ROANOKE, VA – When heavy rain hits Roanoke, these streets don’t just flood — they vanish. Campbell Avenue. Salem Avenue. First Street. Underwater and overwhelmed.
“When we do see flooding in downtown, often this is the first place we see it,” Stormwater Utility Manager Ian Shaw said.
That’s exactly why a long-awaited fix is finally in motion — to stop the flooding before it starts.
“If we get a whole lot of rain fast, the pipes get overwhelmed,” Shaw said. “So we’re really just looking at ways we can improve the flow both through downtown, try to divert some of the flow around downtown, and try to get some attention upstream as well.”
The nearly $2.7 million investment is digging deep beneath downtown to keep future floods from swallowing the streets.
“It’s really one of several projects we’re looking at implementing over the next few years, with this being the starting point — where we’re seeing the most frequent flooding,” Shaw said.
The project focuses on replacing and enlarging old storm pipes, giving rainwater more room to flow and less chance to flood.
“Right here, we’re taking a bottleneck out of this system,” Shaw said. “We’ve got a bunch of pipes coming together at weird angles, so we’re straightening those out.”
While construction tackles major fixes underground, keeping those pipes clear and working starts on the surface — long before the rain ever falls.
“We try to get to that before we have an issue,” Cyndi Sledd, the City’s Stormwater Maintenance Supervisor, said.
That’s where Sledd and her team come in — inspecting, clearing and staying ahead of trouble before the first drop hits the ground.
“A little robotic camera we put down in the lines — it goes through the line and tells us any defects we may have,” she said.
They monitor the areas that cause the most trouble and head there first.
“There’s no one particular place,” Sledd said. “Those are the ones we address the most — right before a storm, during a storm and, of course, after the storm.”
With prevention above ground and new infrastructure below, the city hopes Roanokers will see a real difference once the first phase of the project wraps up this fall.
