It rained last week. Hard. Such hard rain reminds me of the poorly designed drainage in parts of our city.
A normal street is crowned, which means it is higher in the middle than it is on the sides. This allows the water to flow to the gutters, where one of three things will occur depending on the design of the roadway.
1) The water will encounter a storm drain, where it will disappear into the storm sewer (usually).
2) The water will reach a dip which allows it to flow across a side street and continue on for another block to a storm drain.
or...
3) The water will reach a low spot, where it will pool.
There is a three block section of our main drag through town, where tree roots have pushed the curbs and gutters up, which causes the water to pool on the upstream side of the upheaval, then flow around it into the street before flowing back into the gutter.
At the next intersection, this water is joined by the inflow from a side street as it flows through a dip. This usually causes about an eight inch deep mini flood as the water flows across the dip. The water then flows another two blocks to the nearest storm drain.
These mini floods regularly swallow cars and bicyclists whole, never to been seen or heard from again...
Okay, maybe they're not quite that bad, but they do cause traffic issues and stalled vehicles.
It's more a pain in the ass than a serious problem, but it seems like it should be a simple matter to fix. Good luck with that though. It's a State Route and CalTrans is supposed to maintain it.
I suppose the mini floods will continue unabated...
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5 comments:
When I lived in Memphis, we had that same problem in our neighborhood. In fact, it was so bad that we couldn't even drive thru because the water came up to the bottom of our car doors!!!
Only you can make a post about storm drains entertaining.
Officer Wright, that's my guy! ;)
HI,
I think that would make me crazy even,in a warmer climate. Here in B.C, it would be downright dangerous. We're having big melts followed by night time freezing temps. We''ll live with pot-holes but bad gradients are verboten.
Must be nice to have the streets lined with big, old tree's though.
It certainly is nice to have the old trees. Unfortunately they've torn about half of them out in the past year.
Bastards.
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