FRESNO (KMJ) — In a time of drought it’s odd to see flooding – but it certainly came to Fresno Thursday night.
However, the blame for it isn’t being directed towards the amount of water but the infrastructure designed to deal with it. Officials says their infrastructure was overwhelmed when heavy rain fell from the skies.
“We’ve got estimates that some parts of Fresno got an inch – to an inch and a half of rain”, says the city’s Mark Standriff. “So when that happens the system does tend to get overloaded”
He says some of the city’s pipes are up to 80 years old – and were therefore too narrow to deal with the surge.
“We’ve got pipes in many of the areas the flooding occurred that are, quite frankly, not big enough in diameter that amount of rainfall in that amount of time”.
The sheer amount of mud and silt clogging up the the drains also added a strain to the system – but plans are in progress to replace the pipelines with ones which can manage larger flows of water.
It was estimated that at least an inch of rain fell in Fresno Thursday night, but the National Weather Service only recorded a fifth of an inch of rainfall for the area as a whole.
“It was interesting it was kind of the only place to have a lot of rain”, says Christine Riley with the National Weather Service in Hanford. “It was a narrow band that was focused right over pretty much Fresno”
But if you thought the flooding in Fresno was bad, there was another narrow band of rain just to the north of the city where the National Weather Service say more than two inches of rain fell.
