Thomas Nolan lives on Southeast 8th Avenue. Third flood in six years. The last one came three weeks after the city finished the drainage project built to stop it.
He went on the Adams Brothers podcast last week. Ninety minutes. No notes.
Somewhere in there he mentions a document.
Chen Moore and Associates. Peer review of the city’s drainage project. Dated December 1, 2025, written after the October flood. Four alternatives. It recommends the second one: a new pump station on SE 8th with its own 30-inch force main running east under US 1, so the neighborhood stops dumping everything into one outfall.
Nolan read from it at a commission meeting. What happened next, in his telling: the commissioners started asking him questions about it.
It’s their report. They paid for it. They got it in December.
A guy with a fire-rescue schedule and a gutted house carried it into the room.
Nolan says that storm dropped about four inches, same as 2020, and the new system made it three times worse. That’s his strongest line and it doesn’t survive the record. Deputy City Manager Eric Power told the dais on November 4, 2025 that the event was 8.2 inches in two hours, that the system was engineered to a 10-year storm, and that it hit on a high tide.
“We built it to a 10-year storm” isn’t a defense. It’s an admission with a date on it. Somebody picked that standard for a neighborhood that had already flooded in 2020, with federal money on a spending clock.
So I filed four public records requests this week.
The report and its transmittal. The bid file and the basis-of-design memo. The as-builts. And every communication between the city and the trailer park owner, the one staff said wouldn’t allow pumping, who turned up at a meeting and said nobody ever called her.
Full story and the records requests, over on Substack.
