#Urban explorer storm drain install#

A man who died on the same night as Reddy, in Maplewood, New Jersey, was among a group of neighbors who had warned town and state officials that a storm pipe near their homes was dangerous the man was pulled into the large opening while trying to clear out debris.

ProPublica found instances in which local and state governments knew about a hazard but didn’t secure it. The first report did not reach the officials who could have prevented the second death. It issued two reports on storm drain hazards after the near-identical deaths of firefighters during flood rescues.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an arm of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has recommended these steps, but it has no authority to compel cities or counties to act on that advice. The bridge where Reddy and his fiancee, Kavya Mandli, lost each other in Ida’s floodwaters.

#Urban explorer storm drain install#

Officials are not surveying the nation’s aging stormwater drainage systems, which are being taxed beyond capacity by record downpours, to flag openings that could pose a hazard and install grates to prevent people from being sucked in. The numbers are likely an undercount, since reports of flood deaths often don’t give details other than the fact that someone was swept away.ĭespite records of horrific cases that span the country and stretch back decades - and the scientific consensus that climate change will only worsen flooding - federal, state and local government agencies have failed to take simple steps to prevent such tragedies from happening, ProPublica found, after more than a dozen interviews with government officials, engineers and weather experts, as well as a review of documents including death investigations, government meeting minutes and emails, and academic papers. Thirteen of the deaths happened in the past three years alone. Twenty-one of those people died nearly half of those lost were children. There’s no official count of how many Americans get pulled into storm drains, pipes or culverts during flood events, but ProPublica identified 35 such cases since 2015 using news accounts and court records. The engineer and construction project manager was dead at 31.ĭuring the same storm, in the same state, three others died the same way. Reddy’s body was found the next day in a wooded area, blocks away from where he got pulled in. I just covered my head with my arms and just sort of tried to ride it out till I came out on the other side or maybe got a little gasp of air.” Reddy with Kush, the dog he and his fiancee shared and whose name they created by combining their own first names.

“I couldn’t grab a grip to hold on to anything. “I was completely underwater,” he told ProPublica. Mandli’s heart jumped when they told her they found a man hanging from a tree branch and calling for help.īut it was 18-year-old Kevin Rivera, who had also been pulled into a drainage pipe. As South Plainfield police searched for Reddy, who had been sucked into a 3-foot-wide stormwater drainage pipe that ran underground, they looked where they thought it might spit him out, on the other side of the road.