St. Martinville sees power outage, flooding after heavy rain Monday

St. Martinville – Businesses and residences in St. Martinville were without power for about seven hours after a transmission line from Entergy went down around 6:45 a.m. Monday morning.

Heavy rains in the morning hours also flooded parts of the south end of the city, Mayor Jason Willis said, after overwhelming culverts and drainage canals on that end of town.

“We buy our power from Cleco but we use Entergy transmission lines to get the power to the city, and their lines were down,” Willis said shortly after power was restored around 1:45 p.m. “We spotted it but we weren’t able to touch it because they have to come work on their own lines.”

The downed line was located along Durand Street near Cajun Chef Products.

The city also saw about 5 inches of rain fall in 40 minutes Monday morning, leading to some street flooding, the mayor said.

“Nobody’s ditches and canals can handle that much water, from New Iberia to Cade to St. Martinville to Cypress Island,” Willis said.

The south side of St. Martinville drains into the Joe Dig Canal, which then brings the water to Bayou Teche.

But the canal also drains all of Louisiana Highway 92, the Cade area, all of Cypress Island and the Parks area, along with Terrace Highway (La. 92). The canal eventually goes under Main Highway (La. 31) before draining into the bayou.

“The water drains, but it takes a while to get there,” he said.

Another issue is the leaves, grass clippings and trash in many ditches along the way. When heavy rains hit, all that is pushed into the culverts and drain pipes.

“It doesn’t help that people keep their yards full of debris,” Willis said. “You’re coming from winter into spring, so there’s a bunch of leaves, a bunch of pine needles, a bunch of sea moss. There’s a bunch of sticks and branches, and also, trash that people leave in their ditches. Whenever the water floods it’s going to pick up all of that stuff and it’s going to try to bring it through all of those small 12-inch culverts, and it clogs up a lot of it.”

Power

City workers were driving around clearing those obstructions, he said, but the city can’t employ enough people to keep all the ditches and right-of-ways clean year-round, he said, so he encourages residents to keep their yards and ditches clean to help prevent flooding. Loose leaves and debris also clogs the drain grates, which also contributes to flooding after heavy rain.

“People need to be mindful to keep debris out of their ditches and their yard,” he said. “All of that has something to do with it, but at the end of the day, it’s Mother Nature.

“Mother Nature’s the prime cause. We’ve got colder winters, hotter summers, stronger tornadoes, stronger hurricanes. When it rains, it rains a lot in a short period of time. We just can’t handle it. Nobody can. But we just tell people to try to help it out by keeping the debris out of their ditches and yards. If everybody keeps their own stuff clean, it’ll help out a lot But at the end of the day, it’s still too much water at one time.”