09/06/2005 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

~' Council Minutes of 9/6/2005 laterals that allow water to leave the homes freely also allowed the sewers to back up freely during the storm. The Sanitary Systems crew also has been continuing to clean and televise sewers as part of their normal good housekeeping practices. The Service Department crews have been visiting upwards of a six houses daily to flow test storm laterals and clean as needed. Storm laterals are more likely to be plugged with roots, being shallower than sanitary, so this is common. At this time there is a considerable backlog which will take a couple weeks to complete. This week we will be contacting Westlake, as scheduled, to firm up our plans for a joint effort to clean Hall Ditch this month. The brush had been cleared by our crews before the storm. Together we will clean the sediment from the bottom of the ditch. Our Waste Water Treatment Plant Superintendent has found a company that alerts you by zip code with a pager when there is a storm alert. We will try the best, reasonably priced system that we can find to see if it can actually improve upon response time. During the storm, we had the Mayor and Directors of Service, Safety, and Community Life Services out among our residents listening to concerns and inspecting flooded basements. I was also gratified to hear of the actions of our council members who similarly were inspecting property damage and providing valuable insights to my administration. Our police and fire services were reacting to citizen complaints and assuring citizen safety by doing such things as restricting travel on flooded highways and assisting stranded motorists. Our Service Department personnel were working hand-in-hand with our WWTP employees to monitor our lift stations and employ pumps were needed. I will assure you that reaction to the flooding was as timely as possible. Neither our city, nor any other that I know of, is designed to handle that volume of water. The storm itself is a record breaker. We are still amassing information and running a comparison with other storms, but our WWTP personnel have stated that we have never dealt with a storm of this intensity, in such a short period of time. For your information, a 1 QO-year storm is described as the amount of rainfall, during a specific length of time, that has aone-percent chance in any given year of being equaled or exceeded. For our region, 100-year storms require 3.77 inches of rainfall over a 3-hour period. We had over 3.5 inches recorded at our WWTP in a 25-minute period, with about over five inches total recorded at Cleveland Hopkins. The volume of water was so great that it blew open the containment doors at our WWTP and flooded parts their area. We did have to bypass, and that will be reported to the EPA. What are we doing now? We are trying to determine if any relief might be available for our residents who had no flood insurance, or were underinsured. We have approached FEMA, and are contacting County and State offices, to determine what might be available. At this time, it appears that we do not meet the requirements for assistance from FEMA, and other sources are similarly unpromising. However, we continue to search. 6