Backyard flooding has city and county dodging blame

Posted: 04.16.2012 at 10:12 PM

With this weekend's heavy rains, some local authorities have been slammed with phone calls about overflowing ditches.

Some of those ditches turned backyards into small lakes.

Krcg's Daniel Winn talked to a Boone County woman who lives in the Clearview subdivision.

She says she's been having the problem for years and nobody has done anything to help.

Monday afternoon the sun was shining and Lynn Theberge's backyard was a peaceful place to be.

She said, "We used to sit back here and watch the wildlife and enjoy the country".

But, a lot has changed in 13 years since she moved in.

A subdivision popped up behind her property and that's when the flooding problems started.

Neighbors say part of the problem is caused by people throwing their trash in the ditch behind Theberge's house.

The trash stops up the culverts and then water backs up on the other side of the fence into the yards.

This past weekend was especially bad, “The flooding went almost all the way up to our patio".

She said it got within 2 or 3 feet of her house, "So we called the county, and the county says we need to call the city because since the subdivision was put in, it was their problem, the city tells us to call the county" she told us.

The county told us there isn't much they can do to help.

Georganne Bowman is the Stormwater Coordinator for Boone Coounty, "We get a lot of these calls. We got four inches of rain over the last four days, the ground is saturated".

The county says they are going to take another look at the problem and try to work out a solution with the city.

However, in the end, they say there are certain times when drainage ditches are going to become overwhelmed.