Cayce looks to lessen floods that storms create in Avenues area

Kevin Lawson is eager to get rid of the sandbags stacked near the front door that protect his home during heavy rain in a flood-prone Cayce neighborhood.

He’s hoping city leaders will go forward with suggested drainage improvements that a study says would lessen significantly the problems that downpours create in the Avenues area, one of the city’s largest and most popular.

“If they can find a way to do that, I’d love it,” Lawson said. “It’s not pretty here after some storms.”

The fix proposed is an ambitious challenge for the Lexington County city of 13,000 residents. Its $12 million price tag equals the amount that the city website says is spent yearly on water and sewer service.

The flooding after heavy rain plagues an area with more than 1,200 homes and businesses in the center of Cayce, about a fifth of the tracts in the community.

“This is not a problem those property owners can solve by themselves,” engineering consultant Bill Bingham said.

Drainage installed mainly in the 1950s no longer is adequate, the study says.

“The Avenues area has grown and developed over the last half-century, but its drainage system never progressed with it,” it says.

Some Avenues homeowners say they’ve delivered that message repeatedly to state and city officials to no avail.

“We shouldn’t have sold our fishing boat,” said Jackie Weaver, who has lived in the neighborhood for nearly 50 years. “We could use it at times to get around the yard.”

Her home is in the middle of an area the study says is worst-affected during storms.

“It’s not so much the volume,” Bingham said. “It’s the intensity with which it comes down.”

Weaver’s family has lined a ditch with concrete to protect the home and prevent erosion that storms bring.

But it’s not enough to prevent overflows that turn her yard into a pond at times, she said.

Weaver keeps a collection of photographs of flooding that forced her to remain inside for a few hours until it ebbed.

Bingham is familiar with the problems in the Avenues. As a Lexington 2 School Board member, he knows precautions taken to keep water out of parts of Brookland-Cayce High School during downpours.

The improvements would take a few years to complete, as they would involve tearing up roads to install pipes large enough for a six-foot tall person to walk through.

Paying for the project probably means a tax hike of unknown amount, the study said.

The five City Council members – two of whom live in the Avenues – have taken the recommendations in the $60,000 study under review.

Homeowners like Lawson are crossing their fingers that the necessity to keep a close eye on storm forecasts can be abandoned soon.

“This needs to be done,” he said. “But it’s a difficult mission.”

This story was originally published April 22, 2016 at 4:24 PM with the headline "Cayce looks to lessen floods that storms create in Avenues area."