City Engineer Austin Rowser on Omaha's Flooded Streets

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Austin. Good morning, good tohave you back. Hey, good morning,
hear you. Thanks for having meon. Let's begin with can we
get a little clarity on this CenterStreet thing. There are a couple of
reports that say it's going to beshut down sixtieths a seventy second and apparently
the official city notice says that,but there's a Twitter message it says sixty
fourth to sixty seventh. What's actuallyhappening there? Yeah, so there's a

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soft closure between sixty eight's and seventysecond. Basically, what that means you
still have some access with a softclosure. The hard closure is more close
to the water main break, whichis sixty seven to sixty fourth and that's
where that's really where you can't gointo the street. So we set up
the soft closure so that people knowto dethroor ahead of time and to get

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away from that area. But theactual hard closure is a little more defined.
Okay, so there will be accessto Baxtra Arena, but it may
be from the back. Is thatright? That's grag Okay, So what
is it? This must have beena massive break. What is it that
takes six weeks to repair? Yeah? And you know a lot of times,
Gary, we don't know when wefirst put those notices out, and

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we don't know when we first putthe closures how long it's going to take.
There's a lot of moving parts,you know. Obviously, the City
of Omaha is not the water companythat's spend cause the utilities district, and
so we don't always know their businessand how long it's going to take them
to repair, and we don't knowthe extent of the repairs will have to
go to. So we put togetherour best estimate. You know, there's
a significant amount of repairs that haveto go on to that line that involve

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excavation and opening trenches and things likethat, and so when that's all finished,
then we have to do some pavingon top of it. Still trying
to figure out the exact extent ofthe paving. I understand there was a
lot of pavement damage there. Youknow, it was a really unfortunate situation
where that water main broke, andmy understanding is the twenty four inch mains

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fairly large amount of water and itjust had nowhere to go because the creek
was full at the time that itbroke. In fact, it's about the
time I heard Terry Lady on yesterdaychecking the area out. But that creek
was sworn and there was no relieffor that water once it broke right.
So what else are we dealing withthat could be considered major problems in the
wake of the flooding Austin. Youknow, a lot of a lot of

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private property issues that I'm aware of. I know, I know there was
a car dealership up on seven second. That's some pretty significant issues with the
creek next to it. A lotof things like that. We had.
You know, we had a numberof areas where we had some pavement that
actually delaminated and washed out. SaddleCreek in particular had a number of issues,
as it normally does, but havinga work zone there compounded the problem.

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We got it works out yesterday wherepretty much all the barricades got washed
away, and so we had toget that reset as soon as possible.
So just a number of odds andends and things like that. I think
from a transportation standpoint, we cameout of it relatively quickly, which is
nice with flash flooding, But Iknow we had on the environmental side,

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we had a number of sewer backupsand problems with people's laterals and sewer lines
into their homes and things like that. So we took a lot of calls
yesterday encourage people to continue to callthat in to experience issues with sewer backing
up in their face and whatnot.Yeah, you know, it's so common
that it has become almost a runninggag that Saddle Creek rode out to be

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renamed Saddle Creek River whenever there's asignificant amount of rain. Channel six as
a headline this morning that Omaha officialssay no changes coming to address Saddle Creek
flooding. Is that just too biga project or would it be to address
that? It's a huge watershed Andyeah, I mean the name implies Saddle
Creek. It is a creek.You know. One of the issues that

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we have there is that it's anunderground conveyance. It was designed and built
in a time when I think theydidn't quite anticipate the amount of growth in
the watershed and the amount of paving. Obviously, the more paving you put
in the watershed, the quicker you'regoing to run water off of there is
getting the absorption into the ground andin some transparration with trees and things like
that, and so you know,we have infrastructure in place that is at

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this point capable of caring about atwo year storm, which is a fifty
to fifty chance of ANUEL occurrence.And you know, we've been kind of
fortunate here for a few years whereit's been dry and we haven't experienced at
but but we're kind of back inthe mo where that's an issue. I
know, with the with the DodgeStreet underpass in particular, we do have
a warning system that's sent up there. There's a floating place when water gets

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to a certain height, there's flashinglights that go off to tell people not
to enter. I know those weregoing off yesterday and people still entered and
then they had the cars. Yeah, yeah, you've been at this a
while, Austin. We're talking aboutcity engineer, Austin Rouser. You've been
at those a while. Have youseen this before with a one day event
the kind of the kind of damageand flooding we had yesterday? I have

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I can tell you I've never seenthe creeks as high as I saw him
yesterday. You know, I've seensome pretty heavy rains over the years.
You know, eight years or soago, we had a number of storms
back up and had some kind ofrough years, but to the extent in
the level that we saw yesterday.You know, we had areas where we've
estimated between a one hundred two hundredyear rainfall of it, which is half

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a percent to a one percent chanceof annual occurrence. And that that's a
that's a really extreme event. Youjust you just don't see that, and
uh so it's it was kind ofa big deal. We got two days
now of sunshine and drainage and thenmaybe more rain tomorrow night and part of
Friday. Are we on a goodspot now after two days of sunshine or

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will we be that if if wejust if we don't have huge rain again,
that will be okay. Well,well, you know I talked earlier
about some of the rainfall that soaksinto the ground that you know, we
have saturated ground can down so theycan't take as much and so you tend
to run more water off. Sodepending on the level of the storm,
we could potentially see heavy run offagain. You know. One of the

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things that I think happened this timethat was unusual is we've had so many
dry years stacked up here that whenthis heavy rain came down, it really
kind of rushed out those watershed sowe saw a lot of debris, a
lot of tree debris and logs andthings like that drift to it. That
blocked up a lot of our conveyances. So you know, this was really

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a good flush for us to kindof identify some of those problem areas and
get that cleared out. So hopefullywe've got to handle on that and we'll
continue to clear those culverts and drainagewaysas we find out about them. Very
good, Great to have you on, Austin. Thank you appreciate the time.
Thanks there he goes Omaha Sety engineerAustin Rouser. Why don't they turned
Saddle Creek back into a creek?Well, you might need a little access

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to the med center for example.Just the thought. It seems to me
they could come up with some nicebridges and roads to get everybody to the
hospital. But that would be ait would fix the problem and it would
be esthetically pleasing. Yeah, wellit's not cost effective, no, you
know, well you think the street. It's not like it happens every day,
but it would be nice to havea cool creek like you know,

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they have brush Creek down in KansasCity that flows through the plaza. That's
kind of a highlight. You'd ratherdo that than this, much rather do
that than the street car.