Greenwood and Leflore County workers, equipped with backhoes and bulldozers, have been digging a drainage ditch to help alleviate flooding in west Greenwood.
The ditch — about three-quarters of a mile long and 7 feet deep — is intended to more swiftly channel rain runoff south of town and keep homes dry.
It’s a joint project between the city of Greenwood and Leflore County that’s been prompted by residents’ complaints about flash flooding through the area.
County workers broke ground on the drainage ditch last week. It runs south from Buckeye Road and is designed to carry water from the neighborhoods surrounding Greenwood High School and Greenwood Leflore Hospital and from the Buckeye subdivision.
City Council President Ronnie Stevenson said that part of town has long suffered from poor drainage. Two years ago, several homes near Greenwood High School were flooded during heavy rains.
The new ditch will run parallel to a pre-existing drainage ditch, albeit one that proved too small to handle a significant rainfall.
“We’ve been all right as long as it’s a steady rain, but if we get a heavy rain in a short time, it can’t move fast enough,” Stevenson said. “That’s what happened about two Aprils ago. We got 5 inches in two hours, and we just couldn’t move it fast enough.”
District 3 Supervisor Anjuan Brown, who represents much of west Greenwood, said the plans to build the ditch have been about a year in the making.
“It started from a meeting we had about a year ago with a lot of residents,” Brown said. “We put our county engineers on it, and this is the result of their planning We’re doing some things that will help get this water flowing faster. Hopefully, we won’t have that major problem again with houses flooding over there.”
Jerry Smith, the county road manager, said it will likely take his crews three weeks to complete the work.
Susan Bailey, Greenwood’s director of public works, said the new ditch is a substantial project. Both the city and county have sent equipment and laborers to help with the digging.
Brown declined to estimate how much the work would end up costing, saying it “boils down to the number of hours we work.”
An added bonus of all the digging, though, was that the dirt will be useful elsewhere in the county.
“We’re going to pick up a lot of this dirt and utilize it,” Smith said. “We’ve got roads that definitely need building up, and this is the stuff to build it up with.”
• Contact Bryn Stole at 581-7235 or bstole@gwcommonwealth.com.
