Muddy Deluge

Last night I looked out the front door after dinner and was greeted with this sight:

If you look closely at the top of the picture, the entire cul-de-sac is covered with muddy GA red clay water. Yuck.

The people at the head of the cul-de-sac are redoing their front yard. They've got all the proper retention fences and bales of hay, but there was just WAY too much water coming down - and through their yard - to contain all the dirt. It rained somewhere between 1-1.5 inches in about an hour - with most of that rain coming in about 30 minutes. Yikes.

This was the view at the end of the driveway:

We had our own little eddy current at the curb.

The volume of water and the mud were rather "awesome" to see, but not really a problem for us. For some of the neighbors, however, it was. Our next door neighbor's driveway slopes down to his house and he had several inches of muddy, mucky water sitting on the end of his driveway and into his backyard. He and the owners of the mud shoveled and hosed the driveway this morning.

Further down the street is where the real problem lay. The storm drain isn't draining properly. This is how it looked after the rain stopped:

One of the other neigbors had pictures showing it was up to mid-calf. We're not sure what is stopping the drain from draining. Several thoughts are:

1 - people are blowing too much yard waste into the drains and that is stopping them up

2 - there's a bunch of yard waste at the outlet to the storm drain (between some backyards farther down the street)

3- the pipe has collapsed somewhere down the line from there

Various people were calling anyone that they could think of to deal with the problem last night and today. A sheriff's deputy came out to see the problem last night and I think I saw a city truck today. I hope they figure out the problem and get it solved. It made a huge mess - not just the water in the street, but it backed up into 2 different yards - in one it was onto the front porch and on the other it was about a foot away from getting into their basement.

I'm SOOO glad it wasn't backing up into our house. I did discover that one of our drain lines from the gutter isn't flowing properly, though. I was out there in the downpour positioning a gutter splash thing to divert the water (spurting out from the gutter/drain connection) back away from the house.