Remnants of hurricane cause flooding
What remained of Hurricane Jeanne nearly made its way to Bill Cooper's front door in Evans on Monday.
The Arrowood Trailer Park on Wrightsboro Road had some flooding at the height of the storm when this drainage ditch overflowed its banks into the yards of the residents. The remnants of Hurricane Jeanne also caused a creek ditch in Windmill Plantation subdivision in Evans to overflow, but the county received no infrastructure damage.
Photo by Jim Blaylock
As the heaviest downpour of rain from the hurricane's remnants hit the county, muddy water quickly rose in a frontyard creek ditch at Cooper's Windmill Plantation subdivision in Evans, causing overflow to reach only a few feet away from several homes.
"It got very close to the house, and it stayed that way for about 30 minutes,'' Cooper said, adding that water runoff was bad in his back yard as well. "I got a waterfall in the back yard.''
One day after the storm had passed, Pam Tucker, the county's emergency services director, said the county received no infrastructure damage from the storm and that things had returned to normal. However, she said, Windmill Plantation received the brunt of the torrential rains and has had flooding problems several times in the past from an overflowing ditch in front of a line of several of the subdivision's homes.
"That was our worst area without a doubt,'' she said.
On Monday, the county engineer, Jim Leiper, visited the subdivision to see how the storm had affected Windmill Plantation. Residents living on the side of William Few Parkway where the ditch is located said Monday that their front yards often flood with every big downpour.
A plan that had been proposed to residents to remedy the situation about a year ago was turned down by some of the residents, Leiper said. That proposal involved having the ditch widened and adding a second culvert in the adjacent homes' driveways.
"Some of the residents have expressed concerns about the aesthetics, how aesthetic any improvements would be,'' he said, adding that the county doesn't own the ditch and would be trespassing if it conducted improvements without the residents' approval. "Some have been reluctant to grant us easements.''
Now the county is proposing a less intensive, temporary solution that Leiper said he hopes residents will sign off on. He said the county will ask residents along the ditch for a temporary access agreement within in the next week to week and a half for that work.
"It's just kind of cleaning out around the edges,'' Leiper said of plans for the ditch.
"What we need to do is remove a lot of the vegetation to allow the creek to flow freely.''
Windmill Plantation wasn't the only area in Columbia County to receive flooding on Monday, though.
Other areas of reported flooding included: Columbia Road at Wendover Way; Arrowood Trailer Park at Park West Drive at Old Wheeler Road; Hot Springs Drive in the Orchard Hill subdivision, where water was reportedly flowing into a garage at one home; Mullikin Road, where water was close to entering a house; Crawford Creek Crossing at Crawford Mill Lane; and Low Meadow Drive, where a clogged drain prevented water runoff.