A look at Stormwater Utility efforts to prevent flooding

With threatening skies in El Paso, there is always concern about flooding in the Central area of town.

That’s where the Stormwater Utility recently broke ground on the new Magnolia Pump Station – at the corner of Magnolia and Texas, where El Paso has seen heavy flooding in the past.

During Storm 2006, El Paso saw what a lot of rain in a short time can do in an area like that. The new pump station will go a long way toward fixing that problem.

“One of the signature sights of this storm has been the flooding on I-10 at Piedras,” former ABC-7 anchor Gary Warner told us back in 2006. “Traffic was backed up for hours, much of the day in fact.”

The Central area of town — most notably the flooding of Interstate 10 — proved one of the biggest issues in the whole city during Storm 2006.

“Looks like we are kind of in lake I-10 West,” one lady sitting in traffic told ABC-7 back in 2006. “You can see we look like a parking lot here.”

Flash forward to 2014 … John Balliew is the president of El Paso Water Utilities, which has been working since Storm 2006 to develop a new stormwater system.

“This is the construction site for our Magnolia Stormwater Pump Station,” Balliew said. “It helps to protect the intestate from flooding. So this is a low spot where we are, water flows downhill from Piedras and Copia, comes to this point here and we collect it.”

A two mile long, 60-inch diameter pipeline — at a cost of another $12 million — will then take the water to the Rio Grande, helping keep not only the freeway from flooding, but the surrounding neighborhoods as well.

“I would say it is thee largest of the storm water projects in terms of the dollars amount, but it has say the most impact as well,” Balliew said.

We asked residents in the area if they remembered how it looked during Storm 2006.

“Well the whole road was closed,” Jose Juarez said. “It was closed and they were diverting traffic from the freeway.”

Juarez was excited to hear that the new pump station is expected to be completed by August of 2016.

“well, if I live that long,” he said, “maybe I’ll get to see it.”

Although the pump station is expected to solve the freeway flooding problem that backed up into the neighborhoods, Balliew said two smaller stations are needed at Cotton and Copia to completely fix the issue.