Heavy rain outpaces flood control

An unexpectedly heavy rainfall caused severe street flooding Friday in Morgan City.
Morgan City received 4 to 5 inches of rain Friday. Saturday’s rainfall was around 1½ to 2½ inches, said National Weather Service meteorologist Roger Erickson.
On the edge of Iberia and St. Martin parishes, some places received 8 to 10 inches of rain.
Drainage District 2 President Lee Dragna and other city officials receive weather prediction reports from the National Weather Service every Tuesday and Thursday.
Thursday’s report called for 1 inch of rain the entire weekend, Dragna said.
The rain prediction cited by the National Weather Service was “underforecast,” Erickson said.
“We had some pretty severe road flooding,” said Morgan City Police Chief James Blair. “We had to close some roads.”
Officers patrolled neighborhoods and blocked off flooded areas.
“We had a lot of stalled vehicles that we had to tend to,” Blair said.
The problem areas of concern were Maple Street, Victor II Boulevard, and Martin Luther King Boulevard.
“We didn’t have any reports of water intruding into the houses,” Blair said. “It was mostly traffic issues for us.”
The city and drainage district work collaboratively on the pumping stations.
City employees are responsible for pumping the water from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. The drainage district takes over with its own pumpers from 4 p.m. to 7 a.m.
The rain started around lunch time.
City pumpers “did not get to the pumps for an hour and that’s what filled the system,” Dragna said.
The pumping system is designed to handle 2 inches of rain in the first hour and an inch an hour after that.
Morgan City received 4 or 5 inches within an hour Friday. Within two hours the system could not handle it, especially without pumping.
Dragna started calling people to work on the flooding. With no time to spare, Dragna started pumping himself.
“Once we, myself and another board member, figured out that the people weren’t there, we started pumping the water ourselves until it tried to catch up,” Dragna said.
“After it slacked a little bit, we were able to overcome it.
“We were caught off guard just because our information was bad. If I would’ve known that, I would’ve called it in immediately and said, hey, we’ve got 4 inches of rain coming so y’all need to go stand by at the pump.”
All of the pumps were running at full capacity, including two new pumps.
“The water just had time to build up because they weren’t pumping,” Dragna said.
The two new pumps are located behind the fire station on Victor II Boulevard. “They run perfectly,” Dragna said.
“The system, as far as the city is concerned, is to manage the roadways, which we did with police,” said Morgan City Mayor Frank “Boo” Grizzaffi.
“Every asset was out making sure the citizens were safe. For the most part, we took in an unprecedented amount of rain in a short period of time and survived,” Grizzaffi said.