On Monday afternoon, Ward 6 resident Donald Pope went to check his mail and see if the rain had slowed down.
He was shocked to find the rain had pooled about halfway up his driveway.
“I was like, ‘Whoa,’ when I stepped outside, cause it was halfway up the driveway … it was flooded, it looked like a little lake or something,” he said.
Tobias Smith, another resident in Ward 6, said he had never seen the roads as badly flooded as he did on Tuesday when he was driving home.
“It was all the way across,” he said. “I couldn’t even see the road, but I was able to get home.”
Following the wettest May in Columbus in a decade, continued rainfall in June has temporarily flooded areas all across the city.
Though the water has receded from this week’s flooding, Mayor Keith Gaskin believes an upcoming watershed improvement project, funded by the American Rescue Plan, could mitigate those issues in the future. The work is scheduled to begin in July, Gaskin said.
“We can’t give up on it,” said Gaskin, who is leaving office June 30. “I hope the new council and mayor makes it a top priority, as I had requested, because we see the damage that it does.”
Columbus committed $3 million of its ARPA allocation to watershed maintenance and improvements. The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality matched the $3 million to give the project a total of $6 million.
The project focuses on eight flood-prone sites across the city – four each on Northside and Southside.
“There are definitely a lot of needs in the city and that’s what the ARPA money is going to address,” City Engineer Kevin Stafford said.
While it will only impact a few areas of the city, it’s trying to tackle and put the money where the worst needs are, Stafford said.
The project requires the city to obtain 85 easements – the right to cross or use someone’s land for a specific purpose – and Chief Operations Officer Jammie Garrett said it has secured 67 for the project.
Six more are being collected through eminent domain while the rest are still being processed, she said.
The ARPA projects must be finished by 2026 or the city will have to return the federal funds.
A new solution for an old problem
While the increased rainfall has exacerbated the issue, Gaskin said the issues are something the city has known about since the 1970s.
“We’re almost sitting in a bowl, so we’re going to have flooding issues, but there are things you can do to make it better and to prevent it,” Gaskin said.
While every ward was impacted during the most recent flooding, Wards 3 and 6 saw the most, Garrett said.
Councilman-elect for Ward 6 Jason Spears, who defeated Pope June 3 in the general election, said even though the rain in the last two months is “an anomaly event,” it still exposes the problem that the council needs to address more aggressively.
“When you do have those events like we had just the other day that created the amount of volume of water that was coming through there, it’s really tough,” Spears said. “… But I still believe that there are a lot of proactive steps that we need to now make, since we’ve been able to see what’s happening (and) the failures that exist.”
A level of routine maintenance needs to happen in order to free up the drainage which is part of what the ARPA project is looking to do, Stafford said.
Ward 3 Councilman Rusty Greene is optimistic about the impact of the ARPA project, but he doesn’t expect it will fix all of the city’s flooding issues.
“It’s just targeted areas that it’s going to help,” he said. “So for those areas it’s definitely going to be a benefit but it doesn’t affect all the areas that are flooding.
“… We just have to do a better job at keeping the ditches clean,” he added. “But there’s not a big project that could come through there and try to solve everybody’s problem.”
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 41 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
