Has anyone other than me noticed just how much standing water and drainage problems we have in Hancock County? Has anyone else noticed our drainage ditches, if you can see them? Has anyone had any damage from water intrusion into their basement or crawlspace?
As the owner of Home Inspections Plus, and doing home inspections for those having made offers to buy homes, I see water damage due to drainage issues all the time. This is no surprise to me as water damage or moisture intrusion is the No. 1 issue found by those of us doing home inspections in Indiana.
Many issues I see are due to a lack of homeowner maintenance to gutters, downspouts, underground discharge systems and poor ground grading around the home’s foundation.
However, as I drive around our county, poor drainage stands out almost everywhere we look. Many of our county drainage ditches are so full of ground growth you cannot even see them. Debris as well as clumps of grass clippings from bush hogging along our roadways has washed down and clogged underpass drain pipes. Our drainage ditches retain water rather than allowing it to flow to our natural waterways.
The county used to clean out and/or dredge the ditches clean so as to keep proper slope and elevation to properly flow runoff. The ditches in front of my home are now the responsibility of Fortville because of an annexation in 2007. They now own a portion of County Road 200W down to the school campus.
Once last year and again just last month, because of homeowner complaints, they have brought out grinding equipment to cut down ground growth in some portions of the ditches they are responsible for maintaining.
Yes, they ground down the growth, but they left the floor of the ditch full of debris which has turned the ditch into a swamp or marsh. Many of these counties ditches look the same and in my opinion not only reduce effective drainage, but help promote new growth and the breeding of ticks, mosquitoes and other unwanted varmints which could bring us to a discussion about the Zika virus, West Nile and/or other diseases spread by mosquitoes.
A drainage assessment has always been included with our property tax statement, but not this year. When we asked about the absence of the drainage assessment on this year’s filing, we were told that fund was no longer needed. Are you kidding me? Our existing ditches are a mess and in my opinion our county not only needs to clean what we already have, but additional drainage measures are needed in almost every part of the county where we have a high water table, lowland areas and standing water issues.
Many of the farm owners in our county have spent thousands of dollars and countless hours installing drainage pipes buried throughout areas of their fields. Most of those drain pipes terminate at various existing county drainage ditches. If those ditches fail to flow runoff, the very crop damage they have tried to prevent will occur. Standing water also destroys many sections of our road beds, helped create the mass of pot holes we have and can be dangerous at times of heavy rain and flooding.
New residential and commercial developments usually include runoff control within the development. Retention ponds collect and retain runoff, but I as a home inspector I have seen other issues with homes surrounding these ponds. How many retention ponds are there in America? Have we altered the natural flow of water throughout our country? How many areas of the country are starved for water perhaps because we are holding so much water back? That might be an interesting study.
I understand that new residential and/or commercial developments in Hancock County will need to be built some 2 feet above the roadways. That concept may help the new, but will do nothing for what exists now. In fact, building up the new could increase the likelihood the existing could experience even more drainage problems. It’s my hope that our tax dollars will be spent on our existing needs rather than attractions. Would anyone else agree with me?
Dave Huff is a Fortville resident. Send comments to [email protected].
