Concerns grow for flooding at Hamilton Mountain’s Eleanor Park

Community members who frequent one park on the Hamilton Mountain are calling on the city to address a drainage issue that has left sections covered in pools of water.

Hamilton’s Manager of Parks and Cemeteries Kara Bunn says she is aware of the hazardous issue at Eleanor Park.

“We’ve seen a lot of rain and changing weather patterns and this is a result of that.”

Some people who use the park say that certain sections are worse than others. They say some puddles have remained for days and left areas so flooded that they cannot walk through sections of the paved path.

The City says Eleanor Park isn’t the only one with this issue.

“We have others like Millgrove Park. We’re currently working on a drainage solution there, and trying to get the drainage to move away from the ball diamonds.”

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Bunn says that when some of the city’s parks were built, they were not designed to maintain and manage the amount of water the city has been seeing lately.

“We really didn’t anticipate the climate change measures and what was going to be happening in the city as far as the amount of rainfall and the fact that we’ve had more rain and less snow, these are things we just did not see coming.”

The City says it recently spent $150,000 on small, proactive measures to address the issue at Eleanor Park.

“Our project was just to replace the asphalt paving, and we replaced it in the same location with the same material. We didn’t change the grating per-say. We just did some proactive measures knowing there were issues with water, we put some extra drainage pits and stuff like that, but they haven’t been enough to deal with the water that’s sitting there.”

Bunn says the City is currently working to address the design of the park, but could not provide a specific timeline.