What happens when storm water drains into the city?
By CLEON RICKEL, Herald Senior Writer
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Water. It's essential to all of us. But pollution and limited resources threaten our water supplies, and a confusing web of entities controls who gets water and how much. The Herald's exclusive, six-part series examines important water issues facing Franklin County.
It's obvious -- when heavy rains fall on Ottawa, the water runs down hill.
What's not so obvious is what happens when all that water smacks into the Marais des Cygnes River dikes and suddenly stops.
For many people who live in that area, it is more obvious -- their basements flood, the streets fill with water, debris is deposited.
How to deal with that will be a question for the City of Ottawa beginning next year.
City officials have received the first draft of a storm water master study, Andy Haney, city public works director, said. The city staff is reviewing the study and is tweaking it before it's turned over to the city commission, he said.
The commissioners will likely receive copies of the plan early this year, he said.
The study will offer a variety of options, many of which will likely be expensive, Haney said.
More often cities are looking at the question of storm water runoff and in some cases have created storm water utilities, which charge fees based on the amount of paved and built-up surfaces -- which create and speed up storm water drainage -- on lots, he said.
In those storm water utility districts, the money from the fees are used to build terrain features and structures to mitigate and slow down storm runoff, he said.
In Ottawa's case, the city will try to protect those green spaces along the creeks that collect and channel most of the city's storm runoff, he said.
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