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<br />Council Minutes of 9/6/2005 <br />that day, we have received two additional major rainfalls. We received 1.2" within a fifteen <br />minute period on Saturday, August 27`h and an extended and sometimes heavy rainfall that <br />deposited 2.2" of rain on our City on August 30~' and 31St from Hurricane Katrina. <br />Prior to the storm of August 20, we had already taken those actions which resulted in our being <br />better prepared than we have ever been to handle a major storm. Some of the actions taken are <br />listed below: <br />1. Our full-time, four-man crew, which is augmented by four seasonal workers during the <br />summer months, has cleaned and weed-whipped 12.5 miles of large open ditches so far this <br />year. They have repaired gabion walls on Canterbury Road and Lansing Drive, and cleaned <br />numerous culvert pipes and outfalls. They regularly check for problems at preselected locations <br />along main ditches before forecasted storms. Similarly, they check for debris that may have <br />been deposited by the storm, once it is over. <br />2. Service Department crews regularly and systematically clean and repair catch basins. Some of <br />the catch basins that have been reconstructed this year are on Fielding, Keats, Lisa, Woodside, <br />and David Drives, in the Forest Ridge and Timber Trails Subdivisions, and in numerous other <br />locations around the City. Catch basins are cleaned primarily over the winter months and as <br />needed throughout the year. <br />3. Service Department crews have repaired storm mains on Porter Road, Fleharty Road and <br />Columbia Road this year. Although storm sewers are usually self flushing, mains were cleaned <br />on Stoneybrook Drive and Coe Ave. <br />4. Service Department crews install and clean storm laterals, on the City side of private <br />properties and perform flow testing to check for problems. <br />5. The Service Department has cleaned all of the main City streets twice this year, and all interior <br />streets once so far this year. They are continuing to work on interiors south of Lorain Road as of <br />today. All of the interiors will have been swept twice by the end of the season. <br />6. The Sanitary Systems crew has cleaned 11.1 miles of sanitary mains so far this year, and <br />televised 2.5 miles of the same sewers. In addition, all of the sewers on streets being <br />reconstructed this year have been cleaned and televised. <br />7. Sanitary Sewer Repairs were made on Grace Road and Michael Avenue. <br />All of these house keeping activities are recorded and reported to the OEPA annually. <br />During the rain event, our city crews responded to the storm in a professional manner. This is <br />the same professional manner that has proven successful for eight years. It is important to <br />understand that summer thunderstorms are difficult for experts to predict accurately. The <br />amount and location of rainfall can not be pinpointed. Therefore, the Service Department does <br />not call supervisors, foremen and laborers into work for threats of storms, but rather reacts to <br />actual indicators of heavy rainfall in our City. <br />On August 20`h, the two indicators that resulted in the call in of the Sanitary Systems Supervisor <br />were the generator transfer alarm at Dover Lift Station, indicating that the station had lost power, <br />and the VFD (variable speed drive) Fault Alarm at the Lebern Lift Station. Our Service Director <br />was alerted by a phone call from our Sanitary Systems Supervisor, followed almost immediately <br />by a call from the Police Department due to power outages that were causing traffic signals to <br />fail, trees and limbs were down, and streets and basements were flooded. He immediately called <br />the Road Foreman to come in. <br />4 <br />