Item 11.5- Response to CQ 25-2020 – August 28, 2020 Flood Event ---- Ward 1 and 9

To: Mayor Dilkens and Windsor City Council

I am writing to you on behalf of many of the residents in the Devonshire Heights area regarding the ongoing drainage and flooding issues, particularly those living in close proximity to the Devonwoods forest.

Flooding and poor drainage have been a persistent issue here for a long time. Many of the residents have contacted the city for help and improvements to no avail. Many of them have had flooding multiple times, some to the point that insurance has cut them off and they now feel hopeless and resigned to the belief that no solution or help is available.

My situation is the same as the majority of houses on the west side of Woodward backing onto Devonwoods forest that have full basements. I have personally spoken with 7 households this past week on the 3700 and 3800 west block of Woodward that I can see have basements. I have also contacted some other residents on 3700-3900 block of Bliss and Byng, Shingle Creek and Devonwood to discuss their issues with multiple basement flooding.

This has proven to me that this is an ongoing and widespread issue we are all facing.

I have compiled letters from some of these residents that I could make contact with and am attaching them in this package.

Residents backing on to the forest told me of their horrible stories of constantly fighting water each rain and the continued incoming water days afterwards. Some have multiple sump pumps in place and running lines out to the front and back, families have to drop another pump in and run a line out the window or down the sanitary drain nearby to keep up. And this is pretty much happening when we get any moderate to heavy rain or even straight days of light rain. We have to be home to man the pumps during storms. The next couple days following will be making sure the sump pumps are still working good and keeping the water flowing out. Some of us are routing discharge directly to the storm sewer and others into ditches, it does not seem to make a difference where the discharge is going. I have invested over twenty thousand dollars without any city subsidy trying to make improvements to drainage on my own property with some improvement.

It does not take a major rain event to create havoc at our homes and in our lives. A normal or moderate rain is all it takes to get our stress and anxiety up and start preparing for our sump pumps to start overworking and running multiple times an hour(anywhere from 3 min intervals and up), teetering down slowly over the days, until the next rain or snow to ramp back up again. This is every day, all year around. We do not even live by a body of water for this to make sense.

Now compound this with a heavy rain or days of steady rain, and we see days of our pumps running in the hundreds of times per day. Some pumps just don’t shut off for lengths of time.

In the general area, moderate/heavy storms are also flooding residential ditches, backing up sewers to the street level (but not overflowing most of the time), and sanitary (engaged BWV) putting the homes at high risk for flooding.