You can tell there was a large rainfall in Steinbach when certain roadways are sitting a foot or two underwater. The routine spectacle happened again during the storm this past Friday leaving some to wonder, why does Brandt Street always flood?

According to the City’s Head Engineer, Kyle Shymko, the stormwater drain beneath the streets is undersized, and it will probably always be.

“The reality with the City of Steinbach is that it is very flat,” he states. “And that is one of the challenges we have to deal with a lot when working at land drainage solutions.”

As Shymko explains, the drain below Brandt was built in the 1970s to quickly handle water from across much of the city. While using the street as a sort of aqueduct in extreme situations may have been the goal many years ago, Shymko says that is definitely no longer the case. However, with 50 years of new homes and businesses filling in the region, he says the original waterway can no longer support the corresponding runoff. Still, to increase the size of the Brandt drain would require city crews to increase the size of all other drains downstream so that the entire system could handle the additional water flow. Shymko says a project like that is pretty much out of the question.

“In an urban environment, we don’t have a lot of space to expand the storage capacity of those drains that are downstream so any improvements to the land drainage sewer would be very costly.”

While it may be inconvenient at times, Shymko points out that Brandt Street is never flooded for very long. Even if the city did have the funds for such a project it would perhaps be money better spent elsewhere. Finances aside, the city has, in fact, taken steps towards mitigating the problem. Instead of building a solution though, they are regulating it.

These days, the developers of new neighborhoods are required to install stormwater management ponds that store the runoff water from residential properties. Similarly, new commercial properties are mandated to store excess water somewhere on their property, usually their parking lot. Shymko describes the latter as a sort of strategic puddle that centres around a narrow drainage pipe that slows the flow into the main drain.

“As these areas are redeveloped with these new policies in mind, less water will be directly running off into these catchments [like Brandt Street] that are currently getting overwhelmed.”

There very is little that can be done immediately to prevent the short bursts of flooding that accent summertime in Steinbach. Shymko says improvement will come gradually but in the meantime, residents can expect to, on occasion, see conditions similar to this rain event back on September 21 of 2019... 


or this one on August 15 of 2016...


or this one on Labor Day Long Weekend that same year...

 
or this flood that took place on September 15, 2015...

 
or this deluge that ravaged Brandt Street back in August of 2014.


Even as far back as 2012, the City of Steinbach was having the same issue and it will likely persist well into the future.