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Clearing canals months away in city-parish drainage project

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BATON ROUGE – As of Thursday, drainage crews are moving from one clogged drain to the next. A new, 20-million-dollar improvement project is underway in East Baton Rouge. It's coming at a time when just about everyone's fed up with flooding.

“It used to be five to seven inches of rain is a problem, two to three inches is a problem now,” said Freda Yarbrough Dunne.

Dunne lives near Dawson Creek and says when it rains hard, it gets clogged and the water comes rushing toward her neighborhood. She had water in den in May.

“There was literally a wave that hit the house. It went around the sides of the house and came from behind and then into the den,” said Dunne.

Flood water backs up happens so often Dunne knows the warning signs.

“If I’m in the house and the toilet burps [the water] is at the end of the driveway, if the toilet burbs and it has a splash it's by the car,” explained Dunne.

A clearing of Dawson Creek is included in the city-parishes storm water drainage project that's underway, along with Ward Creek and Claycut Bayou. But the work won't start until end of the year at the earliest. The Army Corps of Engineers need to permit the work, and there's two other projects ahead of this that will be completed first.

"I'm really excited, and I'll be really even more excited if it happens," said Dunne.

Dunne has been waiting for Dawson Creek to be scooped out out for years. She doesn't want to move.

"Who's going to buy the house that has flooded this many times?”

But she 's not keen to always being on high alert for high water.

"I have it down to where all my medications I can dump into my medical bag in two minutes and out the door,” said Dunne.

The city-parish has enough money to clear out 90,000 ft. of canals and bayous. The work will start sometime at the end of the year or early 2022.

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