Developers or Others Please Share Your Knowledge -Detention Pond

[Account Closed]

Hi All,

I hope someone can share some light on this huge issue that I am dealing with and some of the neighbours too. I live in a popular location  (Edmond, OK) that has exploded in the last two years with housing development. My house is on a busy two way street with many private homes, and recently, developers have purchased acres and started building neighbourhoods. There is a new neighbourhood east of me not even a mile away and another one in the backside. Since these neighbourhoods came up some of their drainage system point towards others and my direction. Therefore increasing the water runoff into the small creek in the backyard and also widen it by a couple of feet in the last year due to the volume, and no longer containing the water in the creek during a storm. I've had close calls where its come close to our front door, and others have also experienced this. 

The developing east of me continues to build houses and still no retaining pond. The street has been shut down before too, and we've also had a lot of damages; gate doesn't close, bridge flip over, concrete cracking, and a new water stream exposing cable lines. The city is NOT doing anything. 

Should developers have retention ponds???

Backyard Front Yard: notice gate 1st pic and 2nd pic how high water rises

[Mark Trebor]

Wow those pics are crazy sounds like a city engineering problem.  But since those guy's never make a mistake your probably screwed unless you get lawyers.  Then you're screwed and broke.

[Greg Dickerson]

@Account Closed looks like you have a serious issue. You need to address this with the city. There should be stormwater requirements for development they had to adhere to. If the city is not helpful you can contact the state  and federal DWQ

[Michael Koenig]

I'm posting from California where almost all of this is regulated but your pictures are showing why that isn't necessarily a bad thing. You can research what the requirements are by going to your cities website and looking at new development requirements. Specifically Searching for "stormwater requirements" should bring up some results. From there you can check county requirements for new developments and since this is dumping into your local creek possibly state fish and game and lastly the army core of engineers. I'm not sure on the last one as the current administration might have ended the practice but the Army core had originally grabbed jurisdiction on basically every river and stream in the US. They are more about overseeing developments that alter these water bodies but if there is as drastic erosion as you are claiming they might be the ones to contact if you can't find any local new development requirements for stormwater. They'll slap your city hard if there's new development severely affecting waterways and streams.

[Account Closed]

@Greg Dickerson Thank you! I am working on this now and will let my neighbors know to email them too. 

[Account Closed]

@Michael Koenig thank you!