MIDLAND, TX (KWES) - If you've driven in Midland during any kind of storm or rain, you know it floods easily and the city knows it too.
Flooding in Midland is expected when it rains, even if it's just for a few minutes.
"Do we have a drainage problem? Most definitely," said Midland Major, Jerry Morales. "Do we have a drainage plan? Yes."
The City of Midland said they're aware of the problem but it would cost anywhere from 50 to 75 million dollars to fix all of the city's drainage.
"It's a very expensive project and because it doesn't rain enough you don't need to really implement something if you're only going to get 20 days [of rain] a year, I think we can live through that," said Morales.
"Here it's an inconvenience when we see it but it's not very often we see it," said Engineering Services Director, Jose Ortiz with The City of Midland. "We need to be mindful of our dollars and that we're not overreacting to something that's not a big issue to the City of Midland"
In 2016 it rained a total of 23 days in Midland, totaling just over 15 inches. The city said even though it isn't cost efficient to tear up a road to fix the drainage, they've already started a series of projects. While working on roads that already need construction, the city is improving drainage.
"If we're going to rehab a road if we have to tear it up to repave it at that time I like to look into putting in storm drain systems," said Ortiz. "So it doesn't take much more time, it is some more design efforts, it is more expensive but that's the time to do it. There's no reason to retrofit a storm drain system into an existing road."
The city said the current drainage system is designed to drain from northwest to southeast. That's why areas like Wadley, A St. and the duck pond see the most flooding. The rain water then gets carried out to Midland, Jal and Scharbauer Draws.
"The problem that we deal with now is that we've seen so much growth in Midland that the configuration and taking water to our roads to our draws is starting to be a problem for us, because we have so many more vehicles on our roads," said Ortiz. "So what we're up against is trying to come up with designs that are appropriate for our traffic."
The tall city hopes the improvements being done now will have a long lasting effect.
"We know for a fact Midland is going to continue to grow so when we do these types of projects we don't just think about today or five years from now we plan for 30, 40 years down the road," said Morales.
The city of Midland said they do not have a deadline to finish the series of projects. They tell us in order to be able to do it all at once the city would have to look into debt and funding from other projects.
