For the Cranston homeowners who have been affected by perennial flooding, nostalgia went out the window a long time ago.

In many voluntary buyout situations, you find homeowners unwilling to leave their homes. They love their neighborhood and their neighbors, and feel that the improvements needed in the wake of flood damage are worth it in order to hold on to memories they’ve accumulated over the lifetime of a property. Even in Nashville, Tennessee, where the 2010 floods caused nearly $2 billion in property damage, 92 residents (about 30 percent) refused to give up their property rights so the land could be returned to the floodplain.

Back in 2005, when homeowners in the area of Perkins and Fletcher Avenue, Amanda Court, etc., experienced flooding, some felt the same.

Today, it’s a different story.

Homeowners in Cranston’s low-lying areas along the Pocasset and Pawtuxet rivers have faced increasingly frequent and increasingly severe flood events. They have gutted their once-finished basements on more than one occasion, now knowing to leave nothing of importance in subterranean living spaces. They keep wet-vacs close at hand, and are practically novice plumbers after talking to every plumbing company in a 50-mile radius about pump systems and backflow preventers. They have lost photos, furniture and heirlooms, and conversations with their neighbors nowadays are more often about forecast fears than block parties.

They want relief, and it is not going to come with selling their house. They can’t sell their homes. No one would buy them.

Relief, then, has to come through help from the city, state and federal government. That’s why the initial denial of the 33-buyout applications doesn’t seem to add up. History has proven that these properties will continue to flood, and payouts will continue to be made to help these homeowners fix what has been destroyed. FEMA’s argument is that it hasn’t cost enough, but it stands to reason that the costs above the BCA threshold are inevitable, either through further flooding or with the remapping of the floodplains.

So what are we telling Cranston residents? Yes, you’ve experienced unspeakable damage, and yes, it has severely impacted your quality of life. Your homes will continue to flood, and no amount of prevention can stop the floodwaters from rising. So now, let’s hope that another catastrophic flood comes sooner rather than later, and then maybe we’ll buy your house.

That seems like pretty backwards logic to us.

The city has been doing its best to aggressively go after grants for flood mitigation and buyouts, but everyone knows that getting things done through the feds happens at a snail’s pace. If progress is not made soon, the city needs to create a plan for getting these people real relief in the form of a buyout. There are already some funds available, and while $1.2 million won’t solve the problem for all of the 33 homes, it will certainly buy out some. The fewer houses in the area, the more land that is returned to floodplain; the more porous surface there, the better the chances that the surrounding properties can avoid flooding.

It’s time for plan B, because the only way to prevent a recurrence of March 2010 is to buy out these homeowners. They’ve waited long enough.