Great for developers who made a quick buck, not so great for residents. I’ve said all along that Sioux Falls’ unchecked over development was going to bite us in the ass eventually;
Long and other homeowners argued that development has filled in wetlands and forced all the runoff into their neighborhoods. Smith said they’ve studied those issues.
“The drainage in those areas from development they do their drainage studies to size them,” Smith said.
“Guess what, they didn’t work. July 29th and 30th their studies didn’t work. You can throw them out the window,” Long replied.
What Smith fails to mention is that Lincoln County probably doesn’t have the money to fix the problem.
I think the jury is still out on this one. You can’t expect culverts to handle the amount of rain they got in that area. When you get hit with 6 to 8 inches of rain in a few hours, there is bound to be some flooding.
Maybe part of it is development, but part of it is natural too. We haven’t seen rainfall levels this high in decades, so it is premature to blame all of the flooding on new development.
Another reason why I will never buy or build a house in lincoln county in SF.
The guy who’s house got hit hardest (pictured) built the danged thing oin the OBVIOUSLY lowest land in the development – practically a ditch in comparison to the neighbors houses. Almost all of the drainage in the urban developments to the NW of the place (Old Shindler) goes in the OPPOSITE DIRECTION to where this guy’s house is. The runoff was 90% from UNDEVELOPED farmland to his West.
Were the culverts and country road ditches and farm-land drainage-ways unable to “handle” the enormous amounts of rain in that storm – well, YES, they sent it right where they should have – to the lowest quickest route to the river – right where that guys house sits/sat.
The biggest irony I find in his opinion is that he lives in EXACTLY the kind of POORLY DESIGNED RURAL RESIDENTIAL SUBDIVISION that IS the primary cause of drainage and other infrastructure problems for the county – which is why there’s been a moritorium on permitting any more of them for almost a decade now. I.E., he lives in the kind of development he’s complaining about.
Guess he should have bought flood insurance?
There ought to be a law forcing the developers and their banksters to pay for the damages in these entirely foreseeable “disasters”.
The low densities of the new developments is a big factor. If you develop a square mile of land, you need to have sewer infrastructure to handle that amount of land area when it rains. However, a smaller number of residents per square mile makes that more and more difficult to pay for.