Residents of the Bryant (Arbor Oaks) neighborhood have been dealing with flooding for years. Their concerns were the subject of a Monday, Sept. 13 Ann Arbor City Council work session agenda where staff, led by Public Services Administrator Sue McCormick, described work being done to handle stormwater in the city and the local, state and federal regulations that apply.

When you are trying to find the answers to a problem that has been going on for years, it can be very vexing to get to the point where you are convinced that everyone involved is acting in good faith and yet the problem persists. One way out of this log jam is to remove the assumption that everyone involved currently includes all the correct people who need to be involved, and to find some other party who is not directly involved but who is responsible for something upstream or downstream that will affect the situation.

Telling a story based on Freedom of Information Act requests can take a long time. You may think that you have precisely the right question to ask, but then it turns out that the agency that you asked does not have jurisdiction over the problem. In that case even a great question may return zero results. Locating the organization which has the information is half the problem in too many cases — including this one.

Thanks to a comment by alert reader Alan Benard, there's a possible party to the Bryant flooding that hadn't made it onto my radar previously. The Michigan Department of Transportation has a highway, I-94, that goes over Malletts Creek. That culvert or pipe is under the jurisdiction of MDOT and not the city. On a recent post I wrote, Benard asked:

"Until then, please keep digging. And while you're at it, ask MDOT when they plan to clear the pipe running under I-94 to Mallett's Creek (represented by an extremely thin blue line extending from the end of Englewood Ct. on your first map) which is now plugged, and clearly on its easement."

Finding the right map to draw your conclusions from, alas, is not as easy as it sounds like it should be. A map maintained by one organization may look very different than what should essentially be the same map maintained by another organization. When I went to Ann Arbor City Hall and spoke with Jerry Hancock, the stormwater and floodplain programs coordinator, he showed me imagery and GIS layers in his City of Ann Arbor map that indicated
a different watercourse drain map than the Washtenaw County map I originally referenced.

The situation so far

Here's some measure of what I think I know so far, how the systems and pieces are monitored and connected, and where the gaps are.

Malletts Creek is a tributary of the Huron River. It enters the Huron River near the corner of Huron River Drive and Chalmers, and climbs uphill toward a gauging station at Mary Beth Doyle Park near just upstream of where the creek crosses Packard in east Ann Arbor.

Upstream from Mary Beth Doyle Park, the waters are a county drain. At I-94, they become a culvert under the highway, under the jurisdiction of MDOT. That culvert is reported to be clogged, though I have not gone on site to inspect it.

Further upstream, the waters reappear from the culvert as the county drain, which extends along Ellsworth to cross State Street, draining Briarwood and then Lansdowne.
A branch of city drain heads into the Bryant neighborhood at Englewood Court, and upstream from there Englewood Court drain connects to private drains.

A hypothesis, which is testable

Perhaps the drain under I-94 is clogged enough that water rushing down Malletts Creek is blocked at the freeway, and some of it backs up down the city drains at Englewood Courty into people's private drains and backyards in the Bryant neighborhood when the water is high enough.

If that's the case, then clearing out the freeway drain will change the waterflow in the neighborhood upstream, allowing more water to drain into the catchment basin
at Mary Beth Doyle Park instead of in people's backyards.

Can I prove that? No. There are too many open questions, and I don't have a way to clean that drain out myself.

There would appear to be enough problems just in the private drains inside the Bryant neighborhood that no one simple solution can be assumed to be enough.

Open questions

Does this account make any sense, or am I missing something obvious?

Is the flow data at Mary Beth Doyle Park consistent with this?

Do old photos from the last time someone walked Mallets Creek show blockage? Do current photos show blockage?

Who has the authority to schedule that the drain be cleared, as a part of a regular maintenance program?

If this drain is cleared, how does the FEMA flood plain map change for Malletts Creek?

If this drain is cleared, will it do anything to really help the Bryant neighborhood, or is this mostly going to affect someone or something else?

When is the last time this drain was cleared out, and what is the maintenance schedule for it?

How many other MDOT drains around the state are in need of maintenance?

Edward Vielmetti asks more questions than he can answer for AnnArbor.com. Contact him at edwardvielmetti@annarbor.com.