SUMMERSIDE, P.E.I. — Snow melts this spring have some residents in Lefurgey and Meadow Heights subdivisions feeling under the water.
Ron Hatton has been living on Hillside Drive for 16 years. He wants the ditches on his street filled – and soon.
“The water levels just get so high in here. For small children and small pets, it’s really dangerous,” said Hatton.
He figures when the ditch is full, the water is past his knees.
As well as the open water, Hatton worries there are no sidewalks.
“All the little kids have to walk in the street because they can’t walk in the ditches. There’s terrible speeding on this road. It’s all connected. The ditches aren’t filled, and the kids have to walk on the street, and I think It’s dangerous for the kids.”
Ideally, Hatton would like to see a storm water system and sidewalks installed, but he would be happy with any solution that fills in his ditch.
City Coun. Carrie Adams went out to check on the trouble areas in her ward and found ditches filled to overflowing twice in March.
“The culvert system that’s in place cannot keep up to the flow at the bottom of Lefurgey,” said Adams.
At a March 18 Summerside City Council meeting, she called for ditches to be filled so flooding can stop.
Greg Gaudet, director of municipal dervices, couldn’t comment on ditch filling but said staff did check out the high water on the weekend.
“Everything was running and working fine as far as infrastructure goes,” he said. “A true flooding emergency is where there’s actual property damage imminent or there’s a safety issue, but if we go out and see that everything’s working fine, we won’t necessarily act on anything.”
Even when you have an underground system, the water from the surface has to get into it, said Aaron MacDonald, the city’s director of technical dervices.
“If we put a pipe structure in, there’s only going to be one inlet point for that to collect in. If that inlet point is blocked or covered, the water is still going to pond in the low-lying areas.”
It’s a complicated issue, said MacDonald. If the ditch is quite deep, it might be better to fill it in, but a shallow ditch lets the water seep back into the ground and into the groundwater to become drinking water. Stormwater systems don’t do that.
The in-ground storm systems are expensive to install, even after the city stopped putting them curbside.
The current list for ditch filling was laid out in 2015.
“The ones that ranked ‘the worst first’ are the ones that had the deepest ditch and the most water flowing,” said MacDonald.
The ditches in Lefurgey subdivision aren’t very deep, so they may not be near the top of the list.
For now, the city can help repair heaved culverts and washouts.
Culvert maintenance can relieve some standing water issues as well, A heaved culvert might not let water flow properly, so when the city replaces culverts, they level them with the ones around it so the water will flow properly.
Adams maintains it’s time for a better solution for the residents in her ward.
“I don’t know what the solution is, but the engineers need to work with council to get a plan in place for sure,” she said.
The city’s financial commitment to ditch infilling has decreased from $504,700 in 2017 to $250,000 in 2018.
“We need to get that back up to at least where it was, if not more,” said Adams after last weekend’s high water. “The people at the bottom of that subdivision, they require for that to be fixed.”
@AlisonEBC
