And The Rains Came
By Kyle Bradford Smith

Sandbags at entrance to Book Span parking lot.

Ever since the two huge rainfalls that Garden City endured this summer and the fact that the flow along Franklin Avenue could be classified by water rather than traffic, it is evident that Book Span is emulating the time honored way of resisting flood waters, sandbagging the levees. A look at Book Span's problem is that its driveway slopes backwards toward its parking lot and building. Once the spillway that the sidewalk represents is overcome, that water makes its way (rapidly) to the low point which is the front entrance.

The fact that the now sandbagging entrance is where Franklin Avenue changes its slope only adds to the venture-type acceleration of the water flow. As the classic book on American Flooding "Rising Tide" by John Barry (1997), states, "Sandbags can only work to a degree and are after all a temporary solution." Any number of homeowners with back-sloped driveways and other water courses they did not know of now realize that high water is difficult to resist.