCon.
3. The project is displacing 1598 cubic feet of flood storage volume as noted in the application with the
construction of the new pole barn. The lack of substantial elevation changes or other structures that
could potentially be altered or removed on the existing site result in the inability to provide
compensatory storage at each incremental foot of elevation change in strict compliance with the
Performance Standards. The project does propose removing an equal 1,598 cf of fill at the existing high
point of the site which represents the only feasible way of providing compensatory storage on the site
aside from the removal of the single-family home.
4. The 112 square-foot area of work within the Bordering Land Subject to Flooding (BLSF) is the area of
the walls from the proposed barn (1-foot thick walls for a 40-foot by 30-foot building, with two 12-foot
openings within the walls). This does not account for the proposed cut of existing soil at the high-point
of the property, which will be 1-foot of elevation cut over 1,598 square-feet of land. The relocated shed
will remain at the same elevation, having no impact to flood plain storage within the BLSF.
Sincerely,
Berkshire Design Group
Jeffrey Squire
Landscape Architect