As rain was pouring down last week, Joyce Wolf drove around her south Lawrence neighborhood prepared for the worst.

“With all that rain we had and the ground as saturated as it is … I kept thinking ‘We’re being set up for 1993,'” said Wolf, who lives in the notoriously flood-prone Indian Hills neighborhood, referring to a notoriously flooded year in the city’s history.

But there were no floods.

A revamped sewer system and widened creek channel — both installed in the past two years — helped carry water out of the neighborhood instead of letting it turn Indian Hills into a lake.

“It seemed to work fairly well,” Wolf, president of the Indian Hills Neighborhood Assn., said of the new system.

In the past decade, the city has spent roughly $10 million on new storm sewers and other devices to prevent a repeat of the 1993 floods.

Officials said Monday that last week’s rains — and an overall extra-wet summer — provided a minor test of the new stormwater drainage system.

“That area definitely saw some benefits,” Chad Voigt, the city’s stormwater engineer, said of projects in Indian Hills. “They would have flooded this summer.”

Limits to the system

In the past decade, the city has spent roughly 0 million on new storm sewers and other devices to prevent a repeat of the 1993 floods.

The system isn’t perfect. When three inches of rain fell in just a few hours Friday night, it swamped 23rd Street under high water and forced emergency crews to make at least 10 water rescues across Lawrence. A number of homeowners across the city reported damage.

“There’s still going to be storms that exceed (what the stormwater system can handle), no matter how much engineering you do,” City Manager Mike Wildgen said.

But, Wolf said, “The problems aren’t as severe as they were.”

The city’s stormwater utility was formed in 1996; each household is charged $4 a month to pay for the drainage projects that have been built since then. The biggest projects:

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• Construction of a reinforced concrete box under the street from 21st and Carolina streets to the southeast corner of 23rd Street and Naismith Drive. The cost was $2.5 million.
• Construction of an underground pipe and water overflow channel at Third and Michigan streets. The cost was $1.4 million.
• Construction of a reinforced concrete box to carry water under 21st Street, from Kentucky Street to Barker Court. The cost was $2.6 million.
• Replacement of sewer pipes and inlets along Ninth Street, between Vermont and New Hampshire streets. The cost was $463,416.

Another project, construction of a wide vegetated stream near 13th and Oregon streets, is under way, at a projected cost of $3.9 million.

Small projects, too

Not all the project have been big ones.

Last year, Voigt said, the city spent $220,000 to revamp sewer drains in the Indian Hills neighborhood at 27th Street and Saratoga Place. The city also rebuilt a stream channel in the neighborhood, along Belle Haven Drive between 27th Street and 29th Terrace.

“I think it has helped,” Wolf said. “I really do.”

The biggest test is still to come.

“The storms we’ve got this summer — I don’t think any of those was a 50-year storm,” Voigt said. “Our projects are designed to handle 200-year storms in most cases.”

And for all the time and money that’s been spent over the past decade, there’s not much officials can do when the rain actually starts.

“We can’t do anything in the heat of the moment,” Voigt said. “It’s what I do the rest of the year — engineer solutions on a sunny day — that is the bulk of what I do.”