As residents in areas flooded Saturday are still drying out and tending to their property, some officials in local government said the situation is both uncommon and too expensive to repair.

&#8220It almost came up to my top step,” Henrietta Martin said Monday, a day after quickly rising water lapped at the porch of her home at 1415 Lane St. On Monday afternoon, drying mud lined much of the road and the grass in yards throughout her neighborhood.

The official reading was 3.98 inches of rain, but some areas in Vicksburg and Warren County may have received more in the downpour between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m.

Police barricaded streets in a smattering of neighborhoods in the north and central part of the city, mainly along bayous that wend through the city and border back yards.

This included Martin’s neighborhood, where Stouts Bayou is normally only a smelly trickle. Flooding was also reported on sections of Wabash Avenue, Fillmore Street and Crawford Street between Fifth North and Spring streets.

Next door to Martin, Margaret Richardson had a half-dozen rugs drying out from the rains.

&#8220It was horrible. I had not seen anyone from the city clean out the storm drains in quite a while. I will make that a monthly task now,” Richardson said.

She said her home flooded about 12 years ago after a rainstorm produced several inches of rain in a short time period. Water reached about 2 feet in the house and caused $54,700 in damage. Another flood in 2003 was a little less serious for Richardson, only because her flood insurance picked up the tab.

&#8220I’m getting a little tired of it,” she said. &#8220I may put it in the city’s buyout plan.”

That plan, used in Hamilton Heights and Ford subdivisions several times over the past 20 years, pays federal dollars to the owner of a flooded structure equal to its pre-flood value. The structure is then razed and nothing can be built on the lot unless above flood levels.

Once the water receded from Lane Street, Martin said she cleaned the storm drain herself with her metal-bladed rake.

&#8220I mean, you couldn’t see a thing in there,” she said, adding that the chronic problem of people dumping objects as large as refrigerators in the bayous slows the flow.

&#8220They throw everything in there,” she said.

Anyone proven to have engaged in illegal dumping can be fined up to $1,000 in the city’s code enforcement court. By ordinance, fines for illegal dumping in Warren County range from $100 to $500.

As for the drains, Public Works Director Bubba Rainer said the city responds &#8220almost immediately” to residents’ calls concerning caked-up drains, but cleaning debris from bayous is not the city’s responsibility.

Rainer admitted the difficulty of the task for some residents, particularly the elderly. &#8220But it is up to the property owners to do that,” Rainer said.

Having a storm system that produces so much rainfall in a short time frame, however uncommon, is always dicey for the drainage system, he added.

&#8220They can’t handle much more than that. They can’t be designed for these types of rainstorms because we can’t afford it,” Rainer said.

District 3 Supervisor Charles Selmon said most of the calls he fielded from his exclusively in-city district were from streets that run along bayous, like Lane Street.

Selmon reiterated the need for more projects via the Natural Resource Conservation Service to be approved in the city limits.

&#8220The majority of the board has a problem spending money inside the city limits,” Selmon said.

Part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the NRCS initiates such projects when engineers with the USDA determine a threat to public safety due to erosion close to a roadway, with the majority of the erosion needing to come from a single storm event to qualify.

No set distance exists for how close the erosion occurs beside a road to qualify. That aspect is usually left to the discretion of federal inspectors. Usually, the key criteria for a certain location to be approved is the threat to the roadway nearest the eroding land.

Once a site is approved, the project is funded by an 80-20 split between the federal and local government entity.

When Warren County supervisors meet tonight, they are expected to award contracts on its 2006 NRCS project list of seven sites. Only two of them were inside city limits, both along Sherman Avenue.

The water reached scary levels for those outside the city limits as well.

&#8220The children playing in it was my main concern,” said Cindy Edwards, a resident of the Lake Forest subdivision off Culkin Road.

She, her husband, Joe and son, Sam, 14, watched water levels in a earthen ditch running alongside their property reach chest-depth for several minutes, she said.

Behind the back fence that encloses the Edwards’ in-ground pool, rocks fashioned from hundred-pound rip-rap provide some protection from erosion. The lake for which the area is named is now dry, with most water running into various creeks deep beyond the tree line.

&#8220It took them a year and half to put that (the rip-rap),” Edwards said.

The Edwardses would like to see a culvert installed next to their property, something impossible since the road is not county-maintained.

&#8220We put some pipe through some yards, but draining a huge runoff like that isn’t common. Very seldom do we get rain like that,” said Road Department Manager Richard Winans.