Hoover residents deluge City Council with flooding complaints

Dozens of people brought complaints about stormwater flooding to the Hoover City Council Monday night and begged the council to do something about it.

Downpours that brought more than 10 inches of rain to parts of Hoover in a few hours on Oct. 6-7 led to widespread flooding, but many residents in certain areas say it’s a recurring problem that city officials have failed to address.

Matthew Smith, who lives on Paulette Drive in the Green Valley community, said his community has flooded nine times in 2021. He claims the city’s drainage system is inadequately designed and maintained and causing significant damage to residents’ property repeatedly.

He loves living in Hoover, but the response from city officials thus far has been unacceptable, he said.

“We want it repaired correctly, not a Band-aid over the problem. Do not dismiss us,” Smith told the council. “It is time the city takes responsibility and helps its residents. No more placing blame elsewhere. We want answers, and we deserve answers as residents, as voters and as taxpayers in the city of Hoover.”

Tim Carroll, who lives on Creekview Drive in another part of Green Valley, said his property has experienced “catastrophic flooding” five times in the last 10 months.

Seven homes where he lives have been completely surrounded by water, and four of the driveways have been completely submerged, he said. This time, he had more than 8 inches of dirty, muddy water in his basement, which is making him reassess whether this is the best place to raise his family, he said.

David Bertanzetti, another resident on Creekview Drive, said he has been there 38 years, and the flooding problems haven’t always been there. More and more development has covered the area with pavement, which is contributing to the flooding, he said.

“Nobody’s knocking progress. We need it, but something has got to be done,” Bertanzetti said. “You can’t imagine what it’s like to sit there and your house be an island where you absolutely cannot get to it or you’re surrounded by water. We’re not talking just a lake. It is a roaring river with trees going down it. It’s absolutely frightening.”

Lori Abbott, who lives in another part of Green Valley on Kestwick Drive, said her family chose their house because it had a basement where her mother can walk in and out without any stairs, and that is where she has been living. But with this most recent flooding incident, they had more than 4 feet of water in that part of the house in a short amount of time, she said.

Abbott said it’s a good thing she and her husband were home because her mother would have died.

“This has got to stop. My whole bottom level is gutted,” Abbott said. “My mother has been moved to assisted living, and she said to me, … ‘I never want to come back. I’m scared to death.’ This is not right. Something has to be done.”

Abbott said she has loved living in Hoover since moving from Atlanta six years ago, but the flooding is getting worse, and it’s getting hard. “I don’t know how to fix it. I need you guys to figure it out for us.”

Another couple on Kestwick Drive said their house has flooded three times in the past six months and this most recent time they had 7 feet of water in their home.

“This last time, we literally had to flee because our house shook when the doors busted in with the water coming in,” the wife said. “This was supposed to be our dream home. It is now ruining our finances.”

Richard Parker said the problem where he lives on Creekview is a lack of maintenance of the stormwater right of way on private property. The city years ago periodically would clean excess silt and debris out of Patton Creek but now maintains the city can’t do work on private property unless there is a “legitimate public purpose” for doing so. Thus, the silt has built up, and the creek is overflowing and eroding people’s yards, he said.

Flooding problems aren’t limited to Green Valley.

Rebecca Richey, who has lived in the Pinewood community off Sulphur Springs Road since 1993, said she never had any problem with flooding until 2014 when development began for the Magnolia Grove community to the north of her.

She and her husband spent $20,000 last year replacing a stormwater pipe the city wouldn’t replace, and their neighbors spent $40,000 doing the same, she said. “It did absolutely no good.”

The city needs to hold developers and engineers accountable, Richey said.

“I don’t know about you, but I don’t have $20,000 to put into my yard every year,” she said. “I wish y’all would decide to do something to keep the floodwaters out of people’s property. It is absolutely like a rapid coming through our yard … You lay there trying to go to sleep, and you can’t go to sleep because it’s this constant roar of water.”

A woman who lives on Mountain Oaks Drive in Bluff Park said she is experiencing increasingly frequent flooding that has caused mold in her garage and damage to her garage door, gypsum wallboard, backyard and front yard.

“What am I as a homeowner supposed to do?” she said. “Every time the weather forecasts rain, I have knots in my stomach and cannot sleep from the anxiety. We just need help.”

Larry Wojciechowski of the Southlake community estimated there was close to $250,000 worth of damage caused by flooding there, including at least $24,000 in remediation costs on his property alone.

His community donated $25,000 to the Cahaba River Society to assist the city of Hoover in updating its stormwater codes, he said. But the stormwater drainage system is not physically laid out like it should be and is not functioning as it was intended, he said.

He’s not trying to fix the blame on anyone, just fix the problem, he said.

“Let’s come up with a solution that everybody can agree on and that we as citizens of the great city of Hoover can move this ball forward,” Wojciechowski said.

Several residents said they have shared information with the city about their problems but heard no response and are disappointed in the lack of it.

CITY RESPONSE

Council President John Lyda said city officials understand that these are real issues residents have and said the city is in the process of formulating a plan to partner with residents to remedy these issues.

The council on Oct. 12 held a special meeting to authorize about $1 million worth of emergency repairs to roads and drainage systems in 11 places and on Monday night approved emergency repairs in five more areas that are expected to cost another $287,000.

The city already has other stormwater drainage improvement projects in the works and recently hired a consultant to study drainage problems in Green Valley specifically. That study is almost complete and will be presented publicly soon, City Administrator Allan Rice said.

Lyda noted that there are flooding problems in numerous parts of the city, and “it’s going to take time to get to all of them and develop solutions.”

It’s clear that residents have experienced significant damage to property that has to be addressed, Lyda said.

“How to do that and who should do that is what we’re working through now,” he said. “It’s not an easy solution, and it’s not something that happened overnight, and the solution is going to take time.”

He will be working with the mayor’s office to figure out how to get timely responses to resident’s complaints, he said. “We’ve heard from them. They need to hear from us.”

Mayor Frank Brocato said city officials are very sympathetic to residents’ plights.

“It’s sad to hear some of the situations our citizens are having to go through,” he said. “We’re doing everything we can to determine what the causes are and what we can legally do.”

Both he and Lyda said they are not engineers and can’t say whether there are systemic problems or not. Brocato said he is relying on advice from the city engineer and his team, as well as consultants.

“I know that there is a huge desire to do everything we can to help our citizens,” Brocato said. “There’s not a person here who doesn’t want to do that, but at the end of the day, we are limited by what the law says.”

He’s eager to get to the bottom of whose responsibility it is to fix the problems, he said.

As people report problems, the city’s engineering staff is out investigating each and every one of those, Brocato said. If people don’t get a call back, it’s not that someone is ignoring them, he said. “It takes a lot of time.”

Rice noted the city has only three engineers and two inspectors and said they have been working every day since Oct. 6, including weekends, to investigate the problems.

The city also has worked with the Jefferson County Emergency Management Agency to establish online tools for Hoover residents and businesses to report flooding damage and submit photos and videos as supporting evidence, through Oct. 20. The data collected also will help determine if Hoover and Jefferson and Shelby counties meet the damage threshold to qualify for federal assistance.

People who live or have a business in Jefferson County can complete the form at jeffcoema.org./damageportal.

People who live or have a business in Shelby County can complete the form at bit.ly/ShelCoFlood.

People who don’t have access to the internet on either a computer or smart phone can get assistance in reporting damage at the Hoover Public Library.

However, city officials noted that reporting damage via these two portals is not a substitute for submitting information with insurance companies, nor does it guarantee any federal, state or local reimbursement or financial assistance.