FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — On Oct. 25 the flood danger impacted neighbors of the Vale Avenue Townhomes project hosted a walk, explaining why they are worried about a new development coming onto their street.
They're worried the new development doesn't have proper drainage, and that their homes could flood.
"I think it's an 80-unit luxury apartment complex," said David Druding, who's part of the group. "I looked out from my deck, and I saw this in the backyard, 30 feet from my property. It's a storm drain with the manhole cover right up here."
Druding said that the development will be "disastrous."
"It's also going to flood everything over there, though, that's all commercial right now. I mean, depending on amount of water, it could flood the apartment complex on the other side of the cement mixing plant. This has real repercussions," Druding explained. "It can't soak into the ground. It's going to be all storm water runoff, and in four inches of runoff on four acres is half a million gallons. That's more than an Olympic swimming pool."
On Vale Avenue there's currently an eight-foot wide and five-foot-deep discharge canal or large ditch. Druding said it's unmaintained and won't be enough to mitigate water.
"It's filled with vegetation right now. And when we have a lot of rain, the water that gets in this, it takes it two days to get go out of it, because it's basically blocked through all this vegetation," Druding said. "When you want to rapidly discharge water, so it doesn't flood, you don't want it to sit there for two days. If it does, I've got water in my building. Because I'm seven inches below this."
Druding wants the city to look at other options.
"At this point we're not going to stop it. What we're demanding is mitigation," Druding said. "There needs to be a discharge trench on this south side. It should be about six feet wide, and it should have a smooth basin. It shouldn't have plants in it. There needs to be another one on the north side, because some of those apartments will be under water."
Chris Brown, Director of Public Works for the City of Fayetteville, said that the development has met all city standards for drainage design.
"They are required to provide on-site detention to attenuate the additional runoff so that peak flows do not increase. The are providing this with underground detention under their parking lot," Brown said. "The property owners who are concerned with this development are upstream of where the flow from the site is being released and will not see any of the runoff from the site on their properties. The developer is making some minor grading changes to their site to make sure that water that flows from the upstream property owners is not blocked and is properly conveyed through the site."
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