Moses or Camus
It sounds Biblical: the same forces that led Pharaoh to “let my people free”. We already are living under the “plague”: waiting for the real impact of Corona-Virus, the surge of serious illness that may well overwhelm our healthcare systems. Americans are used to disasters that happen NOW: hurricanes and tornados, terrorist attacks, fires and earthquakes. We don’t wait well.
Waiting for the “graphs” and “curves” to come to pass. Will we peak like Italy, with all of that unbelievable death, or will we flatten (and lengthen, they don’t talk much about that part), so that we don’t overwhelm our hospitals? We distance ourselves from each other, hope, and wait.
It’s Biblical, apocalyptic, something out of an existential expressionist novel of the 1950’s. If only we could sit around a seedy bar and talk about it, in black and white of course. But then we wouldn’t be “social distancing,” and anyway, the bars are closed. I remember reading in college, a “long hair” with torn jeans and flannel shirt, thinking deeply about the absurdity of trying to control the uncontrollable. In the 1970’s we thought we could “control” almost anything. Existentialism’s ideas then seemed out-of-date and historic.
So floods are almost like a welcome relief. Flooding requires movement, problem solving, and action. They too are inexorable and uncontrollable, but at least there is a visible “foe” to attack. Flooding is a “normal” disaster. Americans can deal with that.
All of this is because it flooded here in Pataskala this weekend.
City Planning
Pataskala is that little farm village that grew. “City planning” wasn’t really a part of the growth process. When you talk to the government, they say the drainage system for what now is the city was built on the flat farm fields of Ohio a century ago. It was probably later for our neighborhood. The first round of development just outside the village occurred about seventy years ago, when the old Van Atta farm, just beyond Vine Street, was one of the first housing additions. That’s where I live now.
So the developers built storm drainage out of big red clay twelve-inch tiles, laying them across the fields and hooking up to the century old existing village system that went to the river. No one at the time thought about easements and right-of ways. They were burying tile in fields, just like the farmers did.
When more developers “filled in” the middle, building in those remaining fields between town and Van Atta, no one worried about the storm sewers running below their houses. They built right on top of them. Tiles were everywhere in the old fields, some worked, some didn’t.
Clay Tile
Clay tile is a lot more durable then you’d think. With all of the houses built, the seventy-year old storm drainage line struggled to handle the increasing volume of water. A really heavy rain might flood the neighborhood, but give it a couple of hours, and the water would soon go down. It used to be a neighborhood joke, a nuisance. Folks would bring out their rafts and kayaks and play. But just recently, the water comes up, and it doesn’t go down nearly as fast. In fact, it stays long enough for a second round of storms to drive water into basements, garages, and crawl spaces.
In the thirty-eight I’ve lived in my house, built on a small rise above road level, the garage has never flooded. Friday there were four inches and more, flooding the room and pouring into the crawl space under the house. It sounded like a waterfall. The actual structure of the rest of the house is lifted about two feet above the garage level. Yesterday, I had six inches left before water hit the joists, the electric wires, and came up through the hardwood floors.
What happened?
Cap the Tile
There is a newer house “in town” built directly over the storm sewer, the old clay tile line. That tile started leaking, and the owner demanded that the city pay him damages for a flooded basement. The city responded that the house was knowingly built on top of the line and they weren’t responsible. The owner replied by cutting the line and capping it off.
So now there is no drainage from the old Van Atta farm. The water flows down the clay tile towards the river – then it stops. The “lakefront” property that used to be our occasional joke now faces serious ongoing damage. That’s bad for me, and my house is NOT the lowest house on the street.
The city has a long-term solution. They may not have an easement for the old clay tile lines, but they do own the roads. So, this summer, a brand new sewer line, big PVC pipe and concrete drop boxes; will be installed under the roads, replacing the seventy-year-old tile. Instead of dropping money in nuisance lawsuits to defend old red clay, they are putting money towards a modern solution. Then, if a pipe breaks, the city can dig up wherever it needs to. It makes perfect sense.
And in the meantime, every time there’s a heavy rain, the City sends workers with a pump and water lines. They hook at up to the old tile, and pump around the blocked off sewer line and back into the system. It seems silly, but it’s the literal “work-around”. The only problem: water from a twelve-inch tile has to travel through a three-inch hose. The whole drainage process is slowed way down.
Friday’s Deluge
It rained three inches in as many hours early Friday morning. High winds accompanied the rain, lashing the houses and street. Friday is trash-day; the dumpsters were knocked over, drifting down the street now river, spreading neat trash bags around the edges as the water lapped up against the houses. The recycling bins are kept “loose”, no bags to organize the trash. You could tell how far your stuff went by what kind of beer bottle ended up in the neighbor’s yard down the street.
I woke up at 6:00am to go grocery shopping. Kroger’s opened at 7:00am (out of toilet paper at 7:05). But when I saw the flood, and the garbage, I had to go find my dumpsters, and try to pick up my trash. It was dark, but I had a “Gorton’s Fisherman” yellow coat on. A (deleted) pickup truck driver decided it’d be fun to soak me. The neighborhood got an early morning shout-out of Dahlman profanity.
We were late responding to the crisis back at the house. It took us a while to realize what was happening underneath in the crawl space. But once we got it, we sandbagged the doors to the garage, and starting pumping the water back into the lake outside the door. We used my little pump to empty the hot tub, and it took hours to get the water level to drop. Meanwhile the water crept up in the crawl space, coming ever closer to the joists, the wires, and the floor.
Keeping Occupied
It took until late Friday afternoon to realize the flow was stopped, and the house wasn’t going to flood. Saturday the garage was a mess, soaked, but the standing water was gone. The crawl space still had a couple of feet of water, and there was still a lake all around the house. But everything is slowly draining away. The sump pumps under the house were hard at work, and I can still hear the city’s pump at work even now.
This is going to be a week for cleanup, when the water finally goes down. They predict another two to three inches of rain is coming. But one thing’s for sure – whatever Governor DeWine decides about “sheltering in place” they’ll be a lot to do at this place. I haven’t even looked in the shed at the back of the yard.
So it’s time to stop writing and get to work.
