EDITORIAL: Downtown drainage project

Work is scheduled to begin this week on upgrades to the city’s downtown storm water drainage system.

The planned improvements are aimed at alleviating flooding problems downtown business owners have had to deal with in years past during heavy downpours.

Let’s hope the plan works and provides them with some needed relief so that they’re not having to barricade the doors with sandbags or haul in the heavy vacuums when big storms come along.

Part of the work will focus on enlarging storm drain openings to allow more storm water to flow into the underground infrastructure system during heavy rains. Assistant Public Works Director James Clemmons said the underground system is large enough to carry runoff away from the area, but the drain openings are too small. In a big downpour, water rushes by the openings faster than it can be pulled in, Clemmons said.

That work will take place first on Carolina Avenue between Fifth and Sixth streets and then on College Avenue between Fourth and Fifth Streets.
No doubt, some businesses and their customers will be inconvenienced while this work is going on. City officials say they want to minimize any inconvenience as much as possible. That’s good. Remember the problems some business owners had with the streetscape project downtown a few years back when access to some storefronts was limited because of construction work?

Once the work in the downtown area is complete, the focus of the project will move to East Carolina to the site of the old Red Fox Apparel plant, Clemmons said. That work will involve replacing a collapsed 30-foot section of underground drainage line and construction of a retention pond to collect storm water runoff.

The funding for this work is coming from grants the city obtained from federal and state agencies to address storm water drainage problems in the downtown area.
Last year, with the assistance of state Sen. Gerald Malloy, the city received $250,000 from the state to help with the project.

In February, the city was awarded a $340,000 grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) after waiting nearly three years for approval.

City officials applied for that grant in 2005 after heavy summer rains caused serious flooding problems in the downtown area. But FEMA, confronted with massive problems related to Hurricane Katrina, put off acting on the application until this year.

Take a look at the photo on page 8A accompanying the story in today’s edition about the project if you want to see the problem possibly at its worst. The photo shows the same section of Carolina Avenue where some of the work will be going on. That picture was taken in 2005, the same year the city applied for the FEMA grant.

Storm water drainage projects, like so many other infrastructure projects, are not pretty or glamorous. They may not be as visually attractive as, say, park improvements or a renovated building. But they are necessary. And this one is overdue.