Engineer to work on Broadmoor flooding woes

An engineer will be appointed to evaluate potential improvements to the drainage system in the Broadmoor subdivision in Bayou Cane, said Terrebonne Parish Councilman Billy Hebert at the council’s Public Services Committee meeting last week.

Broadmoor experienced extensive house flooding during a heavy rainstorm on March 27, but the subdivision has had flooding problems in recent years.

The engineer will be appointed at the next council meeting.

Hebert said the drainage system was installed haphazardly in the subdivision and that residential and commercial development has contributed to the problem.

The council continued to hear complaints from Broadmoor residents about flooded homes.

“If it takes digging up the subdivision, do it,” said Mire Street resident Dwain Guerin, who had house flooding for the first time in March. “We don’t need a Band Aid, we need a solution.” He showed photographs of stopped up culverts to the committee.

June Phillips, a teacher at Broadmoor Elementary School who also lives on Mire Street, received 4-1/2 inches of water in her home, but her house has taken on water since the 1980s.

“It’s a catastrophe, but all you can do is watch it come in,” she told the committee. “This was the worst.”

Kenney Street resident Ken Tangeys also had house flooding for the first time in March, but said neighbors have flooded four times in a year. Cars passing in front of houses push water in.

His wife Jeanette said that waste from a portable toilet behind Broadmoor Elementary was loosed into the floodwater. Ditches are not cleaned, she said.

Marc Rogers with T. Baker Smith told the committee that Lake Houmas acts as a storage area for Broadmoor’s drainage system, but it could not handle March’s downpour.