Homewood Mayor Patrick McClusky ran on a platform of addressing flooding and stormwater problems.

McClusky, who was elected mayor in 2020, is planning to leave office in November, but he can point to progress on the flooding front.

On Tuesday, he and members of the Homewood City Council gathered to celebrate a $1 million federal grant for a stormwater project. U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, whose district now includes Homewood after recent redistricting, helped bring the funds to the city and joined officials at Homewood City Hall to discuss details.

“We bid this project out two years ago and we’re really excited to start work on it,” McClusky said. “We’ve already put our own money into a lot of other stormwater projects. This is one we knew this was going to be a large sum of money to complete.”

The grant will help pay for a culvert that will be built on Huntingdon Road, to alleviate flooding on Griffin Creek, which flows into Shades Creek. The federal grant will go toward the $1.8 million construction cost.

“Every year we’re budgeting money specifically for stormwater projects like this,” said McClusky.

“These are issues we hear on a daily basis,” McClusky said. “These are problems we have every time we have a bad rain and we have these stormwater issues. Hopefully this project will go a long way toward alleviating some of these issues.”

Sewell, an Alabama Democrat and close ally of Vice President Kamala Harris, secured $13.1 million in grants this year for several projects around the state, and this month she’s been handing out the symbolic cardboard checks representing the funding.

“The water and sewer infrastructure issues have plagued my district in the Black Belt, but it’s indiscriminate,” Sewell said. “It’s not just in rural small towns, it’s in big cities, and towns like the City of Homewood.”

The entire Birmingham metro area is rife with flooding and stormwater issues, said Dr. Hamed Moftakhari, assistant professor for civil, construction and environmental engineering at the University of Alabama.

Birmingham sits in a valley, Jones Valley, and stormwater drainage is directed to both the Black Warrior River watershed and the Cahaba River watershed. Major creeks include Shades and Little Shades Creeks, which drain into the Cahaba, and Five Mile, Valley and Village Creeks, which drain into the Black Warrior.

Birmingham and its suburbs suffer from overdevelopment in flood plains, which leads to dramatic flash floods and flooding incidents.

In wooded areas, heavy rains are absorbed into the soil and can be absorbed into underground aquifers. In urban landscapes, water runs from impervious surfaces such as concrete and asphalt streets and into drainage systems that lead directly to waterways such as creeks, rivers and lakes.

“When you develop, as a side product of urbanization we remove pervious surfaces,” Moftakhari said. “We replace it with impervious surfaces.”