Art Dack has lived in Grandin for more than 30 years and every time the forecast calls for rain, he gets a bit nervous.
If he is out running errands, he rushes home when a big storm moves in to make sure his property doesn’t flood.
When there is heavy rainfall, Dack, who lives on Grosvenor Boulevard, must work to make sure debris doesn’t get stuck in the storm water drains on his street, or the water will pool and back up onto his driveway.
On Aug. 1 a rainstorm rolled into St. Albert, forcing Dack and his neighbours to gather outside with hockey sticks and rakes to clear the tree debris from the streets so the water could flow into the drains.
“When you get that intense rain coupled with either wind or hail, it just knocks all the leaves and branches off the trees,” Dack said.
The branches and leaves fall with the water and get swept through the Grandin neighbourhood to the low-lying corner on Grosvenor Boulevard, where the storm drains quickly become clogged with debris, causing the water from the neighbourhood to pool into a lake.
“It's packed so hard. It's just like trying to remove sod,” Dack said.
A heavy storm Aug. 1 occurred right before garbage day, knocking over neighbourhood garbage bins as trash bags floated down the streets, said neighbour Evie Rastas, who took a video of the river of water surging down the boulevard and creating a small lake in front of her house.
While the water only surged a few metres up his driveway during the Aug. 1 storm, Dack wants to permanently stop the water from rising, because in the past it has pooled up his driveway and down through his backyard, forcing him to file a $150,000 insurance claim for the damages.
That storm was in 2008, which saw much of downtown St. Albert flooded from rainfall, and washing out Dack’s backyard while he was away on vacation. He arrived home to the destruction in his backyard, with neighbourhood debris piled near his fence. The water had washed through his yard, ripping up bricks and stones and dragging them to the lowest point in a pool near the fence.
Now Dack keeps a rake, rain boots, and a jacket in his garage next to the door so he can run outside each time a rainstorm comes.
Over the years, Dack has contacted the city about the issue. He said the city has added other storm grates for the water to flow into, but this doesn’t seem to be enough to solve the problem, because the leaves and sticks continue to pile on top of them and clog the drain.
At one point Dack called 911 to help deal with the issue, as residents were worried about flash flooding on the street, but by the time anyone came to help, area residents had already cleared the drains and the water was gone.
“At 67 years old I really don’t want to be standing in a mud puddle in lighting and pouring rain,” Dack said.
Regan Lefebvre, the city's senior manager of utilities, said the city is aware of the issue, which is a problem in some older neighbourhoods with large trees. Overland drainage systems are also set up in older neighbourhoods where water transitions through grates down to the underground stormwater drainage system, Lefebvre said, and they can easily become clogged with debris.
Another challenge is the style of catch basins installed in a neighbourhood, Lefevbre said. Back when some of St. Albert's older neighbourhoods were built, the trees were much smaller. There were also bigger openings for the water to flow through, but bike safety became an issue, Lefevbre said, and the city had to make the openings smaller so bike tires wouldn’t get stuck. This has caused more debris to become trapped on top of them.
The part of Grandin where Dack lives is a low-lying area, Lefevbre said.
“It's a low spot on the street, so it can't make its way [through] Grandin without ponding in this area first,” Lefevbre said.
After the storm Aug. 1, Lefevbre said the city replaced one of the manhole covers in Grandin with a grate so there is another catch basin for water at the centre of the street.
“That's sort of a temporary help, but we are we are going to look at doing a capital project to add some catch basins in the area just to help with the drainage and then we'll use a style of catch basins with a grating that's designed to capture more of that leaf waste,” Lefevbre said.
Lefevbre said he isn’t sure when the city could pursue the construction work to change the catch basins in Grandin, as there are other areas in the city that need catch basins changed due to a high risk of damage to property.
“There is an issue here that we'd like to address, but it's going to have to go into the queue of our priorities and we only have so much money to make these types of improvements,” Lefevbre said.
