Directing flood water into road ditches

[tfvc.org]

I live on top of a hill in the country, and I have a gate on the bottom of the hill, which is also where the water likes to come down the drive/hill and collect. I am sometimes wading through a couple inches of water to open and close the gate. I have cut a couple of small trenches (a shovel wide by at most a foot deep) using a shovel to try to push the water into the pasture just north or the gate. (my property). This has been working fine granted I keep the trenches clear of debris. With the 2.5-3 inches that I got last night and the ongoing rain, today I had to wade through the water again even with the water quickly flowing into the pasture through the trenches I created and other means. I don't really have the money to spend to rent a back hoe and buy a culvert to put where the gate is and make some kind of water collection pond.

Question is, how do most townships look at having water being drained in the ditches on the sides of the road? If the town maintenance saw that I had dug a trench to have water flowing into their trenches are they going to say something about that? Are those road ditches only there to protect the roads or for general flood control?

[Midtowner]

My opinion is better on this than most having handled some pretty complex flooding issues.

Big picture... there's this thing called the Common Enemy Doctrine, which states that you can divert the natural flow of water on your property and that you have a right to do so assuming you don't harm someone downstream. In almost any case when you are worried about controlling water and have a town which plans and designs drainage systems, it's pretty much assumed water is going to become the city's problem at some point.

But how is the city going to react? No one could begin to answer that. We don't know what city you're talking about or any of that. Why not place a call to whomever in the town is in charge of drainage and pose this question to them? You may get an answer you don't want to hear, but municipal code violation is one of those rare instances where it's better to ask for permission than forgiveness.

[Tritone]

Careful, if you have water running across your land it might just get declared to be a wetland or a navigable stream or something.

[bradh]

You might be surprised how cheap a 20' stick of drainage pipe and a hour rental of a mini excavator is, PM me if you want a hook up on some pipe

[rezman]

I had the same issue on our acreage. There was no ditch running along the road in front of my property. But there was somewhat of a swale on either side of my driveway that ran parallel to the road. In lighter rains, it would direct the water that was coming down the hill on either side of my driveway, to the north to a tinhorn that ran under my neighbors driveway, and beyond to an increasingly larger ditch along the road further down, and to the south to a drainage basin that also collected water coming from the south and directed it under the road through two large tinhorns to a creek that ran off to the northwest. My problem was in hard rains, the water coming down along my driveway would overshoot the swales, and cross the road, causing erosion problems to the private road surface.

At one point, the idiot who developed our addition, showed up on my door step at 9:00pm with a 6 year old piece of paper from OKC engineers stating which lots had to have a tin horn under the driveway. One of which was mine. The problem was that there was no ditch on my side of the road to put a tin horn in. After arguing with him as to where I was supposed to put a tin horn since his dumbass failed to provide a drainage ditch on my side of the road, plus the road was banked for a curve at that location with me on the high side, I contacted the city. The engineers recommended just cutting the swale to the south of my driveway deeper, so as to help better direct the water to the drain basin.

I used a small tractor with an angle blade, and at one point, a neighbor brought over his tractor with a 3 point dirt scoop. Between these 2 tools, the modification to deepen and widen the swale worked perfectly. In hard rains, the run off stop overshooting the road, and ran into the drain basn.

[tfvc.org]

Thank you everyone for your input. I will have to ask the city to see what they say, but I think I might end up just digging out a small pond in the north pasture and doing the culvert thing. I might have access to a back hoe or something simular, I will have to talk to the man who uses our 40 acres to run cattle on it to see what equipment he has or can get his hands on.