Village of Hamburg lays out plan to prevent future flooding
HAMBURG, N.Y. (WIVB) — Hamburg village leaders may have found a solution to flooding problems that neighbors have been dealing with for years.
Residents say flood and drainage concerns in the Village of Hamburg have cost them thousands of dollars. To address their concerns, the village engineer proposed multiple recommendations to help prevent future flooding at Monday night’s meeting.
“I’m hopeful that they’re going to do something,” said village resident Judy Hosie. “It sounds like they found a partial solution to it.”
Village engineer David Britton shared his findings to over a dozen neighbors and went into detail about the recently concluded drainage study. He said the flooding stemmed from the once-in-25-years rain on May 22 that dropped over an inch and a half of water in 45 minutes.
“The system itself has plenty of capacity,” Britton said. “It’s a matter of just trying to get the water into the system.”
In the study, Britton said the flooding was due to both public and private concerns of the size of storm grates in the area being too small and the lack of connections to storm sewers, to name a few.
Hamburg residents say they’ve spent thousands on flooding issues
“Water came off the top of your roof, jumped the gutters and everything came down, fell right adjacent to the foundation walls,” Britton said. “If you have sump pumps, they just couldn’t keep up, it’s going to relieve itself at the first point, the lowest point, which is your floor drain.”
To prevent future flooding, Britton submitted suggestions of replacing undersized storm grates on Prospect and Sharon Avenues and constructing a new drainage system on Randall Terrace, along with more frequent inspections.
“All can be completed using our village forces to do it,” Britton said. “I don’t think there’s anything that was over the top and easy to implement.”
“We know there’s gonna be a cost to it,” said Thomas Tallman, the Village of Hamburg’s mayor. “We’re thinking that if we could do some of this with our own personnel, it’ll be less expensive than having to sub it out to somebody, but we’re going to do that analysis and determine what we can do now and what we have to budget for for future years.”
Tallman said they will be looking at the findings and recommendations and will have continued updates at future board meetings. He hopes improvements can begin this budget year.
Read the full drainage study below.
Hamburg_Drainage_Study_ReportDownload
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