Storms flooded 9th Avenue in Oshkosh, July 15, 2021. PC: Fox 11 Online
OSHKOSH, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — Residents in Oshkosh like Kathleen Bavry are no strangers to flooding.
“Over by 5th Street and Ohio, roughly, there’s been quite a bit of it, I know they were tearing up the neighborhoods and the streets.”
Steve Borski talked about how often his sump pump had to run for 13 years.
“Burning out a pump a year, when the weather would change, I wouldn’t get it for the winter, but just summer months, every 17 seconds,” he said.
But with $300,000 from a grant for flood analysis, Public Works Director James Rabe says the city aims to reduce the flow.
“You’ve seen a lot of projects taking place in several of the watersheds, every street reconstruction project, we’re doing storm water modeling to appropriately size the storm sewers to try and control that and get the water off the street and into the storm sewer system,” he explained.
One of those reconstruction projects happened on West Fifth street last year, and Borski said it made a huge difference.
“I haven’t hardly pumped at all last summer, and so far this year with all the bad weather, I pumped twice,” he said.
Rabe says in order to begin such projects, the city must do hydraulic modeling of the storm drain system first. That’s something this $300,000 grant will fund.
“Every time we do a street reconstruction project, we look at the modeling to see how big of a storm sewer do we need to put in here to be able to convey the water,” Rabe said. “So we really need to start with that model that really guides us on how to design our storm sewer systems from there.”
Residents said the grant is a strong step in the right direction.
“Whatever we can get. If we can get that help, we’re all for it,” Bavry says.
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