Baker, LA asked in Real Estate Law, Environmental, Land Use & Zoning and Municipal Law for Louisiana

Q: Do I have any recourse or a case?

During heavy rains, the small storm drain in front of my house gets overwhelmed and water backs up indoors. The city cleaned ditches for me once; the next time I contacted them they ignored me. This is not a flood zone at all. This is a miserable situation. Is the city responsible? If not, who? I have no control over it. Incidentally...this is just what I heard...the adjacent property was being developed into a subdivision but they quit. I heard the reason was, the land was declared a natural wetland or something similar to be conserved. The water doesn’t run from there though. This may be irrelevant but I thought I would mention it.

1 Lawyer Answer

A: One option you could try is to contact a member of your local government for your district, maybe a city council member or someone along those lines. If the situation you describe is something that other residents in the vicinity are also experiencing, it's possible that an elected official might be able to request the city to conduct an engineering study of the current storm drain system to determine if it is being loaded beyond its capacity by the heavy rains you describe, or possibly identify another source of the flooding condition. Good luck

Tim Akpinar

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