Much of central and eastern Indiana spent Wednesday under water. Fishers spent it with one wet road.
As storms rolled through Hamilton County and a Flash Flood Warning stretched into the late afternoon, the City of Fishers reported high water along 106th Street, where the roadway runs close to a creek. That was it — the only trouble spot the city flagged as of Wednesday afternoon.
“With the storm we received today, we did experience high water/flooding along 106th Street because of the proximity of the creek to the road,” said Ashley Elrod, public relations manager for the City of Fishers. “That said, the stormwater infrastructure improvements we began several years ago have drastically improved our situation and we have very limited closures due to flooding comparatively.”
Compare that to what was happening elsewhere. Parts of east central Indiana picked up as much as 10 inches of rain, Wayne County went to a Level 3 travel warning through Thursday at noon, and schools closed across several districts. Delaware and Henry counties were under a Flash Flood Emergency. Thousands of Hoosiers lost power.
Fishers used to be part of that story
Longtime residents will remember when a heavy rain meant more than one closed road here.
Fishers grew up fast, and a lot of it grew up before modern detention and drainage standards were the norm. Water coming off all that new pavement had to go somewhere, and it went into creeks — Mud Creek, Cheeney Creek, Fall Creek — that were never sized for a suburb of 100,000 people. Low-lying streets flooded. Basements took on water. Neighborhoods built in the 1970s and 1980s ended up with drainage systems that were undersized almost from the day they were finished.
The town’s answer was to stop treating stormwater as an afterthought and start treating it as a utility, with its own bill, its own staff and its own capital plan. That is the money that has paid for storm sewer upsizing, drainage repairs, stream restoration and flood control studies over the past decade-plus.
Today the city’s stormwater division owns and maintains roughly 17,000 storm sewer pipes and 19,000 storm drains, sweeps 800 lane miles of street to keep debris out of the system, and runs a floodplain management program that includes a matching Stormwater Grant to help property owners fix private drainage problems — including elevating homes or getting them out of the floodplain entirely.
None of that shows up on a sunny day. It shows up on a day like Wednesday.
What it does not fix
Infrastructure has limits, and 106th Street is a good illustration of one of them. When a road sits that close to a creek, no amount of pipe upsizing changes the fact that the creek is going to leave its banks in a big enough rain. That is topography, not engineering neglect.
The reminder stands regardless of the ZIP code: do not drive through standing water. It takes very little of it to float a vehicle, and you cannot see whether the pavement underneath is still there.
Residents can report drainage problems, clogged storm drains and standing water through Fishers Connect. Weather permitting, the city expects conditions to improve as the system moves east.