By BROOKE STEVENSON
Sunday Times Newspapers
ALLEN PARK — Help soon may be on the way for residents who fell victim to last month’s basement flooding.
After about 150 houses flooded about a month ago due to heavy rain, City Engineer Rick Lang reported last week on the city’s progress to correct the problem.
Officials have been looking into flooding trends and have found that 70 percent of the flooded basements are in three specific areas of the city: University near College, Becker near Moore and Wick near Marlborough. The cause of the flooding has not been determined yet, and officials will be working in the next few weeks to decide what to do about the problem.
“We are in the process of logging all of the return information from all the homeowners we received,” Lang said.
Residents whose basements were flooded were asked to fill out a form so the city had accurate flooding figures.
“We’re going to bottom those out to see if there is any specific area that is experiencing some persistent problem within the system,” Lang said.
The city does not have flood insurance to cover the cost of damage to residents’ houses who filled out the forms.
Allen Park has a history of flooding, with thousands of residences being affected in 2000 and then almost 1,000 houses flooding in 2004. Since then the city has installed a super sewer along Pelham and Allen roads, but some areas continue to flood.
Lang said officials plan on forming a committee to assess the problem in the near future.
“What we would most likely do next week is establish a citizen task force, along with the water foreman and people that are directly involved in the water system,” he said.
The goal will be to determine the city’s next step in fixing the problem.
“Hopefully from there we can move forward and try to determine the direction the community would like to take on that,” Lang said.