The State Journal-Register on Sunday published a useful report by reporter Jamie Monk about the efforts by the Springfield Metro Sanitary District to cope with flooding from “rain events” that seem to be ever more frequent and severe. Many millions are being spent, but most of that money will go, as it must, to merely maintaining an aging system of stormwater removal.
The problem, as we have pointed out in these pages previously, is not the stormwater infrastructure that is not being built. The real problem is the infrastructure that has already been built — the acres of asphalt devoted to unneeded parking lots, the paved driveways, the built-on flood plains, the house gutters that funnel rainwater away from yards and into pipes. A few more millions spent unbuilding those systems so that more water stays where it falls would not be amiss.
This article appears in Sep 4-10, 2014.
