Several residents who live in Brighton’s Brighton Crossing neighborhood say the drainage system at the end of Royal Pine Street needs to be fixed.
Much of the rain and hail which fell in the neighborhood Monday funneled down to the end of Royal Pine and then started backing up.
One neighbor, whose Ford F-150 was inundated with water, said the drainage ditch on the other side of the barricades isn’t big enough to handle all the water.
“The water was all the way up to the hood,” he said. “It lifted the pickup and moved it against the barricade.”
The swift moving water also knocked over a neighbor’s cinder block landscape wall.
“When it rains hard, this area gets beat up bad,” said Marj Frederick, a resident who has lived in the neighborhood for 12 years. “It’s happened three or four times in the 12 years that I’ve been here.”
Cody and Kristen Dawson were on their way home from dinner last night when the hailstorm hit. They got stranded on the other side of Royal Pine because of the high water.
“It started out as a tiny stream,” said the Dawson’s 8-year-old daughter, Emilee. “Then it turned into a big, huge river.”
“My daughter Madison was actually crying because she was really scared,” Kristen said. “And it was scary, because we were trying to get home and we couldn’t.”
The Dawson family says they pulled into a neighbor’s driveway and waited for the water to subside before they could drive home.
One neighbor, who didn’t want his name used, said he worries that if the city and developer don’t improve the drainage, it could end up being deadly for a child.
“One of these days, a child is going to get swept out into that field,” he said.