Is population growth impacting drainage in Port St. Lucie?

Thursday's storms left city-wide flooding in Port St. Lucie.

"It was bad, it was bad. It constantly rained, it didn't stop," said Cindy Rattan who lives in Port St. Lucie.

She lives just north of Crosstown Parkway and when WPTV drove by on Friday, her road was still flooded.

"In your opinion, should your road look like this nearly 24 hours later?" asked WPTV's Joel Lopez.

"No of course not, of course not, not even 12 hours after, something is wrong," said Rattan. "It was worse than this, the question is why?"

She said it's a years-long issue on her road, which the city has done some minor improvements on.

"We need to be looked into and taken care of," said Rattan. "Not only me and us here, everywhere."

WATCH: St. Lucie County says it 'failed,' is working to prevent future flooding

The City of Port St. Lucie said its population has grown to over 240,000 people, but is the drainage keeping up with the influx of new residents?

Lopez went to city leaders looking for answers.

"As we expand the city are we keeping up with the needs that it takes to minimize the flooding?" he asked.

"That's the goal," said Scott Sample with the City of Port St. Lucie. "We've been one of the fastest growing cities in the country."

WPTV

Sample said the City of Port St. Lucie has an interesting history from a development perspective, and part of that is that the infrastructure needs are not always well-planned out from the time the city started.

"For a number of years that's been one of the focuses of the city is how do we continue to improve the infrastructure?" said Sample.

He said the city is looking at the growth and factoring it into their projects, and will adjust if necessary.

Real Estate News

With so much development, can Port St. Lucie's infrastructure handle growth?

Kate Hussey

The city is working with developers to ensure that storm water management is a critical component of the development.

Sample said they have three different plans:

• Storm water management plan that looks at long-term projects
• Five-year plan that looks into how they're doing projects, which ones are funded and which has priority
• An annual strategic plan that looks at which projects are in place or focusing on other plans

"So we're looking at this from a very short-term, medium-term and long-term perspective to both meet the needs that are occurring now but also the ones we think we're going to have in 20 years, 30 years," said Sample.
He said on Thursday some areas collected up to four inches of rain within an hour caused by the storm on already-saturated ground.

"Every rain event is different, so we are always looking at, 'Are there other things we can do differently?' So we'll take a look at what happened here and if there's ways we can mitigate it in the future, we'll certainly do that," said Sample.

He encourages residents to call the city if there's flooding on their roads at (772) 871-1775.

Sample said storm water management has about 15 different projects city-wide set for the next fiscal next year.