Monday, August 27, 2012

Tropical Storm Irene Update #2

At tonight's Commission Meeting the City Manager gave an excellent presentation on what was going on during the storm and why.

As of this time the flooding is finally going down.  The delay appears to have been caused by a problem with the South Florida Management Districts equipment in that it was not moving the water.  Why is still unknown to us, but it caused flooding throughout western Broward County, not just Lauderhill.  They have advised the city that the system is now working and draining.  Over the last 24 hours Lauderhill received 12 inches of rain.

The other problem related to back up in the toilets that some experienced.  There the problem was Broward County Waste Water Division couldn't accept any more waste because it reached its capacity.  So we went out with trucks to drain and store till later tonight when they can accept it again.  It appears the Broward County's system is insufficient to handle the needs of the residents.

I have requested a full report, with documentation, and to bring it to both Broward County and SFWMD to get an explanation and resolution for the future.

As far as the City went, our equipment and system did exactly what it was supposed to.  But to work perfectly correct required the SFWMD and Broward County to do their job correctly too.  This did not happen and the result is what you experienced.

We will continue to work to improve the system and try to get the other governmental agencies to fix theirs.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tropical storm Irene??

Anonymous said...

Thank you for the update. But, if the problem is as diverse as you state, you might need a larger platform...otherwise...people are going to think that Lauderhill can't get its act together.

Additionally, it took me 2 days of searching to find this blog. Why don't you blog on the lauderhill.gov website? That would be a great place to provide information about ... lauderhill....

eLauderhill News said...

I would love a larger platform, but this is not an official publication of the city. I own this web site and I control what goes on it.

I have been asked by the city, and I would do it anyhow, to do anything I can to keep the public updated in cases such as storms. I see it as a public service.

The city does have an email notification system that you can sign up on, and many have. I would recommend it. The electronic notifications that go out from there are directly from the city.

As to blogging, I requested, in the last year, for the City Commission to consider numerous ways to involve ourselves in Social Media, i.e., blogging, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Instead they created a policy of not allowing the city to promote any form of Social Media that allow two way communication since it causes problems with the Public Records Law and other concerns. The opposite of what I was trying to do.

I think I might have wrote about this on this web site. That is one of the reasons I maintain my own web site since the City would not allow me to do exactly what we are doing here.

Even so, while still limited, this web site daily has numerous hits. People are reading it.