TEHACHAPI, Calif. (KERO) — With Tropical Storm Hilary come and gone, some areas around California are still cleaning up the mess and repairing damage caused by the historic storm. In the City of Tehachapi, the city's public works director says that being proactive helped them pull through in good condition.
Weeks removed from Hilary, the extent of the damage left around Tehachapi by major flooding ended up being a damaged chain link fence over a culvert.
"I've seen it overflow through those culvert pipes a couple of times, but that water was about 5 feet up to that fence line," said Tehachapi's Deputy Director of Public Works Tyler Napier. "It was all the way up to the road, fully inundating that area."
The storm dumped several inches of rain in Tehachapi, and while there were flooding incidents with some businesses, homes, and roads, the majority of the city's drainage systems worked. According to Napier, that's the payoff for years of design and work on the system.
"Tropical Storm Hilary was kind of almost exciting for us as a people who maintain facilities, but also for the engineering team. They spent a lot of effort and time, energy, money on designing the capacity of our storm water network," said Napier. "So, that's the piping, the drainage channels, the sumps, so to ensure that they can handle a 100-year storm."
The storm came at a bad time for the community, as the annual Tehachapi Mountain Festival was firing up, but with staff on-call for the festival, they were able to quickly spring into action as the storm rolled into the area.
"The staff was able to transition right over to that very quickly. We had staff working around the clock throughout that storm," said Napier.
Immediately after the storm wrapped up, Napier and his staff were out pounding the pavement to survey the damage and devise a list of important projects to take care of immediately in preparation for the next storm.
"Our development services director, our public works director, and one of our city engineers, they went out kind of looking at a bigger picture of planning, design, construction, and is there any major improvements we need to make to any of our facilities based on that large storm we had," said Napier.
Ultimately, after the historic storm, Napier says he and the city feel like they are in a pretty good position going into the future.
"Whenever you can handle 5 inches of rain from now on, it's like an inch of rain is going to feel like nothing."
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