Trashed on Chestnut Street . . . and Cedar and Mulberry . . .

I should have taken some photos Saturday morning as I sashayed up Chestnut Street to go to a garage sale. I cannot tell you how many houses have had water in the basement after the big 6" rain the other evening. Every other household, I think, was carrying wet, sodden messes out of the basement and dropping them on their driveway for sorting or into a truck or dumpster. Today, as we walked up the street, some of them are starting to have some odor to them.

The city has had trouble with the storm sewers on this side of town in previous, less wet years. I think that some of the storm sewers are not big enough for all the "new" houses put up out here in the 1970s and 80s. There is a big city project, just started, to put in some bigger lines. That will probably take most of the summer so there are a lot of folks suffering now.

The city is actually pumping hundreds of gallons of rain water a minute out of an inadequate storm sewer and dumping in back out into the street. It runs down the street to the next corner where it flows into a bigger storm sewer. (I can only guess at all this.) But anyway, here it is and there is Johanna checking it out.

Below the street is a nicely brick-lined "well" which is supposed to catch the rain water runnoff and transport it to water pipes somewhere else. Again, in this case, the storm sewer is too small for the amount of storm run off it catches.