Residents on and around Sherry Lynn Drive in Petal have waited for approximately six months for that road to fully open after last fall’s flooding of Greens Creek washed out a culvert, causing a portion of the street to collapse and necessitating the closure of a section of the road.
If all goes according to plan, those repairs may be made within the next few months, as the Petal Board of Aldermen recently approved the advertisement of bids for the project, which is expected to cost more than $200,000. Mayor Tony Ducker said hopefully, those bids will come back and be opened by middle or late May.
“(Those bids) are basically what will trigger everything, and then obviously the timeframe in which we can actually get the winning bid to come in and start the work as well,” he said. “Hopefully, it will be (a company) that can get a jump on it soon thereafter.”
The creek overflowed on August 24 of last year, after heavy rainfall throughout the state caused it to crest and pour water into several dozen homes in the area. On the day of the flooding, The Washington Post reported up to a foot of rain had fallen across parts of the state, leading to multiple flash-flood emergency warnings and several road closings.
Similar rainfall totals occurred in parts of western Alabama, Louisiana and Texas.
“The storm … basically blew out that section of (Sherry Lynn Drive),” Ducker said. “From what I was looking at, it looked like it had been repaired some time in the past; I’m not sure when.
“But what we’re going to end up having to do is basically come in with a new culvert.”
City officials have applied for the state’s Mississippi Municipality & County Water Infrastructure Grant Program Act, which was created by the Mississippi Legislature and Gov. Tate Reeves to provide matching funds to eligible entities for making necessary investments to water, wastewater and stormwater infrastructure.
“Some of the delay (in repairs) is obviously the cost,” Ducker said. “We can potentially have matching funds from our (American Rescue Plan Act) funds.
“We ended up submitting (for that program), so hopefully we’ll get good news on that front.”
Ducker said Petal’s flooding, in big part, was caused by saturation from the rains, which, by the time the creek crested, had occurred for several days in a row.
“I think around 2018 we had a situation like this, and I think it was 2014 that the (Leaf) River got up so high that it was causing a problem with (water) coming back in there,” he said after the flooding. “So it makes it more difficult, especially when we need to improve some of our ditch and drainage situations.
“But if you make them too wide and too deep, it also creates an avenue for the water to come back at you at some point, so we’ve got to be really smart about how we do it. That being said, it would cost millions of dollars if we went in and did a wholesale change. I think in a situation like this, when you get this much rain in this amount of time, there’s probably not a circumstance where we would be able to solve every situation.”
Some solutions to the problem have been offered, with the most recent being from Ward 1 Alderman Gerald Steele. In late 2021, Steele presented to the Petal Board of Aldermen his Steele Plan, which is designed to aid stormwater runoff throughout the ward by way of creating and maintaining ditches and channels. Board members approved that plan, but shortly thereafter Ducker vetoed certain portions of the plan, saying Steele’s proposed timeline was not adequate to perform the ditch work needed to relieve flooding in certain areas of the city.
Since then, some progress has been made on the plan, but Steele said August 24’s events could have been prevented had the plan been followed in full. In recent weeks, Steele has expressed concern that although some ditches are being maintained, that process is not happening in the order outlined in the Steele Plan.
