Quartermaine also offers details about handling of ditches and swales
During the May 21 Sarasota County Commission Stormwater Workshop, Spencer Anderson, then the director of the county’s Public Works Department, explained that since the county experienced the effects of Hurricane Ian in September 2023, the Stormwater Division staff had been approximately six months behind on routine stormwater maintenance.
That was exacerbated by the activities related directly to the 2024 storm season, Anderson told the board members that day.
“From June [2024] to the end of October,” he said, staff handled “nothing but hurricane recovery and response. … That … certainly shot a hole in programmatic maintenance.”
On Sept. 5, during the board’s fourth Stormwater Workshop of the year, Ben Quartermaine, director of the county’s new Stormwater Department, reported to the commissioners, “We’ve effectively eliminated the backlog, adding, “That was a herculean effort.”
Work orders were continuing to be generated, he said, and staff would continue to address them.
“We’ve brought in five contractor teams … to eliminate over 4,000 tasks that were identified in June,” Quartermaine pointed out.
A slide he showed the commissioners said that, thanks to the contractors’ teams supplementing the county’s workers, 16 crews were “performing maintenance to improve stormwater function.”
The slide further noted that 4,260 tasks had been completed.
Quartermaine formally began work on Aug. 11. Because the County Commission in June called for the creation of the Stormwater Department, what had been the Public Works Department, which included the Stormwater Division, has transitioned to the Transportation Department; Anderson has been identifying himself recently as the county transportation director when he has provided comments to the board members.
During his Sept. 5 presentation, Quartermaine also took time to address specific issues related to stormwater maintenance, indicating that he had heard many comments from the public about roadside ditches.
People driving around the community will notice ditches that are “newly excavated and … bare, and they’re without soils, and there’s a reason for that,” he said.
“They may remain without sod for a period of time,” Quartermaine pointed out. “Typically, what we do is … cut [these ditches] down a couple of inches below the flowline of the [stormwater] pipe, so that when we do come back and sod, the flowline will be equal to the [level of the] pipes.”
That also allows “for some sloughing of the cut material adjacent to where the blade hit the ground,” he explained.
“What happens,” especially in the rainy season, Quartermaine continued, is that those ditches are empty until after a rainstorm. Then, “They’ll be full of water.”
He emphasized, “There’s a giant fluctuation of water in these swales throughout the rainy season.”
“Sodding those swales as water moves up and down is very difficult,” he added. Depending on the angle of the slope of a given swale, Quartermaine asked the commissioners to try to imagine staff’s effort to lay sod. If the sod does not take root before the next storm, he said, “The sod just comes right off the bank and becomes further debris that we have to manage.”
Sod could be pinned to the banks of the swales and ditches, Quartermaine added, but if the water level remained high for even a couple of days, “We effectively have killed the sod.”
Quartermaine asked for the public’s patience as work continues. “There is a methodology to our madness.”