Southaven, MS—
FAST FACTS:
- 2005 flood swamps Greenbrook area subdivision
- City works to prevent recurrence
- Federal Grant will improve drainage
Dennis.turner@wreg.com
(Southaven, MS 1/11/2010) Southaven residents who got flooded years ago in an unusually strong storm will get some help from the City, Mississippi and Uncle Sam.
They called the flood in the summer of 2005, a 100 year flood, because nobody could remember it ever happening before.
Now, the Mayor hopes with work in the planning stages, it'll never happen again.
The flood that swamped the Autumn Woods neighborhood came unexpectedly from a powerful rainstorm left over from a tropical storm.
It took months for people here to repair their homes.
With help from the federal government, there's a better chance of making sure that never happens again.
The plan calls for creation of a big retention pond off side and piping the water off the streets into that pond to keep these homes high and dry.
Southaven's Mayor says this should help, not just the Autumn Woods subdivision, but homeowners across the city. "Hopefully be able to build infrastructure that will help alleviate that problem in that area and also anyone along Rocky Creek, because we'll slow that water down and any resident that backs up to Rocky Creek which runs all the way through our city over to Bullfrog Corner should see improvements because of the amount of the water we should slow down." said Southaven Mayor Greg Davis.
That should give water time to drain, without flooding the creek. The mayor says he can't say it will never flood again, but he's confident this fix should make it very unlikely.
