As an out-of-state subscriber to the Leader, I was sad to learn of the flooding that occurred on Water Street. I had a friend, Robert, who got his doctorate’s in climate change during the 1970s. He was sent to London to study the logs of ship captains who sailed the seas in previous centuries. Robert reconstructed the weather patterns from reading those logs.

When I bought my Northwest Arkansas home, that sat down hill from the street, I asked Robert what I should expect in terms of stormy weather. He said more frequent and more severe storms would become the new norm. So, I put three natural stair-step drainage systems in the yard.

While on my first visit to PT I called the architecture student who was renting my downstairs. Fayetteville had had around 14 inches of rain in three days and there was a lot of flooding. The student was stunned, as he’d looked in the crawl space to see that the antiquated sump pump didn’t work, and yet the basement was dry. When I had the three separate natural drainage systems installed, the guys doing the yard work told me I was doing over kill. My response, “Kill it over.”

Louise G. Mann
Signal Mountain, Tennesee