If your basement floods during heavy rain, the City of Covington wants to make sure you’re on a list it “inherited” of addresses where flooded basements have been reported in the past.
So the City’s Public Works Department has created a short, online survey.
The 10-question survey is designed to build a more complete picture of which areas suffer from periodic flooding, regardless of whether water backs up through a floor drain or comes in from outside through a door or window, said Rich Anthony, the City’s project engineer.
Torrential rains in June 2019 flooded basements and tore up pavement, including on Montague Road below Devou Park. (Photo from City of Covington)
The effort is part of a renewed focus on identifying and addressing public health problems and erosion damage caused by rain runoff, aka stormwater. Earlier this year, the City assumed responsibility for some aspects of stormwater maintenance from Sanitation District No. 1 of Northern Kentucky and, as part of that switch, was given SD1’s records of interactions with residents.
“But there are areas of Covington that we know historically have had problems that aren’t reflected in those records, and we want to fill in the gaps in the database,” Anthony said. “If you’ve had water in your basement to a degree that it’s caused flooding, and we don’t know about it, we need you to tell us.”
Prior to completing the survey, residents can verify if their property is already on the list by visiting www.covingtonky.gov. If the property is already on the list, there is no need to fill out the survey.
The survey can be accessed online.
Anthony, who oversees the management of the City’s part of stormwater maintenance, said the data accumulation is the first step toward trying to address longtime issues with storm drainage.
“Once we have a better idea of where flooding occurs, when and why it occurs, and how often, then we can analyze that data and determine whether there are things we can do to try to eliminate or mitigate the problem,” he said.
Anthony said the City, in particular, wants to understand the nature of the flooding, as in whether the water came up through a drain or washed off a hillside and came in through a door or window.
The survey also seeks to find out whether the resident had notified SD1 of the incident.
City of Covington
Hello I am an intern for Groundwork Ohio River Valley and we are working on creating a dashboard that highlightrs environmental issues throughout Northern Kentucky. I was wondering if I could access the results of the survey that is talked about in this article, so that we may use it in our dashboard.