FRESNO, Calif (KSEE/KGPE) – As the weather cools down and the clouds move in, there is one seasonal tradition Tennielle Knight can always count on: flooding.
“It’s every year,” Knight said. “Where I stay at, it’s like a bowl or something where all the water just collects and [there’s] nowhere for it to go.”
This year, the Clovis resident is prepared. Knight spent Monday afternoon at the City of Clovis’ free sandbag station, shoveling piles of sand into bags and loading them into his car.
He says his garage door has a gap, which often lets rain in, and his backyard commonly floods. He hopes the sandbags will prevent that.
“After the rain’s done, I’m out there brushing all the water down the road to get it off my property,” Knight said.
He is not the only one out preparing for the weather, though.
“We want to make sure that our customers are prepared, should they experience an outage, particularly with this being the first storm of the year,” Jeff Smith with PG&E said.
Smith says their crews will work extended hours throughout the storm, and they will have extra resources on hand.
“That’s having extra transformers in our yard, making sure that we have quick and easy access to those, we’ve got extra poles, wires, anything that could potentially be damaged in this storm,” Smith said.
City of Fresno Public Works Assistant Director Brian Russell says they remain prepared for weather events throughout the year.
“Winter is coming. It happens every year,” Russell said.
He says, because Fresno is flat, it takes a long time for flooding to run off, creating drainage problems.
“We have a number of staff that is normally out paving streets and filling potholes,” Russell said. “Those are resources that we can pivot and deploy them to do drainage.”
They need the community to look for ways to prevent flooding as well, though.
“If it’s trash day, maybe move [your cans] out from the curb six or eight inches so that the trash cans don’t become something that’s holding back the water,” Russell suggested.
He says the most important thing people can do is call 311 if they discover flooded areas. He says, when problems are not reported, they continue to get worse.
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