The flooding started when the Sugarloaf Parkway Extension was built beside Gerry and Judy McManus’ Gwinnett County home.
It washed out the driveway. It left sinkholes in the front yard. Torrents flowed through the back yard, noisy as rapids.
The couple filed a lawsuit against Gwinnett County that went all the way to the Georgia Supreme Court. Finally, the county fixed their yard and agreed to pay them $350,000 to settle the case.
It wasn’t the first time metro Atlanta officials have found themselves in court, accused of poorly maintaining a storm water system. And it won’t be the last.
Flooding is a persistent problem in north Georgia. When it rains, it sometimes pours, and storm water gushes through the rolling Piedmont, soaking everything in its path. But some residents say government negligence – not Mother Nature – is to blame for their problems.
Gwinnett County faces at least three pending lawsuits. The City of Atlanta remains under a federal court order to improve its sewer system. DeKalb County also faces a court order to improve its aging system.
Local government officials say they’ve made real progress in addressing flood problems in recent years. Though that progress is hard to measure, tens of millions of dollars a year are being spent to improve and maintain storm water systems.
But they acknowledge even years of sustained effort can’t counteract decades of rampant development that paved over much of the land that used to absorb rain in metro Atlanta.
“Trying to retrofit already developed areas is incredibly expensive, and it’s very time consuming,” said Chris Faulkner, a senior planner at the Atlanta Regional Commission. “Obviously, money is a limiting factor.”
The Atlanta region got a big wake-up call in September 2009 when historic floods – the kind that strike every 500 years – inundated neighborhoods, damaged bridges and destroyed pipes designed to corral storm water.
Faulkner said it would be “almost impossible” to prepare for that kind of event – parts of Douglas County, for example, received 21 inches of rain in 24 hours.
But many local communities aren’t prepared for much less monumental rainfall amounts. In 2010, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation found that explosive development, poor planning and neglected infrastructure helped turned even minor rainstorms into traumatic floods.
Two years ago, part of Atlanta’s Peoplestown neighborhood was inundated during a storm – the latest in a series of floods — and sewage seeped into yards and homes. The problem: The neighborhood sits in a bowl below Turner Field and surrounding hills, and several ancient sewer lines converge at the lowest point.
Atlanta is spending $66 million to fix the problem. Among other things, it's digging "vaults" to catch runoff and repaving roads with permeable materials that allow water to seep in. It also plans to buy and tear down 28 homes, though some property owners have refused to sell.
“We are already seeing some improvements,” said Peoplestown resident Ben Sian. “But the real tell will be a major storm event.”
DeKalb County also has rain-induced woes. It has plans for $1.35 billion in improvements. Those plans include replacing pipes and buying homes in flood plains. The county also has set aside $2 million to hire a contractor to clear storm drains.
Gwinnett officials declined to comment on pending lawsuits. But they say the county’s storm water system is in better shape than most. In 2006, Gwinnett started charging residents a fee on their property tax bill to pay for new pipes and other improvements. This year alone, the county expects to spend $41 million on its storm water system.
But Gwinnett maintains more than 1,400 miles of storm water pipes, and half of them are probably past their useful life, according to Tyler Richards, assistant director of the Gwinnett Water Resources Department.
“We’ve got pipe that’s failing because it’s old and we’ve got pipe that’s undersized,” Richards said.
Sometimes, critics say, the problem isn’t old pipe, but poorly designed drainage systems.
When Gwinnett extended Sugarloaf Parkway from Ga. 20 to Ga. 316 a few years ago, it ran right by the McManus house. Flooding followed shortly after.
Gwinnett officials denied they had caused the problem, but a Superior Court judge ruled the county had acted with “reckless disregard” for the McManus’ property rights. The state Supreme Court upheld the ruling.
Judy McManus said Gwinnett officials expected them to give up, but they persisted. “We’re constitutionalists, and we don’t want to be tread upon,” she said.
But they’re still upset about the way they say the county treated them. “They’re arrogant and they’re bullies and they don’t care,” Gerry McManus said.
Attorney Larry Stewart represents homeowners who have filed three pending lawsuits against Gwinnett. They say the county’s negligence resulted in flooding on their properties, as well.
Stewart has brought similar lawsuits against other local governments. He estimated he spends three quarters of his time on such cases.
“The sad part about the situation is, a lot of these agencies are trying to do better,” Stewart said. “They know the system needs to be improved. But it costs too much to do it.”
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