'This Thing Floods Every Time It Rains:' Ross Township Residents Fed Up With Union Avenue Flooding
ROSS TOWNSHIP (KDKA) - A Ross Township road is routinely flooding and Sunday afternoon a man had to be rescued after his car got caught in the water.
"This thing floods every time it rains it seems like," Bill Kerr is talking about Union Avenue near the Ross Township-Bellevue line.
Kerr has lived near Spruce Run for about five years, he said flooding is nothing new.
"The problem is it's saturated right now, so it ain't going nowhere," Kerr told KDKA from his front yard.
He said it took about 15-20 minutes for Union Avenue to become a lake.
Around 4:20 Sunday afternoon, a car got stuck in the water leaving the driver stranded.
"I think he was a little bit fortunate the rain had stopped or slowed down significantly at that point so the volume of water just wasn't there to push it," Ross West View EMS and Rescue Supervisor Steve Kline said.
Rescue crews got the man to safety and said he was not hurt.
Kline recommends that you never drive through standing water.
"Can't tell how deep it is, you don't know if there are any open manholes, sometimes the roadway is missing," Kline said.
According to Kerr, a culvert in the creek backs up during storms and that causes the flooding.
"That gets stopped up, it backs this whole thing up and they got to shut the road down," Kerr said.
The creek has been out of its banks a handful of times since he's lived there, and it's even made his house a victim.
"We had probably about five feet of water in our basement, it flooded our garage, my wife lost her car, totaled our car," Kerr said. "If it pours again like it did, we could have another flood. I don't want to see another five feet in the basement again."
The road is back open to traffic, but debris and mud still litter the pavement.
