 Hello and welcome to the Fort Report, I'm Chris Conley and why am I standing in front of this ginormous hole? Well, I'm here with City Stormwater Engineering Manager Don McChesney. Don, what are we doing here? Well, we're standing in front of what I like to consider one huge bathtub. Now, the city's built this bathtub in cooperation with the school district that owns the land. Primarily, it's to store water during a heavy storm so that it doesn't flood downstream. In the past, the water would rise up and flow through the school, homes, and create flooding problems. Now, it stores here until the storm is gone. It looks kind of like one of those Ion or Maztec giant arena death sports that they used to play. Yes. Does it have a dual purpose? Good. I'm glad you caught that, Chris. This has a dual purpose. The secondary purpose is to provide day in and day out a practice field for the kids in the neighborhood. Tell us about Flood Awareness Week. Well, Flood Awareness Week is a week, we try to make people aware of the dangers of flooding. It's very important that when people see water on a roadway, they don't cross it. Even six inches of water can carry a vehicle into a stream. So we want to tell people, if you see water on the roadway, turn around, don't drown. We also want to remind people that we have an automatic warning system that tells them that water is crossing the roadway and it's dangerous, and when they see this flasher go off, they do need to turn around and not cross the water on the roadway. And also in flood season we see all the tributaries and creeks come to high water and there's white water and sometimes that's tempting for kids to go down there and want to play near that edge and that's a bad thing to do. It is very dangerous, Chris. The water has things in it that are dangerous. It can be debris, stone, glass. It's no place for your children to play at all. There are lots of other tips you can use to help with stormwater available on the stormwater website. One thing to remember is that everything that goes into the stormwater drains go directly into our creeks and streams. That means more than just rain. It's easy to let litter and pollution get into those drains too. Things like animal waste, lawn chemicals, even automotive fluids can wash down the drains and that causes problems. So make sure you're careful with those and never, ever dump things like cooking oil or automotive oil down a storm drain. To learn more about keeping stormwater pollution free, check out the city's environmental management website. Well, Chris, the mission of the stormwater program is to protect people and property from the harmful effects of stormwater runoff. This is what this project is intended to do, is to save lives, save property by controlling floodwaters. Well, Don, thanks for coming out and standing in the rain with me today. Glad to. That's it for this week's edition of the Fort Report. I'm Chris Connolly. Thanks for watching.