While we see rain popping up already in some areas, residents in Lemmon Valley are dealing with the after-effects of last night's storms. David Miles, who owns his house on Tupelo Street, never thought he'd be draining the pond that used to be his front yard. As he told us, "The water hasn't gotten into the home yet. We're nervous though, because it's supposed to rain again tonight, so we're trying to get everything pumped out."
The garage and everything in it, flooded. He's also using the water pump so his wife can get her car out. He doesn't know how much this is costing him. He told us, "We're going on vacation in 2 weeks, and I thought, 'Oh my gosh, I'm going to spend all my vacation money on this.'"
Up the road on Tupelo Street, homeowner Donna Robinson doesn't know how much her own watery woes will cost her either. She's already taking time off work to clean up. She showed us several pictures to show how bad her yard looked last night. As she said, "Unfortunately, I have a feeling I have some damage under my house"
And her backyard is still flooded. Donna was at work when the heavy rains fell. She watched our late news last night to find out about the flooding on her street and told her boss she had to rush home. At midnight when she got home, the dog corral had 2 to 4 inches of water, with the dogs inside: "I heard slushing, and I thought, ‘is there water running?’ And it was actually the dogs running back and forth in the water there. I've had some flooding, but nothing like this. I think part of it is a drainage problem. The county hasn't been cleaning the ditches like they're supposed to."
Further up Tupelo Street, we saw the county doing just that...too late for the folks who live here. But Washoe County’s Eric Crump told me, "We spend literally tens of thousands of dollars on weed abatement. That's typically what clogs a lot of these drains, but you also get sediment from people's backyards and open space and that type of thing." And he says the rain that hit here last night would have overcome clear drains here: "You'd have to have a ditch probably as wide as a street to accommodate that much moisture."
Donna Robinson’s response? “I think if the trenches had been kept up and maintained, that the drainage wouldn't have been as severe, into people's yards and homes."
At the other end of Tupelo Street, David Miles is grateful...for good friends, who he didn't even have to call: "A lot of these people are my neighbors and people I work with, so everybody's out here pitching in." They even supplied the food...when they took a break from cleanup duty.
