Great news, Lubbockites! City Hall has been working tirelessly on “years of planning” to fix our notorious infrastructure, and they want you to know they’ve completed several major projects to move rainwater more efficiently. They’ve successfully connected a bunch of playa lakes in South Lubbock and linked the Medical District to the Canyon Lakes system. This means, according to the city, emergency services might actually be able to reach the hospital the next time we get an inch of rain.
But don’t go selling your kayaks just yet. City Engineer John Turpin dropped a profound truth bomb about the South Lubbock playa lake project, stating, “What those do is they don’t stop the flooding from occurring, but they alleviate flooding over time.” Brilliant. We are spending massive amounts of tax dollars on drainage projects that explicitly do not stop the flooding. It’s comforting to know that while your car is hydraulic-locking on the way to H-E-B, the water will technically disappear eventually.
Why is this still a problem, you ask? Because our top minds have officially discovered that Lubbock is flat. Turpin noted that due to our lack of hills, avoiding road flooding is “very difficult.” Who could have anticipated that a city built on a giant, tabletop plateau would struggle with gravity? Now, the city is shifting its focus to smaller band-aid projects and a giant headache on the northwest side, where an unregulated railroad bridge is essentially acting as a dam, threatening to back water right into town.
But hey, look on the bright side: next time you find yourself treating your sedan like a jet ski on a completely submerged roadway, just take comfort in knowing that this is exactly what “years of planning” looks like.
Source:
