Perry City Administrator Sven Peterson joked at Tuesday night’s City Council meeting that seeing as it was the first meeting of the month, he would have to talk about another rain event.

Fact is, Perry has experienced several rain events this summer that have resulted in flooding across various areas of the City. As they do each year, Peterson says they continue to look for the problem areas.

“We have the city broken up into phases and each year we try to do a phase of cleaning and inspection.  This year we’re doing a pretty big phase and a good portion of the east side of town.  So hopefully with that we’ll be able to find the big issues where we have a lot of water where it   shouldn’t be coming in, or some broken pipes or leaking manholes or something like that.  This will help us find those so that we can go in and address them and hopefully relieve some of the water that shouldn’t be there.”

Also this fall, Peterson says the City plans to do a smoke test to further investigate with the issues are.

“We actually pop off a manhole cover and then put a machine over it that pumps the system with smoke so we can see where some of the breaks are or things that are not tied in correctly.   It’ll help us identify issues some of the larger issues, that maybe there’s a large break in a sewer somewhere that will smoke and we’ll see smoke probably coming out of the ground in the street and manhole covers.  It will be very interesting.  We’ve lined up a drone to fly up over and video everything so that we can go back and watch it and pinpoint some spots.”

Peterson says residents who live in the areas that the smoke test will be conducted will be contacted in advance so they’re not alarmed.