Newspaper Page Text
AIRPORT TOKKHsW
Runway Work May Have Contributed to Flood
T he morning of Jan. 11, Katie Carmody and Adam
Neely stepped out of their duplex near Athens-Ben
Epps Airport to see a steady flow of water bringing
silt, red clay and other debris into their yard.
"The dirt they put in the ditch was just loose red clay, basi
cally," Neely says. "So when the rain happened, all the water
came down from the airport and hit that ditch. There was like
a rapid of brown, Georgia clay water coming down the drive
way, down by my car."
Athens-Clarke County Public Utilities was completing work
on water lines near the O'Kelly Road residence, and Neely says
he believes the work site was not prepared for any sort of
rainfall. "The ditches from where the water was coming down???
they're not even real ditches," Neely says. "They come down
this road, and when they get to the end, which
is where my driveway is, it just comes up to the
ground level. They weren't dug out."
After the rainstorm, which brought around
three inches of rain in a 24-hour period, water
runoff from the airport runway combined with
water and silt on the ground, leading to a flood
in Neely's front yard.
Tim Beggerly, director of the airport, says
he thinks the high quantity of rain led to the
issue. "There were flood warnings that weekend,
and there was three inches of rain in a 24-hour
period," Beggerly says. "Normally that wouldn't
happen, and I think more than placing blame
on a department for a project that wasn't done
properly, I think everything appeared to be done
properly. It was just the fact that there was so
much rain in such a short period of time."
Neely, however, says the issue was caused
by a combination of the utility work and the
airport's runoff.
"The airport guys kept reinforcing that the
sediment didn't come from their property, and
I know it's like, 'I really don't care if the mud
came from your property'," Neely says. "The
water came, and that was what mixed with all
the mud from the drainage ditch. It was definitely a combina
tion of the two, but even if there hadn't been mud coming
down, the water would have done about the same thing."
Jamie Lewis, an environmental project manager for Georgia
Department of Agriculture, was called to O'Kelly Road to make
sure no muddy water was running off from construction of a
runway expansion.
"What we deal with with construction sites is we look for,
making sure they're not discharging muddy water and stuff,
and putting mud and sediment off-site," Lewis says. "That's
what I went to take a look at... A lot of the water that was
coming off that airport site was clean water, so that's where
my authority would end as far as that construction site."
Lewis says the airport construction likely did not lead to an
increased amount of water in Neely and Carmody's yard. The
flooding likely occurred from a blockage in the water's usual
path to the creek.
"I do believe one of the issues that was dealing with this
individual and the reason they got flooded out was because of
the drainage from the roadway was not allowed to go histori
cally to the area next to their home," Lewis said. "It would
normally go into the creek. And that's the reason why these
homes were flooded???because the pathway for that water,
for whatever reason, closed up and sediment basically settled
out and caused the water to go to the left and go to their
property."
Even though the problem was not caused by the airport,
Beggerly says he remained involved in getting the issue
resolved. "I hate to keep pointing to someone else, saying 'Oh,
it's not our problem, it's their problem,' so that's why I stayed
involved. Because I wanted to make sure it was taken care of,"
he says. "[The duplexes have] always been a good neighbor to
the airport, because they live right off the end of the runway
here, literally right off the end of the runway. But they've been
very good neighbors to us, so I wanted to reciprocate that to
him too."
Jerry Oberholtzer, engineering administrator for the
Transportation and Public Works Department, says after a com
plaint about silt buildup came in, stormwater inspectors and
land development executors were sent to the worksite.
"It's a dirt road, and we do maintain that, and what hap
pened was the ditch got silted up," Oberholtzer says. "We're in
the process of going out there and cleaning up
the ditch and providing positive drainage back
to the creek. We're working with that with our
street crews."
The contractor of the utility work would
typically be in charge of sodding the area once
construction is complete, but Oberholtzer says
public works became involved in this situation
because the silt caused a maintenance issue.
"We went out there, and we've been work
ing with public utilities to get that stabilized,"
Oberholtzer says. "And we're going to go back
and do some rehabilitation of the ditch up
there."
Rehabilitation of the ditch includes sodding
or placing grass in the ditch to reduce future
problems with silt. Oberholtzer says silt removal
will be completed "as quickly as the weather
allows." Cold weather and snow make it more
difficult to establish grass or sod in an area.
The issue has been resolved from Neely's
point of view, he says, but it took almost two
weeks to fix. And as precipitation levels have
been more moderate, there remains a question if
the correction will hold against another bout of
heavy rain.
"All the stuff they've done, it's not like they have an engi
neer down here trying to figure it out," Neely says. "The city
people came out; they put some rocks in the ditch. They tried
to dig out the ditch a little further. It's standard stuff, I guess,
you would do, but none of it seems really thought out."
Erica Techo
A blocked creek, possibly related to airport construction, flooded the yard of a duplex near Athens-Ben Epps
Airport last month.
8 FLAGPOLE.COM ??? FEBRUARY 12, 2014
