CINCINNATI — The Madison Road floodgate at Duck Creek closed for hours Tuesday as crews with Greater Cincinnati Water Works worked to figure out why it failed during recent flash flooding.
Last week, City Manager Sheryl Long said during a press conference that the Duck Creek floodgate failed to close as it should have during a July 17 storm that overwhelmed the creek, causing it to flood the community nearby.
She said a mechanical issue led to its failure.
In the same press conference, Greater Cincinnati Water Works Deputy Director Jason Fleming said the floodgate, which was built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2008 and turned over to the city to maintain in 2012, has been regularly inspected, but issues with it are known.
We spoke to Fleming Tuesday about the work being done to fix the issue.
"It's several issues, it's not just one," Fleming said.
WATCH: We spoke with crews about why the floodgate failed
Fleming said in 2020, a study of the floodgate led to the recommendation the bridge be fully replaced — something the city was not able to do. According to Fleming, replacing all the issues revealed in that study would require re-arranging property, roads, railroads and other crucial infrastructure in that area, which was something the city determined was not financially feasible.
The floodgate is designed to shut automatically when floodwaters get too high.
Fleming said crews have only tested the gate manually and not it's automatic function. We asked Fleming if that will change moving forward.
"Obviously that's going to be one of the things we spend a lot of time looking at as we uncover some of the problems that were missed in the past and how we're going to prevent that happening in the future with different types of testing," Fleming said.
Long said the floodgate only impacted the area specifically around Duck Creek and the Madison Road bridge; she estimated it was around 40 homes and businesses, and the city has already begun reaching out to them to assess their damage.
Flooding in the immediate vicinity of the Duck Creek floodgate may have been less severe if the floodgate had not failed, Long said, but the sheer amount of rain that fell within an hour on July 17 still would have caused issues.
Fleming said there's no timeline for when the floodgate is expected to be fixed. He said there is now a plan in place to make sure it closes if needed.
