This past Monday night, 07/18/11, between 6:15 and 7:00pm, our area was hit with 2.25" of rain and high winds.  That amount of rain in that period of time is just about equivalent to a storm that has a 1% chance of occuring every 100 years.  The flooding in our area was intense.  Rte 65 was shut down.  Driveways were washed out; hillsides collapsed; some roadways had water up to the middle of your car door.  We then had a break of a few hours and then it continued to rain on and off through much of the night.  The damage caused by this storm was synonymous with the level of damage caused by Hurricane Ivan.  The problem with this storm is when we experience the level of high heat and drought such as we have been going through, combined with rocky, clay-based soil we have in this part of western PA, the water hits the ground and it is largely not absorbed.  Most of the water flows downhill.  At the Legacy Fields, we got a lot of water.  It was encouraging that the run-off from our neighboring property that routes its water via terracotta pipes onto our site was handled very well by the portion of our storm water management system meant to handle it.  That water flowed through Pond #1 and then flowed in a controlled fashion to Pond# 2 which is slowly bleeding off each day as it was designed to do.  So that was very good news.  We did notice that Pond #3 took more water than it should have for a very short period of time.  That pond is taking water from the northeast side of the complex and it is taking water from the area north of Hawthorne Acres which is crossing the street and coming on to our site.  Representatives from QVRA were on the site during the storm to monitor the performance of our storm water systems and we held an on-site meeting with our engineer the following morning to review the observations and identify recommendations to tweak parts of the site to better handle the 100 year storm.  For the past two years, we have received what are equivalent to 100 year storms every season.  It has been really unfortunate but it is what it is.  Our strategic approach at this point is to continue to modify the site with the assumption that we are in climatic pattern where we will have to live through such violent storms possibly through the next decade.  The original design was meant to handle such a storm once every 100 years.  We now are assuming we will get these storms 2-3 times per year.  So we need to build some additional redundancies to protect the site.  The color of the water in such extreme events still has an orange-hue from the iron and clay in the soil.  However, once the grass we have seeded takes deeper root across the site that hue should dissipate greatly.  Ideally, we would would like to start planting trees this fall on the non-field areas.  That is part of our 2-3 year plan and the advantage in having more trees is the root structure will absorb water at a rate roughly 5 times that of grass.  This is important because if the ground is hard from drought or saturated from frequent rains, the water will flow off the site.  More trees will mean more water is being absorbed at a faster rate when the ground is being saturated.  So if we are getting hit with many back to back storms, the trees will go along way to helping the site retain more and more water.  Prior to construction, residents have reminded us that that hairpin turn next to the site used to flood in an uncontrolled fashion when rains like this would come through.  These waters would bring with them all the non-anchored debris from the undeveloped site and dump this all into the Little Sewickley Creek.  This uncontrolled flooding also endangered the integrity of the road foundation.  Now, with the re-design of the site and our efforts to have the county repair the storm water outlets and repair some of the foundation of the road, that flooding has stopped and the road has remained intact.  But we still have some tweaking to do over the next fall and spring season to make sure the site is well prepared for the next 50 years.