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Mountain Brook Council puts all flooding matters on the table, gets 280 expansion update

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Photo by Solomon Crenshaw Jr.

Virginia Smith put Mountain Brook flooding in perspective as she opened a city council work session this morning.

“In general, we do not have catastrophic home flooding,” the council president said. “We do have basements flooding and generally those are obviously in low areas. We definitely have some street flooding that gets out of the drains and causes damage. 

“We do have flooding,” Smith continued. “That's why we're here. But to put it in perspective, we're not in a position like Birmingham where we're having to come in and buy up hundreds of homes because they flood year after year after year, causing the homeowners to actually not to be able to live in their homes.”

Smith admitted that perspective provides no solace for persons in Mountain Brook – some who sat silently in the meeting – who all too frequently experience flooding. 

Council meetings have frequently addressed various flooding/drainage matters throughout the city. The July 20 meeting was to look at the various situations to put them in perspective and to prioritize them as the time to establish the 2023 fiscal budget approaches.

Engineer Walter Schoel of Schoel Engineering detailed the areas that have been frequently hit by flooding. That list includes:

City Manager Sam Gaston acknowledged that several affected properties are at or near the lowest point of a drainage basin. Naturally, he said, those properties are going to flood.

“Then some people bought houses and maybe they were not really informed by the previous owners that they experienced flooding at times,” he said. “Some of these you're not going to be able to totally solve, especially when you have a very heavy violent rain like we've had in May of last year and, of course, June of this year. 

“You can't solve every flooding issue because when the rain overwhelms the system, it's going to get out of the banks of a creek or a drainage, ditch or whatever and more water's gonna come down your driveway,” Gaston said. “More water is gonna come off your neighbor's property if you are downhill from there.”

Today’s meeting put all the matters on the table after having had residents address their specific matters at individual meetings. “This is what we know of that we’re working on,” he said.

Photo by Solomon Crenshaw Jr.

Council members also heard from DeJarvis Leonard, an East Central Region engineer for the Alabama Department of Transportation. ALDOT will expand U.S. 280 from four to six lanes from Hollywood Boulevard to Interstate 459. 

Leonard said the bridge at Pumphouse Road will be torn down to accommodate the added lanes of highway traffic.

“Good news is that they're gonna build a new bridge first with pedestrian access before they tear the old bridge down,” Gaston said. “That makes me feel a lot better. I was thinking if they had to tear that thing down, people are going to have to detour for a year. Plus, work being done at night will help alleviate some of the inconvenience.”

Unrelated to the U.S. 280 expansion is the plan to add pedestrian lanes on the bridge at Hollywood Boulevard. Jefferson County is taking the lead on that project, which involves the county, Homewood and Mountain Brook.

Birmingham has signed off on the project although it is not required to provide funds.

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