A plan for upgrades to Grande Prairie’s drainage system could mean less flooding during major rainstorms. City Drainage and Environmental Supervisor Richard Sali has come up with a number of recommendations to deal with flooding in places with older infrastructure like Swanavon and Hillside.
“In some of our older areas, the infrastructure that’s in place was designed for a smaller rainstorm event and there wasn’t quite the overland drainage flow to get the bigger events away from properties.”
Every five years, the city looks at the current pipes in place to make sure everything is up to date and see where improvements could be made. Two places Sali wants to upgrade sooner rather than later are the Richmond Industrial park and the Mountview area. He says those upgrades could include adding new pipes and doing roadwork.
“Some are to put in bigger pipes, some are to reestablish overland drainage routes, look at where our ponds are and see if there’s an opportunity to upgrade the ponds, see what we can do to upgrade our road systems so that we can get that overland flow away from there so we can get the overland flow to stay in the roadway versus affecting private properties.”
Suli says that once some of those upgrades are done, water should stay on the road instead of on peoples’ properties. The new plan will now need to go to council for approval before any work can be done. If it is approved, the first round of upgrades on the Richmond Industrial Park will start in the summer.